Hacker News Reader

Comment by filoleg | Hacker News Reader

What about the opportunity cost that he potentially lost by starting his company outside of Silicon Valley? I am not saying that he definitely did, but the fact that OP doesn't mention it at all makes his whole post feel a bit disingenuous. In fact, it reminds me a lot of people who talk about how much money they saved by not going to college and how it is the way to go for everyone, despite studies [of US colleges] showing otherwise.

P.S. I don't lean one way or the other about colleges, there are definitely cases where not going is a good idea. However not even seriously looking into upsides of going and closing eyes on potentially missed opportunities will devalue your argument.

View on HN

I think it's wise to ask the question: Where do I/we need to be to build the best team, or the best company?

Are you in a domain where you need to hire people that are difficult to find outside of Silicon Valley? If that's the case, it makes perfect sense to found in the valley.

Is your business capital-intensive, and funding will be a long-term concern? Maybe SV or NYC makes more sense.

Are you entering a domain where most of your key customers will be located in specific metro area, and being located there lends you credibility? Found there.

It may also be smart to found where you have lots of local connections, letting you staff up with vetted local talent and leveraging local connections to get introductions to potential customers.

And finally, founding close to family/friends can help keep your mental health in check and help you stay focused.

I absolutely agree with you. The scenarios you bring up make perfect sense, and I can see why starting outside of SV/NYC in those cases is the way to go.

My main beef with OP is that his whole post has zero nuance and doesn't even look at upsides/downsides. It just preaches his single opinion as the only right way. Just to illustrate how bad it is in my opinion, I got way more useful info on topic out of your single comment than from the whole OP.

Yup. The headline could have easily been "Not starting a company at all saved me millions of dollars".

What would the opportunity cost? What does silicon valley have that philly doesn't?

Talent, VCs, good weather. OP has managed to save $1mil by basing his company in Philly, but could have potentially missed out on multiples of that amount from VCs.

Mind you, I don't even live there, because the downsides of living there in my current situation outweigh the upsides. However,I have been there many times, and if I had to start a company right now, that's where I would do it.

P.S. Try hiring engineers for a company in Philly and a company in SV. Then try to compare the quality and number of candidates knocking on your door in each scenario.

He may lose out tons if/when he gets acquired / acquihired.

A community of experienced technologists. Veterans of successful ventures can skip many mistakes due to experience.

Those exist everywhere. The Bay Area doesn't have a monopoly on experienced software developers.

It doesn't have a monopoly on experienced software devs, but it has a monopoly on the highest density of job opportunities in the industry, as well as the number of software devs. Which, in turn, brings more devs and creates even more opportunities. It's like a positive feedback loop that is extremely difficult to escape.

Yeah, network, for example a lot of the companies on http://applytroop.com could probably pick his team up later on if they were in the Bay. But the risk becomes having to move again for opportunities.

Not being around the valley and not having random run ins with people who can help you. I got one of my best employees by running into her roommate at a birthday party and finding out she's looking for work. I've had other cases of running into people at events that later helped me out. Events I wouldn't have gone to if I didn't live in SV.

Also I've found that a lot of VCs don't want to talk to you if you aren't local, because they don't seem to believe in video conferencing and like to be able to have last minutes meetings. This seems to be changing though.

The key here is that my company is fully remote and my employees don't live here, so they get to take advantage of this purchasing power, while I get the advantages of being SV.

I don't think the whole company needs to be in SV, but it certainly helps if the founder is.

Location isn't irrelevant but for both locating in a less fashionable location and teams that are at least somewhat distributed, you probably have to budget for T&E. Traveling to events/meetings aren't a panacea but they can fill in a lot of gaps. I get your basic point though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com