HN: We're starting a "Move to Silicon Valley" wiki. We could use some help. | Hacker News Reader

HN: We're starting a "Move to Silicon Valley" wiki. We could use some help.

svstartup.com

179 pointsiamelgringo45 comments

My suggestion: a section about immigration and a list of startups hiring people who wants to work in U.S.

If an EU founder of an SV-based startup could do a brief write-up of the process they went through (and how much it cost) that would be absolutely fantastic. Anonymous if necessary.

I know some travel to the Bay Area for less than 3 months at a time on the visa waiver programme. I'm also curious about the gotchas to watch out for with that approach and the practicalities of getting by for such short times (e.g. finding a place to stay, etc.).

We'd love for you to start the section. :)

I searched about that a year ago, didn't find too much but I will try to get some free time to start this section.

dear lord: please someone make a resource for immigration. it is baffling.

I usually look up immigration questions at http://www.murthy.com, in particular the H1B FAQ: http://www.murthy.com/h1bfaqs.html

They are one of the best immigration lawyer teams that I have dealt with. They are the only firm where every member of the team seems to understand all the fine nuances of immigration law and how it can be used to your benefit. Having a bad or just an OK lawyer is expensive in the long run when it comes to immigration.

I second this. A section for each country & scenario would be great! If someone could start with unemployeed, broke programmer with no college or university degree, hoping to move from Canada to SF, that would be great.

Second this, otherwise you're cutting out a big pool of talent, it's what made America isn't it?

I just started something very similar for the DC area (http://dcstartupwiki.com/). It makes sense to have a centralized location for all this startup in, but delegated by locale. That way, there only needs to be one location to goto to get started and from there you can choose where you are looking for relevant startup info about.

I know PG owns http://startupwiki.com, and has some longterm plans for it, but it'd be nice to see a easily rememberable centralized location for all this information. Somewhere down the line it could gain sponsorships in order to pay for itself, and (BFAD) become a centralized location for startups to lobby for things then benefit all of them (i.e. legislation, at least in the US)

Why just Silicon Valley and not the whole SF Bay Area?

edit: Actually, now I look at your wiki it seems to be focused on the whole Bay Area while just claiming to be about the valley. This is wrong: San Francisco isn't part of SV and certainly the East Bay isn't either. (San Jose is debatable.) Now, while most of the early errors made in a wiki will get corrected eventually, giving it the wrong name is an uncorrectable error, so I'd recommend changing the name before you do anything else.

I completely agree with you that geographically speaking, silicon valley is considered a sub-region of the greater bay area, but it's also kind of an entity or state of mind that goes beyond its borders. For instance, if someone in LA wrote a wiki about "moving to hollywood", we wouldn't expect it to be geographically limited to hollywood. Personally, I don't think the title is all that bad.

"San Jose is debatable."

San Jose's motto/tagline is "Capital of Silicon Valley" (http://www.sanjoseca.gov/).

from wiki:

"Geographically, the Silicon Valley encompasses all of the Santa Clara Valley including the city of San Jose (and adjacent communities), the southern Peninsula, and the southern East Bay."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley

I definitely agree -- the "Silicon Valley" has expanded in meaning from the Santa Clara Valley to the whole Bay Area anyway.

I've always wanted to write up a "so you just moved to the Bay Area; everything you know about living here is probably wrong" post, and I may just contribute to the wiki instead.

San Jose is debatable

Huh? Isn't San Jose in the Santa Clara Valley?

"Geographically, the Silicon Valley encompasses all of the Santa Clara Valley including the city of San Jose (and adjacent communities), the southern Peninsula, and the southern East Bay." - Wikipedia.

I hope this resource fills out. I work at the YMCA in Palo Alto and I meet a lot of people as they move in to the area. I will have to introduce them to this wiki.

I disagree. Find me one person who lives in the bay area, working in tech, that doesnt believe they are in silicon valley. Including SF and the shores of the east bay.

Especially considering much of silicon valley's manufacturing history is on the east side of the bay south of Oakland to San Jose.

To say that San Jose is not a part of Silicon Valley is ridiculous.

I think Silicon Valley has both broad and narrow meanings. The broad meaning mostly applies when mass-market magazines or people from the East Coast are speaking. But from where I sit in SF, the Valley is that area down south where the big boys have their big campuses, and all that.

Of course, when I go home to Mississippi and folks say I'm living in or otherwise associated with Silicon Valley, I don't correct them. Close enough that it's not worth being a smartass.

By they way, incoming links from blogs, etc... are always welcome. We really want this to be a community resource that becomes useful for years.

We are working on something similar in Australia - http://www.startup-australia.org/thevalley. I am moving to SV early next year. I'll try to add to the SVstartup wiki based on few bits of information I have gathered.

I think this is a good idea not only for those seeking to move to the Valley but also those just there for a visit. I was there for a week before and after Startup School this year and I would have loved to have had a definitive hackers reference for the area. It might also be worth asking pg is you can use some of the content from his "Where to see in Silicon Valley" essay.

I gave a presentation at FOWA in London recently on this exact topic - you can see my slides at http://www.slideshare.net/bandrew/fowa-2010-fighting-and-thr...

Hope you find the content useful.

I'm not a great resource of Silicon Valley startup advice, but if you need any help with the technical aspects (such as rewrite rules so you don't have URLs that look like /~svstartu/index.php?title=Main_Page ;), or if you need a skin, MediaWiki extension, etc, I'd be happy to help. I have some experience with the internals of MediaWiki.

EDIT: Also, for others looking where to start, take a peek at this page for a full list of pages that need to be created: http://svstartup.com/~svstartu/index.php?title=Special:Wante...

Very cool. I'll ping Tristan to start a conversation about this.

This could be invaluable to me. I plan on quitting my job at the startup where I currently work to move to SF/SV (Prefer SF) and look for work. Resources for networking, places to work on projects and cheap places to crash.

Ping me when you get closer to your move date. If you're looking for work, and you're a programmer, I'm sure I can probably hook you up with a couple of interviews with startups. People are dying for programming talent out here.

Wow, what perfect timing, I'm planning on moving out there in 6 months and just started my research :) I'll add my thoughts to the wiki after I go through the whole process

Same, I'll probably be moving to SF in Jan/Feb. Somebody write an article about SOMA, please :)

Very cool. Stop by a Hackers and Founders meetup. I'll pour you a beer.

Thank you! I wish I could contribute. I'll certainly keep an eye on the content that does turn up as we're getting increasingly restless in Vienna. In addition to the immigration related stuff mentioned in another thread, I'd be much obliged to anyone who could contribute cost-of-living related info. Basics like rent, utilities and food and any expense I might not be expecting coming from Europe...

Thank you very much. This is very helpful.

This is a great idea.

Anybody know of similar resources for Seattle? I'm moving there inside of 6 weeks with a half-time telecommute job and I'm looking to get involved in the tech scene and find people to hack with.

Try http://flax.skein.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/organize

I think Quora is a more appropriate destination for this content, it already has a great critical mass of users, and a more accessible UI. (you also know it won't just vanish tomorrow)

re: quora...

I've thought about that quite extensively. The problem with Quora is that it's not terribly easy to link to other pages. I think people need a centralized reference point.

re: longevity of content...

I've been running the http://www.hackersandfounders.com meetup in Silicon Valley for almost 3 years. I'm going to be in this town for quite some time, and if and when I do leave, I'll be sure to hand the projects off to someone that can keep the content up and running.

The reason that we're doing this, is Silicon Valley needs more engineers, and more startups. Everyone talks about there being a "bubble", but what I'm seeing is an amazing amount of really cool, hacker founded companies get money to build companies with. And they are all working really hard to hire talent. This situation is only going to get worse over the next couple of years, so we're trying to make the leap to moving to Silicon Valley easier.

There is no reason why you couldn't make a meta topic like "Valuable to startups moving to SV" and tag stuff from there. The benefit of this would be you can harness all the content already on Quora (eg: http://www.quora.com/Which-is-the-best-hookah-bar-in-San-Fra...)

I think its harder to link to pages on wiki style platforms than Quora. The whole point of Quora is an accessible wiki platform :)

I find quora to be awesome for opinions, not so impressive on facts owing to voting by popularity. They both have their advantages, but it would be nice just to have one spot to point everyone who asks about this stuff. I get a tremendous amount of people asking for a primer on SV.

Sure. But you want peoples opinions on where to live, where to work, where to meet, how to join a startup. These aren't factual topics - you want the healthy debate?

I think both are critical. Quora questions such as http://www.quora.com/I-am-a-creative-guy-with-a-startup-idea... are a great example.

This question gets asked on quora repeatedly and I've answered it a dozen times, but the 212 vote (an counting) answer that I wrote is particularly useless in terms of taking actions, whereas the one I wrote with a practical list of sites and events to check out usually top out at 12 votes, even if they are the top answer.

Clearly a simple list of different places is the best answer for this sort of thing and would probably best in ONE wiki article which can be easily found. Not a dozens of nearly identical questions.

Oh...perhaps I should also say that I think we should all put links to quora questions in the wiki where appropriate.

On the job boards page you were linking to startup.ly which is a parked domain. I've edited it to link to startuply.com, I hope this is the one you meant.

Does anyone know of a "Move to New York" wiki? One specific to startups would be great, but a more generic guide would be great, too.

also you can find some references/links in this post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1586027

Move to NYC! If you're a developer, you are needed here!

http://padmapper.com is the best tool for finding a place to live.

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