Former Sun CEO Worries About Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

Former Sun CEO Worries About Silicon Valley

online.wsj.com

34 pointsSerene26 comments

While some of the article just seems like nostalgic yearning, I agree that it's not necessarily the best place to start a company. My wife and I were making a very good income at Google but still found ourselves wondering how we would ever afford to a buy house, raise a family and other medium to long-term goals. The idea of starting a company while having to pay $3000+ in rent was laughable.

We lived in the Bay Area for the last 5 years and wound up moving to Charlotte, NC in order to bootstrap my business. While the tech/startup community here is obviously much smaller, it's thriving. I've been completely surprised by the level of diverse technical talent here and now that I'm outside of the Silicon Valley bubble I see that Charlotte's not alone. There are thriving startup communities all over the country and at the end of the day, it's easy enough to hop on a plane to SF to visit investors. I'd rather focus on building my business than constantly worry about how I'm going to afford housing.

I've always felt that people's best bets are in places like Chicago, which have good tech economies, while having a healthy range of living costs. You can go anywhere from a very cheap apartment or condo on the far north side to living it up on the Gold Coast.

Places like SF, Boston, Manhattan, with their exorbitant costs seem to add a lot of unnecessary pressure when trying to build a startup.

With dual income I am surprised you weren't able to buy a home in silicon valley. Unless you are dead set on sending your kids to school in Cupertino (or another expensive area with a really good school).

Also, why spend 3k a month on rent? You can get an older one bedroom apartment for just under 1k within ~8 miles of the Google HQ. If you are single you could also rent a room in Mountain View for ~650 a month.

It isn't hard to live on the cheap in silicon valley. You just need to be smart with your money. (99 Ranch for groceries, drive a economic car, don't eat out all the time, don't buy a 65 inch flatscreen tv. :) )

Obviously you have already moved away so this information won't matter to you now. I'm posting this for other people who are in a similar situation.

You can get an older one bedroom apartment for just under 1k within ~8 miles of the Google HQ

Where?

Here's one such place (not sure if it is older or not, but it is under 1K and close to Google HQ): http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/apa/2204805441.html

That's a studio, not a 1bdr.

Sorry, I wasn't making a distinction between studios and one bedroom apartments since I have searched for either when looking for an apartment for myself; but yes, there is a difference.

Also, for the record, from my search on craigslist I didn't see any one bedroom apartments in that price range (just studios), although as another post mentions it wouldn't be easy to raise children in a one bedroom apartment anyway.

Japan town in san jose is one area. It won't be a brand new unit of course. You can find deals if you spend some time looking around.

You can't reasonably raise kids in a 1 bedroom apartment.

Agreed. But the 1 bedroom apartment would allow you to save up for a starter home or condo.

My point is that we would have to reduce our standards of living in order to stay in the Bay Area, even with two good incomes from a stable company. The costs of housing and raising a family were simply out of bounds with what we wanted to spend. By moving, we get all of the same quality of life for < 50% of the cost.

I don't want to raise my son in a 1-bedroom apartment in the suburbs.

The internet was supposed to facilitate telecommuting etc, yet some of the people most in the know - the yc partners - require startups to physically relocate to Silicon Valley.

Unfortunately, the Internet was supposed to ( http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=active&q=%22... =) do nothing of that sort. Telecommuting would indeed become viable for many types of jobs because of the Internet but that doesn't mean just because you work in an SV tech-startup, telecommuting could replace face-to-face interaction. If I'm not mistaken, YC startups get a lot of benefit from being in the Valley - they get to meet other founders, SV movers-and-shakers, talented engineers, and potential users/business-partners/employees. While YC requires the founders to be in SV, I'm pretty certain the employees of the startup can be almost anywhere in the world. Running a startup is different from being a telecommuting developer. The former requires shaking a lot of hands and talking about your vision in person while the latter requires application of tech skills and experience and can be done remotely.

A bit off topic, but it's a bit sad/melancholy to be reminded that Sun - who actually made real physical _stuff_ like all those Sparcs and Alphas - ended up selling for barely more than what Groupon apparently recently turned down...

Sun never made Alphas. Those came from Digital (Equipment Corporation, not Research).

But I agree it's sad. Sun's accomplishments were something to behold.

It is sad. I wonder how Sun could have prevented their demise? It was obvious to me from the late 1990s that their business model wouldn't survive cheap Unix boxes running on commodity hardware.

Their best option would be to produce SPARC-based machines at PC prices. A PC is a very kludgy machine. If you don't need to be PC-compatible, your motherboard can be much simpler. Sun targeted the high-performance turf when "average" was becoming good enough.

Had they targeted the lower end of the server space (and workstations, to prevent Windows workstations being turned into cheap servers) with the better technology they had, the story would have been totally different.

Of course, buying companies they didn't need wasn't exactly clever.

And now I just read they're claiming Zygna is worth over 7billion - the company that make _Farmville_, who could be destroyed anytime Facebook chooses, is worth the same or more than _Sun Microsystems?_ Surely that's insane?

(oh, and "oops" on the Alphas error... I _did_ know they were build by DEC... Thanks for the correction)

Yes... The indignity of being worth less than the owners of Farmville is even worse than being sold to Oracle...

Ironically it was the result of the very R&D that McNealy was so excited about.

Not so much the quality of their R&D, but its lack of focus. Sun was a hardware company and forgot that.

"The biggest issues with the Valley are local, state and federal governmental overreach and overregulation. It's over-pensioned, over-unionized and over the top."

-- Scott McNealy

Wish he could have been bothered to describe how he thinks things should be done differently.

The full quote, which I am posting under your article as you posted part of it first:

"Mr. McNealy: It's not the Valley. It's the overhead and the overhang, the clouds brought in by Sacramento and Washington, D.C., the regulations, the deficit and the misallocation of resources. It's all of those things. Obviously, I'm a believer in the private sector and in personal responsibility.

The biggest issues with the Valley are local, state and federal governmental overreach and overregulation. It's over-pensioned, over-unionized and over the top. "

also, News Flash: Rich ex-CEO Blames Regulators and Worker Unions for All The World's Problems

Yet, people still flock here to start companies. I reject the Republican slant of his statement.

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