Tell PG: I think NYC can now be a place to do a startup. | Hacker News Reader

Tell PG: I think NYC can now be a place to do a startup.

6 pointsmartinshen8 comments

Just a quick note to ask to change the location part of http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html

I fully agree. The startup community is exploding here. We have serious companies coming out of the city, a seriously diverse culture (Tech, Business, Fashion, Art, Music), leaders and mentors speaking at meetups, co-working spaces, conferences and colleges daily, and tons of VCs and Angels. So glad I moved to NYC.

I'd worry about being lean and frugal there, due to the cost of living. I bet there's some ways to save money (aside from cramming five guys into a studio apartment).

Related question: Did NYC ever get any of those miracle residential fiber connections covering the whole city? It's surprisingly hard to get broadband info w/o going through forms.

FIOS is probably the best bet although it doesn't come to our building. You can still get 20-50Mbps residential if you pay enough. It's quite easy to live cheaply here, as long as you don't live in midtown Manhattan. You can cross the water any direction and knock $1000 off your rent, and if you cram a few people in the same apartment (everyone does), then your rent can be $500-$1000 per person. On incubator funds that leaves some runway. There is a pizza place one block over from me that is open 24hrs and has $.99 slices, so food can definitely be had on the cheap, and we don't have, need, or want a car since 20 instances of everything we need is within 10 blocks from us. Dentist, Doctor, Store, Parks, River/Ocean, Gym, Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Coffee shops.

NYC is becoming a great place to do a startup, but is NYC the next silicon valley? I'd say no (I'm a New Yorker). Silicon Valley has always been the place to run a techonology company. New York has always been about commerce, finance, fashion, art, media. NY and SV are good at 2 different things. What's happening now is not that New York is becoming good at what silicon valley is good at. Its that the things New York is good at are now becoming technology enhanced, so depending on what kind of company you're building, SV could be better than NY and in some cases, NY could be better than SV.

(I'm making wide sweeping generalizations of course and they may not be valid months from now.) edit: yes that last statement was just to cover my ass. ;P

Why do you need him to change it? Just show him.

I hope NYC doesn't become the next silicon valley. I hope another city does. Or why not a country? The thing is we should decentralize the different powers. Yeah, leave NY to your lawyer but why not creating a new hub at a tropical place like... lets say... Brazil. A place with very low life cost and super high internet access + super nice weather where hackers could be doing their 'thing' all year long and then maybe take a plane to meet investors from NY, Europe or China..... or just skype them.

Brazil sounds good, but that's a huge country to become a hub. It would surely need to be a city within Brazil like São Paulo or Rio.

Of course it's not really something you can engineer, if it was I'd suggest New Zealand =D

I'm in.

But, I think the culture is fundamentally different and must be treated as such. I wish I had more to say on the matter but I'd have to think about it some more. All I'm thinking is that we can't just move the valley to the city because the city is already very established.

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