And doubly so if you're married. If your spouse isn't on board and you've minimized the challenge, you're screwed.
I am sure we will not know if we made the right choice, for a long time. But I dont buy in to the belief that unless you are in the Valley, no one will give a damn (as touted by Vivek Wadhwa a few weeks ago).
Any thoughts?
EDIT: Needed to add a couple more thoughts that came out of the responses my post received.
a) Its really hard to find talent in SF - Right now, we are one non-tech founder and two hackers. And finding android or iOS talent in Richmond is like looking for needles. But I believe that if you find a darn good hacker, then a new tool or language is just a speedbump. We are still trying to find a very good UX designer though.
b) I agree with the Valley vibe. But it sounds more of a Goldrush than anything else. And I also agree with the vibrant support system that the Valley can provide. Right now, I get that through HN, blogs and my peers over email and phone.
Customers generally don't mind if you're not in the valley (although it is true that if your product is built for tech oriented people the bay area may be a high customer saturation zone.)
There are three problems to the Bay Area:
1. Massive competition for engineering talent. It's probably harder to hire 20 brilliant engineers in SF than in any other major city in North America.
2. Cost. Our burn is increasing by 20%-30% because we're moving.
3. Echo chamber. Ideas tend to get reinforced here. This is often good or neutral; SV will sometimes recognize the significance of something before the rest of the country will. (There are a lot of people who still think Facebook and Twitter are hype and will go bankrupt soon.) But I imagine that there are ideas that make sense in SV that are ultimately bad ideas. And there are ideas that wouldn't resonate in SV that are probably huge opportunities.
This is a little off-topic from the original article, which is fantastic. But circling back: startups are hard, and moving to SV isn't a panacea. It may help a little, but do it with eyes open - because you want to commit to the startup life, and SV is a good place to do that.
Good luck though. You are much better positioned due to the YC framework and which should open doors far more easily than to a couple of outliers like us.
It ain't fair but that's how it is.
In you go to SF with your pet project which has no traction and revenue, it will suddenly have traction and revenue. Don't ask me how. It isn't exactly logical. Things happen. You'll meet people who'll tell you if only you change this feature and add that feature and do this and not that you'll have a saleable proposition. So you'll say what the hell and give it a shot and soon it becomes so! Its just not rational, and as a coder and mathematician I hate irrationality just as much as you. But that's how it is. Whereas with no such brutal feedback, you can labor away at some precious project until it becomes larger than life and super-brittle and soon even you don't want to touch it cause who knows which module will break which other module, and then you go looking for customers and nobody really wants it cause its gotten way too complex for anybody to decipher.
I've heard ideas that are so lame ( an app that counts ONE TWO THREE while you do pushups. Really! Yeah, that's got funding to the tune of a couple mil! ) your 3 year old could have come up with it. So its not the traction, framework, revenue model etc. Its just finetuning an idea to the point where it becomes saleable. And for whatever reason, perhaps because its in their DNA, SV seems to have the sort of people who actually give you a listen and then tell you exactly how to go about it. They actually give a damn! If you have an idea, I think you should atleast spend 1-2 weeks in SV trying to pitch before writing it off as a futile exercise. Nothing to lose, everything to gain.
However, if what I have is a piss poor idea that has not won over customers, has no traction or revenue, then I dont think thats a problem a million dollar can solve. It will just be someone else's money that I will end up losing over a terrible idea. I would rather fail with this idea where I am now, than work on it (with someone else's money) for the next year and then still fail.
The Valley entices everyone to go there. I both drank the koolaid in 99 and ran for cover in the wake of the dotcom crash. Entrepreneurs who persevered were the ones who coupled the right ideas with a sense of commitment bordering on the insane. Thats what I want to emulate. That, to me is more tangible than a million dollars.
Except you benefit from talking to people with deep experience. When someone here tells you "have you tried putting this button on that page?", it's because they did it and it doubled your traffic. Experience of what works and what doesn't circulates so much faster in Silicon Valley.
Why would you want to be disconnected from the flow of ideas? If you think online forums are a substitute, they are, but with a time delay.
So why am I back to the midwest ? Well, I'm not running a startup myself, atleast not yet :) And when it comes time to do so, I'll rush over there myself.
I guess this is what it was like in the 1960s in Greenwich village in NYC, or Berkeley CA or Woodstock or whereever else. Its just quite surreal & I still haven't gotten over it.
It is good to be optimistic, but I'd hate for people to get this impression that the streets are paved with gold and make some really poor decisions.
As for the "Somebodies", it's not all about past success; there is a lot of luck and flair to it. There are, in any human culture, people who are utterly worthless but can make the magic happen. They don't know much technically, but they're great at using the herd mentality and certain exploitable vulnerabilities in weak minds in order to make other people like them, so getting funding and press comes easily to them. When they actually have to build a product and a team and a company, they're screwed, and they tend to flame out catastrophically. Whereas the people who actually work hard and have real capability will have slower paths to success but, when they get there, they'll be able to stay where they are because they've actually earned it.
> And a third chap was going on and on about some series A series C thingy.
Ok, this has to be a subtle troll...
It's not unheard of that I'll be hanging out at a cafe in Palo Alto and run into other entrepreneurs I've met before.
I went to a talk at the CS dept at Berkeley and ran into a direct competitor (who actually had my app installed on his phone). Had a great convo with him.
I've also had people come up to me who are in similar spaces who propose a possible collaboration.
However, there's good reason I am here in Silicon Valley. Athens at the time of Pericles and Socrates wasn't a great place to live either, far worse than Silicon Valley. Same goes late Republican and early imperial Rome, Tang dynasty Xi'an, Florence and Venice during the Renaissance, Victorian London, etc... On the other hand, people willingly sacrificed their standard of living and prestige to live in these cities and and pursue activities they found meaningful. Being a big fish in a small, provincial ponds sucks: if you want to grow intellectually or professionally, you should be around smart and ambitious people.
To be fair, there are pockets of talent elsewhere (New York, Seattle) but they're generally rather insular: a lot of the places tend to be a combination of a revolving door for some (people joining and leaving in 18 months, very frequently moving to Silicon Valley) and a life long commitment for others (lifetime "softies" at Microsoft). While exceptional talent does exist in many place outside of Silicon Valley, the stories of people joining a company, staying long enough to make a significant impact and then applying their lessons elsewhere (e.g., the "Fairchildren", "Paypal Mafia", Xooglers) are not as common in less-fluid engineering job markets.
I think that Silicon Valley in the late 2000s and early 2010s is that place. Particularly centered around the offices of Google, FaceBook, Twitter, and YCombinator. There's an energy here, a thrill of discovery, that's just missing in most other places in the world. It's enough to make me overlook that the city is basically suburban sprawl, public transportation sucks a lot more than Boston/NYC/DC, the quality of life is honestly not that high, there's little sense of history (only of history being made), and everybody wants to get rich quickly.
I don't think I'd want to settle in Silicon Valley. But when my grandkids ask questions about the birth of the Internet age, I want to say I was there.