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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Moving to Ohio was one of the worst decisions I made in my life. Dayton is proud of its history of innovation but most of the innovators left for California 50 years ago where innovation was allowed. What's left is the lumbering bureaucracies and sprawling empires that grew from the innovators' products: NCR, the GM plant, Otis.

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The region you live in matters greatly. Take Dayton. It doesn't impact me as I have not been anywhere near Dayton in all the years I've live in Ohio. Columbus, on the other hand, is a really nice city with a great vibe. I'm guessing it could be like saying, "Don't move to California. Moving to Riverside was the worst decision of my life." The real message is don't move to places that are down and out.

Columbus did seem nicer when I visited. But is it really "not down and out"?

It's one of only 14 cities in the US to gain 100k residents in the last decade.

What startups has it produced in the last decade? Or, more knowably, the decade before that, 02002–02012?

CoverMyMeds was the recent poster child ($1B exit). Ohio has a large focus on insurance and med/biotech.

Root insurance has been a recent one

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/rootinsurance

CoverMyMeds another

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/covermymeds-com

At least for a Midwest city, investment does seem to be picking up

https://news.yahoo.com/columbus-startup-funding-skyrocketing...

That's pretty significant!

CoverMyMeds, Root Insurance, and Olive are a couple of unicorns.

Aside from Cal, which other State(s) do you consider to be at least growing a culture of innovation? Just curious because might move to US from Canada in the future.

Chicago, IL is a hotbed. Boston, MA also is doing great these days. Texas and Ohio seem to be in a race to the bottom in terms of the types of work they're trying to attract.

Maybe Taiwan, Singapore, and Bangladesh? Canada's pretty great too.

Innovation is a function of you and the people you work with, not where you live. You should be looking at the team you will be working on, not the reputation of a physical place or company. If you fail to do that, you will be disappointed when the reality inevitably doesn't match the hype. Nearly every state has loads of smart and innovative people, despite what HN's regional bias would lead you to believe. The exception would be the very tiny states, but they still have smart people, just fewer of them.

The people you work with (in person) is to a significant extent a function of where you live, though, and what the team is allowed to attempt is even more so. Maybe there are a hundred smart and innovative fluorine chemists in your state, but 30 of them are assholes, 20 retired, 40 already have jobs too good to hire them away from, and the other 10 aren't allowed to do any lab work because of NIMBYs or because your legislature associates chemistry primarily with Breaking Bad. (That's a big problem in California today, but it wasn't 50 years ago.)

Thanks, sounds reasonable. Although I'll probably look at the area too.

I'm sure there are more, and I haven't been everywhere, but these are ones that stand out to me:

- Greater Boston area (outside of Boston, the high tech companies are pretty scattered)

- Chicago (and the North/West suburbs)

- Virginia (Tysons, Alexandria)

- North Carolina (Research Triangle)

- Portland

- Austin

The obvious ones: Bay Area, LA, NYC, Seattle area

If you're into specific industries, then there are areas that are more focused than others.

Boston isn't as scattered as it was 20 years ago. A lot of pharma and biotech in Kendall Square as well as outposts of California companies. And there are various startups maybe especially in the Seaport. Amazon has a lot of space in the Seaport as well.

But, yes, the computer industry in Massachusetts always tended to be in Metrowest and the defense contractors were/are out in the suburbs as well.

Minnesota's twin cities plus Rochester. Excellent place if you're interested in biomedical, health care technology innovation. Top ranked companies headquartered there, a great university, the Mayo Clinic. Really top notch.

But if you're moving from Canada to escape the cold, Minnesota is not the place to stop. It's a bit warmer than Winnepeg, but colder than Toronto and the rest of Eastern Canada by quite a bit.

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