Ask HN: Should I move to Silicon Valley, remain in my small city, or elsewhere? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should I move to Silicon Valley, remain in my small city, or elsewhere?

3 pointsmoomoo112 comments

This might be a simple question to answer for some, but as someone without a substantial financial fallback it is a bit hard for me to decide. I could use some advice or anecdotes.

I live in a small city in California about 4 hours from San Francisco. I like living here, it is quiet and mostly farms and nice scenery. However, there's no tech scene here.

I listen to some podcasts or watch youtube videos where successful venture capitalists tell people they need to move to Silicon Valley in order to build a company. These are mostly videos from the 2010s, prior to covid and shift to remote workplaces. My aspiration is to build a company, and I want to know if it is necessary to be physically in SV to do that.

Is their advice still valid in 2022? I have been to the bay area a few times, and while I enjoyed the time spent with my friends eating at nice restaurants or going for hikes, the quality of life there seemed really low between the tiny living spaces and the overall unsafe vibe. I've been to Los Angeles and San Diego, and while they were also chaotic they seemed way more livable and surprisingly safer. However, if there is really that much of an edge in SV, then I'm willing to deal with it.

Although humanity is gigantic, individual human beings are incredibly small.

Super-small I should say. Life satisfaction is incredibly dependant upon what happens in the very immediate proximity: I call this the H.H.R. rule (housing, health, relationships).

Moving to SV your health should remain the same, but you'll have smaller housing, and you'll leave behind all your relationships, so you'll have no support system and no family so that's already a huge minus, in order to compensate for that people usually turn to friendship and other type relationships, but good luck finding them in SV while you are working like a maniac to fundraise and get your company off the ground. Your employees can't and won't ever be relationships. Maybe in other parts of the country, but not in SV, entrepreneurs see them as costs and employees see entrepreneurs as authority figures to manouver around to work the minimum as they possibly can. Did I mention the skewed gender ratio?

SV is a giant battlefield and everybody knows that it's a ginat battlefield and also everybody knows that everybody knows that it's a giant battlefield. People go there to figtht and landgrab.

My suggestion is to take advantage of how small you are and be extremely focused on curating your H.H.R.

EDIT: If you can't push back the strong desire to see how does it feel to be a millionaire you could travel further south towards Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Nicaragua , Ecuador...South Africa, Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand are also honorable mentions. You'll be a de-facto millionaire on a Purchasing-Power-Parity basis, and you'll be having too much of a blast to even care about what Peter Thiel said or what maniac Elon Musk tweeted about.

"I like living here" makes me think it might be nice to keep living there, at least for now :)

You probably don't need to relocate anywhere for building your own business unless you plan on opening up a production facility around existing talent pools (especially if your business is hardware related) or a brick and mortar shop to sell your product out of. Even then, there's places to do this that will be considerably cheaper and less saturated than the bay area.

Outside of this, if the culture and lifestyle there interest you at any point then I would say go for it!

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