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Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. Every time I hear somebody talk about the "overabundance of capital" in the startup world, I want to grab them by the shoulders, stare them in the eyes and scream frantically like a mad-man "Have you been to RTP (NC) ?!?!??"

OK, not quite that bad, but still, you get the drift. What's happening in California is not necessarily indicative of what's going on in the rest of the world. Research Triangle Park, for example, is FAR from having enough capital freely available, much less too much. Look at the most recent Triangle Startup Factory class... they took, what, six startups out of - IIRC - a hundred and some applications?

Now to be fair, probably not all 100 of those startups are worthy of funding... But I know there were more than six worthy startups in the Raleigh / Durham / Chapel Hill area as of March, 2012.

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This isn't a political statement, it's a comment about culture as it relates to recruiting valuable and scarce talent. Startup culture tends to be highly meritocratic. It lends itself to openness toward who you are as an individual as long as you work hard, work smart and achieve.

Given this, I can't imagine trying to recruit the best and the brightest to NC given recent developments when there are more accepting places like NY, Silicon Valley, Seattle, etc. There are a ton of talented people who wouldn't want to live there. I'll concede that there may be others who want to live there more because of what went down, but those same people could be recruited almost anywhere without a meaningful depreciation in quality of life.

Regarding the "recent developments", RTP jumps out on the following map:

http://www.wral.com/news/political/page/10991843/

Durham and Orange Counties voted no by over 2-1 margins. And meanwhile, Proposition 8 passed in California a few years back; indeed, such propositions have been passed everywhere in the US where they've been put to the voters as a whole. North Carolina is not distinguished in this respect.

I personally like San Francisco over RTP, despite originally being from Durham, but there is a lot that is very good about the RTP area, and I personally know a lot of very talented people who are extremely happy (if, admittedly, a little bit less so this week...) to call it home.

Not to be nitpicky, but NC did distinguish itself from Proposition 8 in banning civil unions and domestic partnerships, too.

NC is a wonderful place, I was making the comment that now it's just a little harder to recruit great people there. Perception matters when scaling a company. Starting a 10 person team is probably fine. Scaling to a 100-200 team gets that much harder.

What on earth does this have to do with technical talent?

Projecting your political opinions a bit?

Some technical talent is directly impacted by these types of laws and we care. The last time I got an e-mail asking me about a position in Qatar I just sent back a link to this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Qatar along with a few polite words.

The guy was sympathetic, but we both knew that was the end of that conversation.

For some of us this isn't a matter of politics, but an impact on our quality of life. And for others of us, it may just be a matter of politics, but even then, that doesn't mean it's trivial.

In Richard Florida's "The Rise of the Creative Class", he describes an experiment, complete with empirical data, that show an overwhelming positive correlation between gay-friendliness and positive economic outlook.

There's no question that A1 gave NC a black eye, and it does hurt. How much it hurts is a different question. My perception, having lived in NC my entire life, and having worked in the RTP area for 12 years, is that talent isn't the major holdup here. There is a ton of talent here, at least on a transitional basis, by virtue of the fact that people come here to attend NCSU, UNC and Duke (all 3 are very well respected and regarded schools) and because IBM, Cisco, GSK, and a pile of other companies have large presences here. The big challenge, talent wise, is to keep the folks who are graduating from UNC, NCSU, Duke, etc., here, instead of moving off to $WHEREVER. Not easy, but - believe it or not - NC has a lot going for it, A1 aside.

Just to add some anecdotal evidence, I'm a college student in NC but I'll be leaving for SF on Saturday and I can't wait.

For us yankees that exist on the "coasts", anywhere outside of NYC, SF, and LA are foreign lands, and somewhere like NC may as well be the moon.

That is a bit unfair, but unsurprising. People choose to work where they want to live, and they'll work with the people they're most familiar with and understand, in the environment around them.

I've been living in RTP for the past 2 or 3 years and continue to get surprised by how many well known developers are in the area.

What's RTP?

Strictly speaking, RTP[1] is a small area (mostly) in Durham County, NC, where a research park is located, where a lot of major technology and pharma companies, and tons of small companies, have R&D and/or manufacturing operations.

Colloquially, people use "RTP" as shorthand for "The Triangle"[2] which is generally considered an area roughly defined by a triangle of lines connecting Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. Or, depending on your take, connecting Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and NC State University.

RTP (or "The Triangle") is a tech hub in the Southeast region, and is becoming quite a startup hotbed. But one of the limitations of this area is lack of access to early stage capital. Of all the things that hurt entrepreneurs in this area, that's probably the single most encountered problem. :-(

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Triangle_Park

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Triangle

Research Triangle Park

It's the area where Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh, NC are.

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