Free Living Arrangements Offered to Startup Founders in Kansas City
homesforhackers.com
homesforhackers.com
"What is expected of you: [...] You pay for your own food"
Now I'm here in SF and paying double the rent for a place half the size of my place in KC, seeing something like this is very intriguing. Especially since I'm trying to bootstrap my own startup and feeling a bit lost in a sea of Silicon Valley startups!
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/08/startups-would-you-c...
Still, if you do end up committing to move there, I'd love to hear about your experience.
I lived in KS & MO for a total of 20 years. I'd say that worrying about tornadoes in KC is a bit like worrying about earthquakes in the Bay Area. Outsiders think, "Oh, my goodness!" but people who live there just do what little (very little) they need to, to deal with it, and mostly don't worry about it.
Nonetheless, weather is an issue. KC does not have a mild climate. Late summer can get very hot. Cold, windy winter days can be miserable. Ice storms can cause power outages. Most of the year, it's fine, but these do happen, and should be taken into account.
I will admit, in one house with close to zero insulation and very large windows, having finally purchased an electric blanket for about 2 weeks out of the winter - but never turned on the central heat.
Certainly a change from the Cariboo Interior in British Columbia, let me tell you...
Weather events in KC don't just make the news; they take lives. Flooding, ice/snow, wind, lightning, tornados, heat waves, cold spells. You name it, KC deals with it.
It can seem like there's always something to deal with everywhere, but the midwest gets the crap knocked out of it from the weather. It is not mild in the least.
Also forces salaries lower, competitors can't hire you away. If you are skilled, you're better off in a state like California. Paid more money, and you aren't handcuffed to your job. Look what facebook did to Google's talent pool or Zynga did to EA's.
I am not from the US, but where I come from noncompetes are enforced, but are very expensive (by law) for the companies so they are not used that often.
There's even worse things out there for employees. I've read about ownership of all ideas/work clauses including outside of work hours while employed and enforced in a court of law. Imagine doing a startup nights and weekends only having it taken from you.
As for IP stuff, that's really a case by case basis with each companies contract and how reasonable the claim that special resources and information made available by the employer were behind the development of the ip. If you're working for Starbucks and patent an algorithm for targeted advertising than no way in hell. But if you work for Garmin and develop a method to improve GPS reception in small devices, you're probably screwed.
And most of that stuff is pretty standard across the country.
And the Nelson-Atkins Museum is better than anything in the Bay Area, in my opinion.
KC has an ok modern art museum, and Lawrence KS has a decent museum at the university there.
My best guess is that the highest-demand neighborhoods are fully wired by end of October.
Tax-write-off wars and the Big 5. Awesome.
Add in a bunch of rich people who don't have to spend a lot to live luxuriously and get bored easily means a lot of cutting edge stuff gets funded that you wouldn't expect.
And then you have a culture of giving back that includes the Kauffman foundation, which is the 4th largest foundation in the US and focused on education and entrepreneurship. They us KC as a testing ground for a lot of their pilot programs in teaching entrepreneurship. So the city has more startup resources than just about anywhere else.
But the city has long been a testing ground for new products and services over the years due to having a lot of basically isolated areas that mimic demographic conditions in all other parts of the country. That was part of the reason for the google fiber coming here, and the fact that as it spreads across the country it will end up following railroad right of ways to keep expansion costs down. And KC being a transportation hub in the middle of the country makes this a natural match.
You have to realize that it's basically the entertainment, financial, and technological hub for about 30-40million people living within an 8 state radius. So there are a lot of things centered here that normally couldn't be supported in a city of the same actual population.
It's not SV, it's not Austin, but it has a huge reach for a lot of talent and it is starting to spawn dividends.
Our Ruby talent pool lost some talent with the Google acquisition and subsequent moving of a local company, but we're back up to 40 at our Ruby group meetings twice a month. We have the Ruby Midwest conference and other developer conferences. Lots of opportunities to meet and hack with other developers.
I would totally offer up my basement, but I'm just outside of the first round of fiber rollouts.
Cool idea, be awesome to see how it goes.
I'll be swinging by that area in Sep, maybe I can drop in on something. KC sounds like a place I want to poke around in for a bit.
http://www.pitch.com/kansascity/spider-man/Content?oid=21878...
Kudos to the locals for trying to pull young entrepreneurs to KC. The town needs a jolt of options outside the typical corporate-IT-office-park-in-the-burbs.
One thing about KC is culture. The people are really nice, but the midwest is so substantively different from the coasts. In Seattle and the bay area, technology is king -- it's dominant from an industry perspective. Not the case in KC, and it's not going to be anytime soon. Whether you, as a possible startup entrepreneur, care about that is personal, but make no mistake -- the local culture is not around tech.
A second knock on KC -- the good local talent doesn't hang around. Historically, competence in technology has not been rewarded; thus, the good companies tend to see young up-and-comers depart for greener pastures.
Want to start your technology company in KC? I would say it's a bad bet. Cost of living is cheaper than many other places, but you get what you pay for; expect access to technical talent to be challenging.
* Westboro Baptist Church is in Topeka, KS (65 miles away)
* a professor was beaten in Lawrence, KS (30 miles away) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Mirecki#Intelligent_Design...)
1. Climate. There is no mild weather in KC. Summers are excruciatingly hot. Winters can sometimes be very cold and snowy. Tornadoes can get pretty scary at times, but 90% of the time there is nothing to worry about. I've seen a couple of touchdowns in 15 years. Most of the time i just hear about them.
2. Cost of Living. Rent is fairly cheap. If you're single and want to be in the middle of all the action a single bedroom place on the Plaza will probably run you around $800. Power & Light district will likely be around the same price. Westport area is going to be cheaper around $600. If you don't mind the drive, you can probably find a decent place in North Kansas City for around $500-$600. Want to buy a house? ~$250K in the burbs for a nice 4 bedroom house 20 minutes away from the center. 2-3 bedroom homes are around $160K-$200K.
3. Traffic. KC is backed up all over the place between 8-9am and 5-6pm. When the rush-hour is over, it is a pleasure to drive here.
4. Nightlife. You have the new Power & Light district with tons of bars and clubs open 24/7. You have the old Westport area with it's own vibe. If you're from the Bay Area, you'll likely fit right in here. It's a very hip place. Plaza, Zona Rosa and The Legends are great place to shop and get a bite to eat around day time and up until midnight. KC occupies pretty massive territory, but it actually isn't a big city and it can get old pretty quick. So keep that mind, especially if you're single or a young couple. You'll be running into the same people over and over again before you know it. :)
5. Recreation. KC has beautiful lakes, nature and wildlife. 30 minutes away from the center and you're pretty much on camping grounds. Getting around on foot is pretty tough and even impossible in some places. You really need to have a car here. Sidewalks are non-existent in many neighborhoods. There is always something going on in the city. Lots of concerts and outside events in the summer. Not so much in the winter.
6. Tech Scene & Job market. KC doesn't really have a good techy/entrepreneurial scene. It has strong corporate IT sector, which is booming. Good developers are still very hard to come by. Most companies are more than willing to dish out 100K+ if you know what you're doing. The interesting thing about Kansas City businesses is that most of them aren't looking for rockstars or ninjas. They're looking for someone who can fit in with the rest of the team. This is not a bad thing, but more often than not you wind up working with really incompetent people who fit in but don't know squat. It's also very hard to find interesting work. The hottest thing is IT jobs supporting internal development in financial and medical sectors. There are some prominent tech companies in the area like Sprint, Garmin, Honeywell & Cerner, but most are just not very appealing in terms of life/work balance, innovation and quality of work.
7. Want to run a start-up from KC? Hmm... I don't know. Finding good developers is a pretty hard task here. Finding talented developers is inexplicably difficult. Most folks who know their craft are no longer in KC. You basically have to know people who know people. Tech conferences are usually full of talented folks. The great thing about KC is the lower cost of living. You can make a comfortable living on 60K/year, but as a developer you can easily make 100K here and have plenty of time & money to invest in your own start-up while working full-time elsewhere. So in that respect, it is a pretty good place to build a start-up.
Not all startups care about VC money or hiring outside talent to work in site. Imagine a 5 person team working on some web service or a mobile app, with external people telecommuting if needed.
Why does everybody assume that startup = Facebook, Twitter, Groupon etc wannabes?
Most startups that make it out of KC right now have raised money from both coasts and locally and have Dev offices in SV and Boston if not other places.
Try again somewhere that doesn't use most of its government revenue in destructive ways, and maybe this would be worthwhile.
Seriously, it's time to leave the USA. If you want to encourage migration and innovation, do it somewhere outside of the borders. The world is a big place and not all of it is insane like the USA.
1. A $50k investment
2. A job or research position
3. Marry a brazilian :)
4. Be over 60 and with +$2000/month income
A foreign developer will probably find a job very easily, but be prepared to live on 50% less.
But we don't have Cherry Coke :(