I hope more startups move to Texas... housing cost are way too high in SV.
It's not about salaries because those aren't the major issue. The COL difference is minor in comparison to the execution risks. In fact, the traditional reason why startups "had to be" in NYC, Boston, and San Francisco is job-market latency. Yes, you can find great engineers elsewhere, but for some ridiculous purple squirrel query (production experience in the 3 NoSQLs you use) that needs to be filled tomorrow, you need to be in the Valley or New York (due to Wall Street, there's a lot of technical talent, albeit expensive). If you're in Austin, you can find great people but probably not the guy who matches your purple squirrel query exactly.
That said, a place like NYC has the urban dating problem (too many alternatives, so people treat each other like shit). We'd write great offers to people only to have them picked off based on minutiae. We were ridiculously picky and rejected people for dumb reasons; only fair for them to be.
However, I feel like the grow-fast-or-die red-ocean nonsense is played-out and the next wave is going to be in the mid-growth (5-30%/year headcount growth, focus on technical excellence) space which doesn't need to be in the Valley or New York.
* Austin, TX (seems to be the obvious pull-ahead winner in 2013)
* Portland, OR (great weather, beautiful, lots of potential)
* Madison, WI (near Chicago, great college town, not as cold as people think)
* Minneapolis, MN (underrated gem, beautiful, just very cold; I'm told they haven't had a 60+ yet in 2013)
* Pittsburgh, PA (CMU is right there; how is it not kicking ass?)
* Ann Arbor, MI (another Midwestern gem)
* Chicago, IL (if you consider that low-COL)
* Toronto, Ontario (ok, not a US city, but I spent a summer there and loved it)
Almost none of these would be considered low-COL (they're above 100) and relative to their regions they're quite high, but they're a hell of a lot cheaper than New York or Palo Alto.
Oh, one ass-kicking advantage of the low-COL places: people actually want to be lifelong software engineers. In New York, you can't raise a family on a (non-WS quant) engineer's salary.
Of course, most of young idiots have this insane dream of having a manager's title and pay (plus real stock options!) which you can get by 27 if you play the politics, but being full-time programmers and just using their magic manager powers to assign themselves the best work. It turns out not to work that way. Poor them...
I really think the fact that one can't raise a family out here on an engineer's salary is toxic to the culture. It creates the wrong kind of ambition.
Can't tell if serious...
Portland, according to Wikipedia, has an average January high of 47, an average July high of 81-- some seasonality but not too much-- and with 40+ percent sunshine in most of the year, doesn't seem to have the overbearing cloudiness of Seattle's winters.
Portland's weather is truly miserable during the winter and is rated #1 in the country for seasonal affective disorder. The summers, however are beautiful.
But the weather? Oh my god, the weather. The weather is horrible a good 6-9 months of the year. It's amazing for 3, but oh my god does it have a cloudy, wet, no-sun-ever feel for a good chunk of the year. Wikipedia might say one thing, but really, the weather... oh man the weather.
When it comes to the cities themselves, just like anywhere else there are some spots that are better or more trendy than others. St. Paul is an older city but in a well maintained, charactery sort of way. Minneapolis is a small city, newer feeling, much cleaner than some of the bigger cities. Their are lots of small areas within each of the cities that are pretty popular. The suburbs are constantly being built out and are very convenient to the downtown areas.
There's a number of other great things about the area to help counterbalance the weather as well. The one thing that really gets me though is that NOBODY knows how to zipper-merge.
Perhaps I am jaded, but I look at what most people do at their day jobs and it makes me sick to see trillions of dollars of unrealized economic value being spilled on the floor because the wrong people are calling the shots.
And most quant salaries are not that high, I guess less than 50% of them make >200k. Again, you are probably cherry-picking successful quants working for big banks and funds and that gives you very high expectations.
It's a really nascent scene, and you want to avoid letting the culture get in the way of business, but it has a lot of promise.
Houston is a wonderfully large and diverse city, and there is always a lot of work to find around here while pursuing your startup. We've got top-notch engineering talent (NASA and the energy sector), and the best private research university in Texas. The food is really good, housing to match near any requirement is readily available, and the people are friendly.
Perhaps of interest is this report from the Brookings Institution:
Patenting Prosperity: Invention and Economic Performance in the United States and its Metropolitan Areas
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Reports/2013...
So there's one for you.
I'm pretty excited to see the growth of a strong startup scene outside of NYC + SF. I feel like VC-istan is played out and I'm trying to get a coherent feel for what's next.
Discovery and recommendation oriented, designed to get the rather large percentage of the young population that isn't dressing as well as they could on board. Especially young professional-age men.
It's an itch-scratching problem that is dear to me. Even if it doesn't develop into a sustainable business it's worth it to me to attack.
I'm in Mountain View right now, consulting after my stint as a non-founder CTO. Not going non-founder route again.
I'm bootstrapping at least initially so I get more utility from cheap land and nice people than I do accessibility of seed money.
Interesting. That seems more like a New York startup, but COL would really be out of your favor out here, and you'd be competing with finance on salaries.
Discovery and recommendation oriented, designed to get the rather large percentage of the young population that isn't dressing as well as they could on board. Especially young professional-age men.
That's a great concept. I think a lot of us are late to realize that how you dress (especially for work) matters. I didn't know how to dress until I met my wife. I hope that it works out.
I'm in Mountain View right now, consulting after my stint as a non-founder CTO. Not going non-founder route again.
I hear you on that. I feel like startup founders overestimate the degree to which they've "de-risked" the business, mainly as an excuse to take 10x the equity. In truth, a company with 18 months to live, no free-standing reputation, and that fires without severance is not de-risked at all.