HubSpot CEO: We would've struggled on the West Coast
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I'd add two more bad things about the valley: faddish thinking / groupthink, and completely insane costs. I can only speak second-hand, but the Valley strikes me as very much a bubble with its own internal echo chamber and groupthink. If you're in the Valley, you are likely to get sucked into chasing trends that everyone else is chasing instead of finding a unique niche nobody's thought about. And the cost of living is simply absurd: think Manhattan except car ownership is an almost must-have.
I also hear that the availability of funding in the Valley is overstated. Early-round funding is scarce, and funding might be even more faddish than the startups themselves.
The advantage of the valley though is the talent pool. It's fresh, large, and highly skilled, though perhaps a bit fickle as the interview mentions.
Finally, having lived in Boston/Cambridge, I can mention one distinct disadvantage of that particular place: it's somewhat antisocial and has a conservative investor climate. I found it a somewhat stifling place to live. People don't have friends. They have colleagues. And investors there tend to be more risk-averse than California.
If I wanted a big startup hub that is not the Valley I would honestly pick Austin: lowish cost of living, lots of tech talent, nicer climate than the Northeast, and more fun than Boston. New York might be a possibility too, as it's more fun and diverse than Boston and probably less conservative.
A very large component of this is a policy choice (http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/face...). I've posted the link before and will probably post it again.
Any time valley cities want to make cheaper housing, they can. The technology necessary to do so is a hundred years old and well understood.
Many people treat very high costs of living like a fact of life, but they're not.
Nobody in California outside of San Francisco really thinks or cares much about The City, so nothing would be different. It's always been it's own weird microcosm of reality, and will likely stay that way forever.
Also, I've never come across this use of "The City" but there it is, according to Wikipedia. The term can refer to: New York, London, Rome, or San Francisco (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City). I don't think "The City" would ever evoke SF to anyone outside of SF...
It's just anecdotal, but I don't think many people in California care about San Francisco's housing problems. Southern Californians tend to think SF is "weird" and "too cold." If they pine for a dense urban experience, it's in Manhattan.
Citation, please. Cheap housing in the Bay Area is like $500/mo to share a 7x5 laundry room.
http://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/Startup-dreams-meet...
Being based is Boston, I feel this quite a bit; it's absolutely true despite the pitiful cries of people in the area.
That said, this problem seems very much limited to the investor and financial attitudes of the area. The people we work with are awesome and excitable and friendly. People do help each other.
The way I look at it, Boston is great if you depend on domain-relevant talent and experience (in my case, medical). And when it comes time to raise money, you get on a plane and go where you need to go. That's not a constant thing, being instead quite episodic.
Boston living costs are crazy: 3-6x here - I can have such a longer runway in Myrtle Beach, and as noted by the article: get lots of media attention, as we have for events out of our coworking space: www.coworkmyr.com
We've created a tech community around the space, and we're building an investor community out of the rich retirees in the area, and those that choose to come visit.
I've made deeper friendships faster here in 6 months than 6 years in Boston, and I believe the smaller community of tech professionals empowers people to know one another's skills and interests better - to create more fulfilling opportunities when they do arise.
I'm sure there will be challenges, like finding talent, but that's still a challenge in Boston, just for a different reason!
I'd love to hear more from smaller cities that are creating tech communities: with the right combination of elements, you can go far with your startup, maybe even farther & easier than in Boston or SF.
Sounds like there's a balance of many factors going on, with a sweet-spot depending on your needs and desires. Maybe someone can make a "startup location" tool that takes all the variables and spits out the perfect city for your startup!
All said, if anyone wants to plan a meetup or just wants to grab a beer, my email's in my profile.
(1) Boston has an undeserved liberal reputation. Boston is extremely conservative, but in its own way. It's NPR-liberal, not fun loving socially open liberal, and definitely not San Francisco liberal. It's ideologically liberal but not culturally so.
It took me a year or two to wrap my mind around it as it's a sort of conservatism you just don't find elsewhere in the U.S. much. It took me aback. I had no conceptual framework to place it in. Eventually I realized it was an upper-crust blue blooded Ivy League thing, a bizarre hybrid where people are intellectually open minded but socially unbelievably reserved.
(2) Boston is a huge college town, and thus has a very transient population. People move there for school or work for a while, but they often do not settle there. Why make lasting friendships when everyone's just going to leave? Also: the social scene tends to revolve around the schools to a great extent. If you're a student you have those social networks, but there is less of a social scene for non-students.
(3) It's expensive and inconvenient to drive in Boston, and the public transit is unfriendly to socialization. The T stops running at 12:30AM, and cabs are insanely expensive-- far more costly than New York. So people don't want to go out further than they can walk or commute in a short cab ride. Go out to some place like North Cambridge or Quincy and you're looking at a $40+ cab ride home. I think this is a huge reason there is no quality club/music scene to speak of outside a few tiny islands here and there.
All that being said, people are very polite and friendly. It's not that people are hostile or mean, just that they don't socialize much and keep to themselves. I think it's a vicious cycle too-- it drives people away who would otherwise really like to live there. Boston is a wonderful city in many, many ways.
Having grown up in DC and now living in SF I think this phrase is farcical as well. SF liberalism is pretty shallow and restricted to a small number of topics (gay rights, environmentalism, and others). The cities off I-95 between DC and Boston tend to be more liberal on issues other than the Californian's one to three pet causes. Of course on an individual by individual basis there isn't a total monoculture in either place, and it's probably more complex than a binary liberal/conservative distinction.
SF is quite the opposite: discussion of anything is on the table, you say things first and think later or think by talking, everyone is expected to offend and to not be offended by anything, and if you cross any lines you're told so bluntly and argue back. It's a culture of debate, it's anti-puritan, anti-polite, and more free-as-in-speech free. But what you say becomes more important than what you believe, and your beliefs are allowed to be much more malleable and impermanent. Because of this, I say that it's less authentic, in that people are less solid in their ways and more apt to say what's popular or interesting at the time rather than what they solidly believe, and thus, they form fewer things solidly.
Disclaimer: I grew up in California, went to school in the Bay, and have lived in Boston for five years. I feel I survive well here because I actually fit in better with the slightly more intellectually conservative culture; or at least I feel like I understand it well enough. I think these cultural differences are fascinating because the cities share so many similarities otherwise.
I think the HubSpot article actually makes sense in this context—Boston folks do tend to be more loyal, have more of a sense of permanence both intellectually and socially, and know how to live through a good cold winter—a quality and gumption not to be overlooked!
Anyway, interesting and fascinating, and dripping with stereotypes and generalization, but in a good way. :)
Huh, I'd always thought Boston was widely known to be an intellectually liberal, upper-crust, blue-blooded, Ivy League city. My guess is that this isn't news to a lot of people in the US.
I really have to disagree with your characterization that people don't socialize much & keep to themselves. People may seem cold here at first, but once you make friends here they'll often be great friends for life and see each other often.
I've heard just the opposite from friends of mine that have moved to the west cost, i.e. that it's easy to make friends there but it's often not a long term thing.
Most of the people I've met tend to be 20s and 30s with jobs downtown. The college culture is pervasive, but I wonder how much it really affects those of us who aren't planning to leave any time soon.
SF does have some 24-hour bus service, though. It's not great service, but it'll get you around the main parts of the city ok. PDF map here: http://transit.511.org/accessible/providers/allnighter.pdf
It took me a year or two to wrap my mind around it as it's a sort of conservatism you just don't find elsewhere in the U.S. much. It took me aback. I had no conceptual framework to place it in. Eventually I realized it was an upper-crust blue blooded Ivy League thing, a bizarre hybrid where people are intellectually open minded but socially unbelievably reserved.
Coming from "that kind" (solidly middle-class economically, but culturally/intellectually what you described) I think that there is a fear in us of the impractical. We have a 400-year memory of weird religious fantasies, failed dreams, and dangerous frontiers. We are quite liberal, but also very cautious and it's bred into us. When someone tells us that he's gone "poly" and that he's quite fine with his "open relationship" (initiated by his more alpha girlfriend) we roll our eyes and see someone who got played. We have 400 years of experience with concepts far more impractical than that.
Also, we generally don't like taxes. We're fine with money going to important social programs (e.g. universal healthcare) of obvious value, but we're fiscally prudent and when we can't see where every dollar goes, it makes us suspicious.
Intellectually, I'm about as anti-conformist as it gets. But on some level, I feel like there are rules and traditions and boundaries that have some value. What I especially hate are powerful people (the current elite, who've eclipsed us, and who've outdone us economically by orders of magnitude by their willingness to associate with distasteful money, e.g. oil despots) who seem to have taken all the bad of our traditions (e.g. our haughtiness and faith in hierarchy) and thrown away the good (our respect for education and human dignity, our progressivism, our flair for the written word).
We are (as noted) terrible, as a set, at keeping in contact. This is probably why people perceive it as being hard to make friends in Boston. We will still consider a person a friend if we haven't seen him for 10 years... but we also tend to go 10 years without being in contact, which is a shame. We also go out of our way to be kind to people we barely know... but we're not exactly warm. This aloofness is certainly one of the northeastern traits I have that I don't like.
I'd agree compared to many places, but Boston is hardly cheaper than the Valley! It's cheaper than SF, but more expensive than Mountain View, San Jose, Santa Clara, etc. At least as far as apartment rentals go; I haven't looked at how purchasing a house would compare.
There are Boston suburbs which are cheaper, but unlike in the Valley, there is not much going on there. The South Bay has a bunch of tech companies (Apple, nVidia, etc.), community spaces like the Hacker Dojo, coworking spaces like NextSpace, etc. The parts of Boston where you can find an apartment for San-Jose-level rents don't really have anything like that.
Edit: For a more complete list, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Route_128#The_hig...
The costs drop precipitously when you aren't trying to live in Cambridge or in downtown Boston. I live fifteen minutes by train from downtown and 30 by train from Cambridge. I pay $1550 a month for a 1300-sq-ft 2-bedroom--I WFH so I needed an office, otherwise it'd be $1200 for a 1-bedroom.
Plus there's Allston/Brighton, which are part of Boston but priced pretty reasonably.
That's exactly what the Samwer brothers are doing in Germany: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/04/features/ins...
This depends a lot on where you live. People outside the SF Bay Area tend to use "The Valley" rather indiscriminately, I've found. If you actually mean in Silicon Valley itself, then it's difficult to get around without a car (although not impossible, especially if you have a bike and both live and work within sane biking distance of a light rail station).
But our current dotcom boom is different from the 1999 boom in one significant respect--a much higher proportion of the action is happening in San Francisco. If you can manage to live in SF itself, Oakland, Alameda, Berkeley, Daly City, or arguably even certain neighborhoods in cities on the peninsula, you may be able to get along very well without a car. I have several friends who don't have any issue without one. (I live in Santa Clara and could actually probably manage without a car given my specific neighborhood--even though I go into an office in San Francisco once or twice a week--but I wouldn't enjoy it.)
The costs certainly are insane, which is really the biggest problem I have here; I'm a middle-aged guy who still lives a lot like a college student: renting an apartment with a roommate. My roommate's job is moving farther east and our already-expensive apartment is likely to have another rent increase in the fall, which may leave me stuck between moving with him to a likely-cheaper abode with a much more inconvenient commute (a 30-minute drive to get to a train station which is farther away from SF than the one I go to now) or trying to find a one-bedroom place that I can afford on my own.
But, as much as I grumble about SOCIAL GAMIFICATION SOCIAL BADGE SOCIAL SOCIAL SOCIAL everywhere, I think the "groupthink" out here gets... hmm. I'm not sure whether it's overstated, or whether people tend to underestimate whatever groupthink exists in their locales, or maybe some of both. But it's actually not that difficult to find companies out here whose business plans are more inspiring than "give away shit for free, connect to every social network everywhere and hope Facebook or Twitter buys us."
Austin would probably be a very good choice for a startup. If I were leery of the SF Bay Area, though, I don't think I'd be any less leery of NYC unless I had a really specific reason to pick it. It's the only metro area running essentially neck and neck with us for living costs.
Launch-and-flee, fast firing, brutal deadlines, and corporate behaviors that don't instill loyalty, all are pretty bad for code quality.
It's not their engineering that has made them successful but a combination of sales/CRM and evangelical style marketing. I'm not sure SV could provide that - but please correct me if I'm wrong.
I moved my project to the east coast for completely different reasons, primarily to make good use of the strong medical community in the Boston area. The advisors and collaborators we have here are amazing, and they understand some of the special challenges of being a medical/life science company (things like scientific validation).
Sure, you can do arbitrage with geographically distributed startup resources, but imo it's more important to focus on expertise and mindsets pertinent to your work.
Also, these companies generally have tight deadlines (because they grew too fast and blew up their burn rate) and can never invest any time in doing things right, much less employee mentoring. With no loyalty to employees, these startups get none back.
Finally, when you're forced to implement bad practices (technical debt plus unhealthy work conditions) to meet these deadlines, you want to run as soon as you hit a macroscopic target, in order to (a) cash in while there's a glow on your face, making that social bump permanent, and (b) avoid suffering or being embarrassed when things start to fall to pieces.