Best Place To Start A Company If You Have Kids | Hacker News Reader

Best Place To Start A Company If You Have Kids

jeffkward.com

80 pointsmjfern36 comments

I like the near suburbs of Seattle. Cheaper than B.C. and also home to a lot of tech talent and some VCs and incubators. Also a lot of tech jobs at established companies to fall back on if your startup fails. WA also has great schools and lots of family/outdoor activities.

I honestly don't understand how anyone can afford to live in B.C. Victoria is beautiful, but I don't see how there are enough high-paying jobs to support the prices there. Unless the locals somehow pay much less for everything than tourists do.

Vancouver, fuhgeddaboutit. The Chinese investors have driven the prices for formerly middle class homes into the millions.

There aren't enough high paying jobs here. Which is why everyone leaves (or works remotely). I know nearly a dozen people who have moved away because of the culture and cost of living.

Victoria has a few main industries all extremely hostile to innovation, but do overpay unskilled workers - retirement (and trust fund kids), government, tourism, military(navy) and shipbuilding.

Edit: Victoria might be a great place to patio11 those industries with tools to service those businesses. But it wouldn't be the sort of place you'll grow the next Google, Xerox Parc, Microsoft* or Facebook.

* Yes, I know Microsoft is setting up a games studio. They won't be doing engine development here though. Which is the point - we're a satellite office town at best.

"Edit: Victoria might be a great place to patio11 those industries with tools to service those businesses. But it wouldn't be the sort of place you'll grow the next Google, Xerox Parc, Microsoft* or Facebook." Total myth that's perpetuated by not looking at the history of great "start ups". Take some time to read about the history of extremely successful companies in the US and you will see locations such as Armonk, New York and Schaumburg, Illinois. Massive incredibly wealthy companies managed somehow to be created and continue to generate billions without paying California tax rates. Not only that but these companies are high tech and leaders in the fields. It's especially ironic that the field itself espouses mobility and connectedness on a global (not national) scale and yet, its followers all feel they need to live in the same city to get anything done.

OT: "patio11 v: to make money off of a complacent industry via consulting, software and generous amounts of A/B testing"

No, I meant the provide a useful service to an industry and automate the hell out of it for a nice income stream.

> "we're a satellite office town at best"

This, sadly, describes almost all of Canada, not just Victoria. Even vaunted Toronto has few homegrown software companies and an ocean of satellite offices of American corporations.

As an expat I frequently wonder how I'll ever go home. Doing so not only means taking an enormous pay cut (>50% at this point) but also giving up my front-row seat in the industry. My ego can deal with the different paycheque, but my passions will never square with the rest.

One big factor to consider when looking at US vs. Canada is health insurance. I can get my entire family insured for $133CDN/month (base insurance, no extended). I hear that this could be 10x higher in the US. With the base insurance I can have babies for free, and I can keep my burn rate low.

Yes, and this is a huge reason why older adults with families are more reluctant to do startups, compared to fresh-out-of-college 20-somethings who might not think they even need health insurance.

Yes, definitely not Vancouver. Any house here is $1M starting even if it's small and crappy. An apartment with 700 square feet or so will set you back $400k.

On top of that, there isn't really a tech scene here. Many small startups, but mostly ones you don't really hear about. A few large companies are here, but with fairly small offices.

Hootsuite, A thinking ape, indochino, unbounce, just to name a few doing well. There's only ONE bay area ... but Vancouver ain't doing bad. I've run an internship program placing top 1% Canadian University students for 4~8 months in the bay area and SFU, UBC and Uvic are pumping out great engineers. Only Waterloo is better. SF is a super short flight away, and Vancouver is the type of city you can actually recruit people to MOVE to. There's not many cities like it.

As a guy who grew up in Victoria, went to UVic, lived in Seattle and then moved to the bay area, Seattle can pretty much beat Vancouver & Victoria on all of those metrics. On top of it you can recruit all of those BC engineers with TN visas, and home is just a few hours drive (or boat) away.

Why live & work in Vancouver when you can live & work in Seattle for half the price and twice the income? Literally.

I hadn't seen any numbers on the apartment side. Although by extension it makes sense, nonetheless, good grief!

P.S. If you have any sense of this, how far out must one move before the numbers start to drop off appreciably? Is there a significant commuting culture, then?

To me its less about the location, than how you go about running your startup. As Jeff says, working from home and distributed teams help a lot. In my experience that can enable you to maintain a very healthy engagement with your family while still working at founder-desperate levels. For example I picked up the kids from school every day and spent some time with them in the afternoon, which refreshed me to do much more work in the evening.

Of course, there will be times when founders need to be on the road a lot. But putting these trips on top of a base of family engagement makes them a lot less painful for all involved.

Vancouver Island represent! :)

I am also in Victoria BC (moved here in the summer of 2012 with my three young children and it's been great).

Anyone else in the area? Any interest in a small meet-up?

(NB. Your email address must appear in the about field of your profile if you want to get email from people. The "email" field is only visible to HN admins)

Well, I'm ostensibly in Victoria, but most of June is being spent in SF. If the meetup is somewhere between June 11-18 or in July I'm there, though!

(BTW. I help run makerspace.ca and we're moving to the tech park this summer. Lots of cool things to play with if anyone is interested in 3D printing and CNC tools and the like... also biospace.ca for biotech stuff.)

I moved my family to Vancouver Island from Calgary in 2011. We ended up at Shawnigan Lake which is truly beautiful and a great community to raise young kids. I've been hosting the ios hacker group in Victoria as a way to meet like minded tech people. I'd love to connect with anyone interested...I'd be thrilled to discover someone else in the area too!

I'm helping a friend move to Victoria in four weeks. Great guy; family man. I know he'd love to connect with people.

Another Victoria dev here. I might be down for a meet-up, or at least pass the idea along to coworkers.

Hi there, I live in Comox. Found Victoria too pricey. Working 100% remotely, and have young kids.

I'm a ferry ride away on Galiano; could possibly make some meetup. avi@stripe.com.

Glad you liked my post! V.I. represent! Yes definitely hit me up, would love to meet-up in Victoria. You can grab my e-mail from my blog.

Also in Victoria (Fairfield) with three young ones, I'd love to meet techie families in town.

Hey hey hey.. Stop with the geography already, everyone. Just read what this guy's saying.

  The best place to start a company with kids is next to your family.

And he is 100% right.

That's extremely idealistic... I wish I could agree, but that's the same kind of well-meaning falsehood as "you can be whatever you want when you grow up."

Someone who's looking to start a company and raise a family needs to be smart enough to understand both the family's needs and the company's potential. The latter will often depend on the location in which it's started, for better or worse, regardless of whether there's an office involved or not.

What's the tax situation? How do potential employees/investors view the area? Do local lenders support small businesses? Is there a local ecosystem around business, and is it friendly or hostile to this new entrant? Does the location have a background that will invite discrimination among investors or clients, or one that will support them?

This whole discussion is a vast oversimplification. It does no service to people trying to do real things in the real world.

Life is complicated, true. The point being though is that having a family to fallback to in the first year of being a parent is as much of a factor as other elements. It shouldn't be the factor, but it shouldn't be overlooked either.

Does anyone else see the irony of Silicon Valley? We have hoards of people who worship at the idol of mobile technology, all crowded together living in each other's backyard when a system is in place that presently allows any sort of communication with anyone, anywhere in real time. The only reason to live in and around Silicon Valley is to live in and around Silicon Valley. If you think you can't make a lot of money unless you live in Silicon Valley or Austin, Texas, then you might want to remember Id Software, Sierra, Valve, and the list just isn't limited to gaming. If you want to play the game of "please give me money so I can make money", then it probably helps to live near the investors you need to brown nose, but if you want to build your own company like John Carmack did, then live whereever the hell you want and use the technology you insist is changing the world to change the world. I'm moving to the moon.

There is no best place to start a company. Only a best place for you.

Whole heartedly agree. The list of successful tech companies from places like Sequine, Texas is very long. The difference I see is that the list of get rich quick with ideas is huge in SV and other "start up hubs" but statistically speaking, you have about as much luck doing that as moving to Hollywood and taking up acting. Build your future with your own power, not with a brown nose and someone else's money.

You don't have to have family nearby to have kids.

Yes, you don't. But it helps immensely.

Ours was 12-hour flight away from where we were, and the first 2 years was very very very damn stressful. In fact, I don't rememeber anything from the first 5 months or so.

To say that having a kid is a major lifestyle change is an understatement. It completely, abruptly and irreversibly fucks up whatever lifestyle you had, including any ability to work in long stretches or to even poke around things you like for your own pleasure. Your life is no longer your own. So if there's someone who can take at least some load off and grant you back a little of personal time, it's a huge help.

Completely agree. Though you can sometimes relocate family.

My parents moved to live very nearby after our first (a few years ago) and we've since had twins (now 3 kids). The fact that they can come over almost every day to help out in small bits is immensely stress-releiving.

Technically, you're right. More generally, it helps an awful lot with time management and household bliss, thus allowing one to focus more on a business/consultancy/startup and reduce distractions.

Really, most of BC is awesome in terms of a place to live. My favourite areas are the island, the Kootenay's, and the Okanagan valley. Love ability to experience different seasons in the interior.

That said, I highly doubt there is a "best" place to start a business. Might be good places, or even better places, but no "best" place. Choosing a good place is a complex mix of where you can have connections, where there is a market (if applicable) and where you can lead a satisfying life.

Having left my native western Oregon for sunnier pastures, the thought of moving to Vancouver for the 'good weather' puts a bit of a smile on my face, but in any case I always like to hear about people making a go of it in !Silicon Valley, so +1 from me.

I'm kind of curious about Boulder, CO - it seems to be small enough that it's more livable for a family, as well as having a very well-educated populace, some nice outdoors stuff, and a growing startup community.

Hey, Victoria! Also, your guy Mat Harvard is in my class.

Sweden.

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