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Comment by lhnz | Hacker News Reader

The perfect location for a startup would have:

    1. Low cost of living.

    2. Low house pricing/rent. (As rent-seeking forces people into being wage-slaves.)

    3. Low regulation and bureaucracy.

    4. Low taxes. 

    5. Educated, creative, and risk-taking workforce.

    6. Ease of finance.

I see so many countries trying to compete in the startup ecosystem by just trying to cargo-cult their way into it with a bit of investment and a brand. Far too many are not fit for purpose because there is too much power held by rent-seekers. It cannot be fixed by simply applying duct-tape to the problem.

Does anybody know a country which fits this specification?

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What about the perfect location for startup employees? New York has an astronomically high cost of living, but it's not like people are somehow tricked into paying it. It also has world-class transportation, social scene, arts, etc. etc.

If you want a "low cost of living", you're going to pay the price for it in another way. Your "educated, creative" workforce might not be all that inclined to stay.

That sounds correct, though there definitely has to be a location which is somewhere in between the two polar opposites. I find it hard to believe that Silicon Valley was always as expensive as it is now...

In the early days, leading up to the founding of Intel, one of Silicon Valley's main features was that it was dirt cheap. In fact it was dirt; it was farmland. This made it a reasonable base to set up chip manufacturing, which needed lots of workers at minimum cost.

Why do taxes matter for a start-up? They're usually not making much money anyway.

If you want a low cost of living, and low rent, you could always live in Mexico. Good luck with #5 and #6 though.

When you have #5 and #6, usually you have an in-demand area, which leads to #1, #2, #3 and #4 being much higher than they would otherwise be. Supply and demand rears its ugly head again.

Most places that have a low cost of living and low taxes are also high on crime, bureaucracy, and corruption, and have poor infrastructure (roads, Internet access, etc.). It sounds cool to open your business in a country with low costs - right until the local mafia pays you a visit and demands 50% of your income. And you'll need a thousand permits for doing anything business-related, and everyone involved in granting you those permits will need some money under the table.

In my personal experience, the UK ticks all these boxes, at least outside Greater London. Good state schooling and the NHS go a long way towards lowering the cost of living.

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