Cities and Ambition (2008)
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
Overall I don't really miss it, though I did like eating VC food and drinking VC beer at the ubiquitous lavish parties. But the culture might be even weirder than NYC, in terms of what it promotes.
Wow, that kinda hit me. I grew up a relatively poor, at times in the lower-middle class. I took a weird path to college and graduated very late. $750k doesn't seem like a huge amount of money to me anymore, but perspectives change.
I did a thought experiment...had I graduated high school, went straight to college and graduated and decided to do a startup...at that point (22 year old me), how many steps out in my family would I have to go for their entire net worths could combine into $750,000 at that time. Not free money available for investment, I mean every penny everybody had.
I gave up when I hit second cousins.
Things are better these days, if I were 22 today and fresh faced out of school and wanted to start a company, I could probably run the same experiment and hit $750k before I ran out of siblings (they live comfortable middle-class lives for the most part), but again, that's not money available for investment. That's the entirety of their assets.
Having family who could pitch in that much runway without it bankrupting them is something I could never have conceived of at that age. When I was 22, $750k may as well have been a hundred trillion dollars for all the relationship it had to my life.
My second real job was with a bootstrapped startup that was the result of 4 founders maxing out their credit cards. I think their combined startup capital worked out to around $40k.
I'm old enough now where I've handled much more money than that, and I have a good sense how much of a business that buys...it's surprisingly less than you think. But given a fat seed like that I bet I could have recruited a few other poor 22 year old looking for work grads for pennies into some startup and written a vastly different story of my life.
But, I never considered that this viewpoint was a hallmark of the middle class. It never struck me that these people were never actually talking to me, but maybe to a different, more affluent class of people, in a very specific part of the world.
Seriously, the only people I know of who ever talk about NYC in SV are ex-New Yorkers.+
+ I'm a 4th generation native.
Living in the Bay area, I can't say I relate all that much. You hear about New York in the context of food and finance, and about LA in the context of fashion and Hollywood. But not really in terms of a competition of some kind. Maybe it's a peninsula thing.
The upper-middle class isn't nearly as preoccupied with location. You don't really identify with a place if you can't afford to buy a house there. (Or, if you do, you're a sucker.) The NYC envy of the Silicon Valley elite is mostly a phenomenon of the VC/MBA circle. (I've never heard of L.A. envy. Maybe in the '80s or '90s it was strong, but I can't imagine anyone having that now.)
From what I understand, this is now common practice not only at Stanford but at many of the top private schools.
That's very interesting. Would you elaborate a bit more about this? What was it like, beyond the fact that those people have connections that most people don't?
Also quite different compared to the vibe around other vaguely nearby universities: Santa Clara University, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, Cal Poly SLO, etc. They all come across as more "working class", socially, which contrary to what I might've thought some years ago, seems to correlate against being startuppy. The working-class Cal-Poly/Santa-Clara/etc kids seemed mainly interested in getting a stable job with a big tech company, while the upper-class-background Stanford kids were all into startups.
Kids from a genuinely rich family - as in, pitching in 750k is not a problem rich - are more likely to feel safe enough to take startup-related risks.
What it means changed a little, and I think it's now more important than ever. The thing is, someone like PG never sees or interacts with anyone lower than upper middle class. Other 'incompatible' classes are invisible to us.
There is a whole world of people in this country that he wouldn't even be able to talk to. Depending on your state, between 59 and 80% of people graduate high school. That 20-40% isn't dropping out because they're running a startup.
There is a class of people that takes advertisements at face value, as sources of information. There is a class of people that doesn't value education... There are millions of people that don't even have the same goals or life values as a middle class people do.
PG you used the cliche "second class citizen" a bunch of times in this article without thinking about what it actually means!
Not in America there isn't. Well, not a social class. The amount of tv the average American watches is insane, something like 4 hours a day. It is impossible to watch that much tv without developing some rudimentary media literacy. Maybe less, and less sophisticated than smarter, more educated people but the number of people who think drinking Bud Light will actually make them more popular and win them a hotter mate is pretty damned small.
I agree with almost everything else you said. I do suspect that every YC cohort has at least one American who grew up poor by American standards though. I'm sure they're underrepresented though.
I'd be surprised if a single y-com company had a single employee that was raised by functionally illiterate American parents. I'm not talking about a child of immigrants either, but the intergenerational trainwreck of the American underclass. Keep in mind that 14-20% of Americans are functionally illiterate.
Take a minute to imagine what your life would be like if you couldn't really read. I'm not making this up-- there are lots of people who think McDonalds is healthy because Olympic athletes are on the bag.
Yeah, I've worked with dumb people but not unemployable stupid.
I mostly agree with the root, but I want to challenge 2 things: the vulnerability to advertising, and the perceived percentage of Americans incapable of functioning in a modern world.
From 7 to 5 years ago, I tried doing manual labor, unskilled and walk-on jobs (opener/gutter on a kill floor, union carpentry and hoist operator at a prefab construction shop) for 3-4 months a year, saving my money, and living in South America the rest of the year.
I'm not sure if 'seriously underprivileged' has an exact definition, but the people I worked with: very frequently didn't graduate high school, sometimes had extensive criminal histories (one guy spent 8 years in jail for dragging what turned out to be an undercover cop behind his car), usually had a variety of addictions (ranging from the pervasive smoking and alcoholism to the 4 out of 4 of my fellow heavy equipment operators in shipping and receiving who admitted to being addicted to meth), and 30-80% of the time depending on the job, spoke no english at all.
... most also had really, really well-attuned BS detectors!
They just like different things than I liked, so they gave a free pass to products, ads and political parties they and their friends associated with. Exactly like >90% of the designers and coders I know.
The people who are being 'abused' by advertising -- let's say, by credit card companies and sneaky zero-down-payment offers and buying things they can't actually afford -- aren't necessarily being hoodwinked, but I'm sure their self-control is weakened by the experience of being poor. How could it not be?
Everyone knew a payday loan is a bad idea. Everyone knew leasing a $40,000 car when you make $25k a year is a bad idea. Everyone knew spending more of your money on booze than on rent and sustenance is a bad idea. Poorer people just tend to have a larger amount of pain in their and their families' life, with no way out visible to them, which makes self-control harder.
Now, I know there are some people who are so impaired mentally that they can't function at all in society. But I would make sure to call out and challenge the idea that 15-20% of Americans of working age can't function in modern society.
The people I worked with could function, and were functioning -- and yet it is guaranteed that a large number would fall under that '14-20% of Americans are functionally illiterate' figure.
You might say there's confirmation bias, but I was always there during hiring season, and I saw the washouts, too. There were some people -- maybe 1 in 100 of the people who started at these places, and couldn't make it and were let go -- who clearly had mental issues. I remember one guy who lived in a station wagon in the parking lot during his stint there, wore overalls with a t-shirt and no underwear, and never bathed -- the company gave him a week because they felt sorry for him, but he couldn't really function, and he ended up going back to live with his mother.
The only defining common factor of all the VC shops in the bay area is money. Sure a lot of them made that money in tech but it is money that lets them have power.
Also some anecdotal impressions:
I lived in SF for two years. I think the constant humdrum of tech (specifically a strange breed of big data + machine learning + web tech) is making the place intolerably insular. When I first moved there, I thought the opinionated twenty something year olds who think that their youth and opinions mean that they matter were cute. Now, it is just fucking insufferable. Building a company shouldn't be purely about getting sold, acqui-hired or building products that no one outside your iphone addled tech circle will use.
I think there is utility in moving out of the bay area to build real products. I recently moved to NYC. The tech scene feels refreshingly small, surprisingly under-dog like, I am reminded of Austin. Most tech folks I meet here are mellow, there is also a large overlap with incredibly smart ex-finance people who are humble and sociable.
Everything also doesn't seem to be focused on shipping your shitty product and tweeting about it, there is focus on building something that is not primarily focused on acqui-hired or VC-driven.
Also, more importantly, NYC is superior to San Francisco as a place for your social life. The men:women ratio is way more balanced, you are constantly reminded that your "coding skills" are not all that define you. When I first came to interview here, I had serious misgivings about the place (the climate is miserable), yet I think the thing that made me decide to move here was a conversation I over-heard in a coffee shop between two girls. It was about Python. The snake, not the language.
when i lived in SF women would be completely rude to me when talking to them in a bar or social setting. calling me names to my face, bare sarcasm, thinly beiled insults, back-handed complements... you name it, i experienced it.
that kind of shit just doesn't happen in LA or NY. or vancouver, or texas, or ... anywhere, really. it's a REALLY fucked situation. sorry, single guys in sf.
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As a person who got into programming five years ago after finding out math doesn't get you jobs, I would be worried if my average coding skills alone defined me.
> Try Cole Valley, or the Lower Haight and skip SOMA.
I lived a block away from Cole Valley, dated girls in the Lower Haight, spent never more than an 8 hour day in SoMa. Your move! :)
> Might I remind you right now it's 70's in SF while you have snow...
As do all my friends who keep sending me pictures. However, a view as observed through a window whilst working in a SoMa warehouse is about as real as a screensaver.
This reminds me somewhat of response to people complaining of the Seattle Freeze (the infamous propensity for Seattleites to be simultaneously polite yet unfriendly). The standard response when this is brought up is to insinuate the complainer is antisocial. This, despite being so widely felt by so many that it has a name.
The other problem with this pressure ridge, is zero precipitation is horrible for your skin. You need lotion and humidifiers to avoid cracked skin, especially through sleeping.
I like warm weather in the Spring and Summer, but most Northern California residents enjoy living here for the seasons. It's almost depressing without them.
Despite the lack of rain, humidity right now in the Bay Area is still not horribly low by national standards. Looking at the local forecast I am seeing humidity in the range of roughly 40% - 60%.
Taking into account the effects of indoor heating and an outside temperature well above freezing, this is still pretty pleasant compared to what happens in cold climates indoors when you heat frigid outdoor air up to room temp. Cold air does not hold as much moisture, and when your furnace heats it up, the amount of moisture content stays the same but the carrying capacity for moisture increases, effectively making it very dry.
The upshot here is that even if it is a bit dry in the Bay Area right now, it's still nothing compared to the bone dry indoor air you would get somewhere where the winters are actually cold.
So the kind of people you find in Cambridge are the kind of people who want to live where the smartest people are, even if that means living in an expensive, grubby place with bad weather.
I say this as I build out an addition on my already expensive house, while holed up in a AirBnB victorian with drafty windows watching wet, sloppy snow make the streets into mess.
On the other hand, I've chatted about web stacks with my landlord, auto-correlation functions with a dinner guest, toy accordion repair with my neighbor, and depth-perception optical nerve cross talk with my other neighbor. That's in the last two days.
I love it here.
Great cities certainly do have a vibe, but Cambridge (MA), although it's a very nice place to live and obviously has tons of smart people, is actually a pretty sleepy place in general; for all it's charms, it isn't a "great city." The "density of the unfamiliar" which I think tends to characterize great cities isn't really so evident in Cambridge (the presence of MIT / Harvard / etc does generate some of this, but universities tend to be somewhat closed societies).
Besides the fact that Bostonians are most definitely infatuated with pop culture and hipness. Maybe across the bridge things get more intellectual, but not so you'd notice.
I will say in PG's defense that I've never seen a city more excited about selling you a master's degree as the key to your new future life ; - ) So I suppose they do value education (an brick-for-brick there's probably more post-secondary schools in the area around Boston than almost anywhere else in the U.S. or even the world.).
You can be whatever you want.. The observations and love for nature is one of the big secrets of geniuses like Da Vinci and Newton.. florence or england, just give them the means to achieve their goals..
Cities are stuck in the era they shine most.. and if you listen to them now, you will be listening to the 20, 19 or even 18 century echoes.. not the XXI we are supposed to
I think real genius has a transcendental and private path to somewhere, where they can listen whatever, and bring it back to our reality.. if they happen to listen to cities its just to give them new interpretations of it.. so we (the voyeurs of their work) can see it with new eyes..
If you listen up to most cities, you will see more what them want you to see than its own reality.. unless you belong there for more than 10 years.. and you already know it... its pretty much fake, delusional..
I dont know you, but i happen to like the real thing, i care more about the truth.. thats why nature is more seductive to me than city people or concrete walls
I love your note about cities being stuck in the era they shine. That's brilliant and so unbelievably true. I love cities and urban environments. I grew up in Chicago and spent time living in our fair city (Boston) before moving north.
But I settled up here to be close to family and to not let my ambition get to heady. You can wind up feeling really important and powerful in a city, and the discovery that barring 0.01% of the population you aren't actually very important or powerful will destroy you if that's what you built your life on. Instead I've built a life around family, farming and hacking (which incidentally, farming basically invented ... every farmer has their own solution to a problem).
Washington D.C. thinks of itself as the center of power of the entire universe. And in a lot of ways it is. But it's a weird city. Power in D.C. is indirect and complex. You can't really start at the bottom and work your way up to positions of extreme power (though it's a popular story)...hard ceilings are everywhere. To be clear, I'm not talking about the more or less irrelevant city government.
The best way I can explain it is this, power in D.C. is build on a tripod. You must have all three of these things to be powerful: money, widespread popularity, and cunning (not intelligence).
This is different than other cities, where elements of this tripod exist, but aren't necessary to be powerful in that city. For example, in NYC, money is sufficient to be powerful. But even billionaires have failed to attain power in D.C. In NYC political connections are useful for making more money, but aren't strictly necessary. In D.C. political connections are critical. In NYC, you have to have alpha-like mammal aggressiveness (not necessarily intelligence), but in D.C. it's reptile like cunning that's needed. You can draw different but similar differences with other cities and power.
Power in D.C. is also incredibly transient and fickle. In theory, power in D.C. can accumulate to the point that a single individual can more or less wipe out all life on the planet, then just a couple years later has trouble keeping reporters off of his vacation property. It's a tower of power that's built on sands that shift so fast it makes the stock market look like a simple linear function. Everybody falls from power in D.C. It's the tallest tower there is, but the downward drop is inevitable. The key is making a soft landing when you do. That way you can take a "fall back" position to power in NYC on the board of an investment company or the Bay Area where you can become an Angel investor.
But you'll notice that people who are really powerful in one place rarely move from where they know how to operate, and when they do, rarely gain positions of equivalent power in their new homes. They just operate differently. Throwing money around in D.C. might make you popular for a bit, but without cunning you'll just be that guy who throws lots of parties.
It reminds me of the old saying
"Rich is being a millionaire basketball player, Wealthy is being the guy who signs the checks"
add to that "Powerful is the guy who proposed the bill that got turned into a law with teeth that regulated the NBA and bankrupted the wealthy owners."
Intelligent people often think intelligence trumps cunning. Truth is, cunning people are very, very successful. Don't underestimate them. (I have.)
On the other hand, I think it's nearly impossible to define intelligence. "Smarter than" as a working definition at least focuses the discussion on the metrics and implicit assumptions. There's Jobs' famous line, "Computers are like a bicycle for the mind," which implies that intelligence has a deterministic component to it. At the same time intelligence seems to describe the indescribable breakthrough moments as well.
Intelligence is sometimes the best part of cunning (or rather execution, without the deceit).
Cunning is limited by its own constructions. Mendacem memorem esse oportet [1] A liar should have a good memory – it requires carefulness that I think is wasteful in a lot of situations. But if you're good at it, chances are you are successful in a lot of other ways too.
Certainly everything in D.C. need not revolve around Capitol Hill/K-Street, right?
But yes, everything in D.C., even for 30 or 40 miles outside of the city, is absolutely consumed by the Federal government.
The downtown of D.C. proper, outside of the tourist areas, is almost entirely composed of foundations and think tanks and non-government organizations who's mission in life is to try and influence executive or legislative policy decisions. There's almost no other real industry by comparison. The tech scene in D.C. is dominated by fed contracting megacorps and small tech businesses that exist only to partner with those companies in order to get the small business set asides. The non-Fed tech sector in D.C. is abysmally small. It exists, and there are hacker meetups and proper commercial companies here, but the ecosystem for those companies is pretty sparse. Most of the non-fed commercial tech companies you find are IT services companies that help build internal infrastructure for non-tech companies.
D.C., the city, also dies after working hours and on weekends. There's minimal night life. It's slowly changing, but nearly everybody who works in the city in the Fed space, lives outside of the city. It means commuting here and traffic is easily as bad as L.A. It's so bad that many of the Agencies are moving or opening very large satellite offices 20 miles or more from D.C. just so they can find qualified workers.
The really powerful people, people sitting on all three legs of the tripod, don't live in D.C. at all. They'll live in Northern Virginia or Southern Maryland. If you want to bang into a Senator or a cabinet secretary while grocery shopping, go shopping in McLean or Great Falls.
It doesn't help that the residential parts of D.C. are rather grim and not very pretty. Even the old historic row houses are rather gritty looking piles of old bricks with broken sidewalks outside and overgrown weeds and grass everywhere.
But I think it's also that the atmosphere in the city is so stifling, the constant ladder climbing and political backstabbery so intense, that people just want to get away from it.
Take a look at the large West Coast tech companies with offices in and near D.C. and you'll see that, down to the position, they all open up their offices to cater to the Fed space. Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Google, etc. all have offices near D.C. and if you check out the job listings all require clearances and/or experience doing business with the Federal government.
Practically, nobody cares about how much money you make, or your investment abilities in D.C. It's your positional authority, and what that means, earned through the tripod of power, that people care about.
D.C., the city, also dies after working hours and on weekends. There's minimal night life.
In the past 10 years, there has been an absolute transformation in housing and retail from Gallery Place/Chinatown, to 14th St and all the way up to Columbia Heights. I challenge one to stand on the corner of 7th & H St and say that the city dies after working hours and on weekends.
It's so bad that many of the Agencies are moving or opening very large satellite offices 20 miles or more from D.C. just so they can find qualified workers.
Unless you work for GSA, I wouldn't make assumptions like this. It is impossible for the federal government to open up a new 500,000 sq ft facility in downtown DC because there simply isn't any available space at a reasonable cost. Sprawling complexes are cheap and easy to build in the exurbs and the employees don't have any choice but to follow their agency to its new location. It has nothing to do with finding talent, especially in the hills of Virginia where fewer people choose to live.
The really powerful people, people sitting on all three legs of the tripod, don't live in D.C. at all. They'll live in Northern Virginia or Southern Maryland.
Suburban Maryland (esp. North of DC). Southern Maryland is Waldorf, St Charles and La Plata, which I would argue are not places where Senators reside. Though, I think you will find that more of the recent politicians are residing in DC. For example, Obama, while a Senator, resided in an apartment building in downtown DC.
It doesn't help that the residential parts of D.C. are rather grim and not very pretty. Even the old historic row houses are rather gritty looking piles of old bricks with broken sidewalks outside and overgrown weeds and grass everywhere.
Again, you might benefit from taking a walk anywhere in DC. H St NE, areas around Union Station and even New York Ave & Florida are nice.
DC is changing, but very slowly. The last couple mayoral administrations have done a pretty good job of gentrifying (I don't think that's necessarily a bad term) parts of the city and encouraging new residential construction.
There still isn't much of a nightlife in the city though. Sure there's been little pockets of it at least as far back as the early 90s when I was old enough to look for that kind of thing. But I think the loss of Chinatown in favor of the Verizon Center and a few trendy bars is one of the great tragedies of the city.
But still, most new transplants I run into looking for a hip place to move to end up in Arlingon or Silver Spring and to some extent parts of Alexandria. Many of my gay friends do find homes and community in D.C. around DuPont and a couple other spots, but even with a scene in the city, about half of the folks I know live in Arlington/Alexandria.
In general, a constant theme I could apply to people I know (anecdotal I know), they try to make it work in the city, then quickly move out as soon as their lease is up. There just isn't the kind of benefit of city life that you get in more regular cities.
It doesn't help that, while having lots of little parks, they're virtually unusable due to deep rooted homeless problems in the city that haven't materially improved since as long back as I can remember (the 80s). Getting panhandled virtually every block in some areas gets old very fast.
As for the historic housing, lots of people have visions of this https://farm1.static.flickr.com/118/263237392_a4aacdd50f_m.j...
only to find endless listings for places like this http://sweetpaperdoll.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/100_0259.j...
which means on top of the already inflated price, they'll have to put in endless expensive refurbishments to have a livable home.
It's kind of a shame since the public transport network in D.C. is one of the few functionally useful ones in the U.S. I think the metro is the 2nd most used subway in the U.S.?
The good news, like I said, is that it is slowly changing. The population is increasing for the first time since the 1950s (the city back then was over 3/4 of a million people, it hit 600k in 2010 an apocalyptic population drop. Estimates say almost 50k people have moved in in the last 4 years).
There is joy in frivolity.
- _Eat Pray Love_, Elizabeth Gilbert.
Tokyo, Xi'an, Harbin, Rome, Assisi, Florence, Jerusalem, Berlin, Munich, Lyon, Palo Alto, DC, Boston, Providence, Philadelphia
Actually, it's about real estate and legacy. Until you own a genuinely nice place (those start around $4 million) it's about real estate. After that, it's about preschool and grade school and making sure your kids have the connections to make something of themselves. Once those are shored up, it's about taste and the arts. Not before then, though, and most people don't get that far.
I had to turn it off after 10 minutes because it jumped the shark with attaboy puerility.
- builder/hacker
- eager learner
- I'll step up for tasks right away
- I deeply care about making people feel loved/included and finding people who care about me
- likes public transportation
My opinion is that while it's super nice, socially, to be around people who are into what you are into in person, it doesn't make that much difference when it comes to getting actual work done. Now, sales? raising money? all that bullshit where you have to interact with business people? face-time matters a lot. But for purely technical work, hell, I'll be working in the same house as someone and I'll communicate via IM, because it's less disruptive.
On the other hand, he's working for me - If you want to make money? you have to find a competent business person, or at least a business person with money, and most of those guys want to look you in the eye. Not all, but most.
That's the thing; I get a lot of offers to merge, to invest, and to do other business-type things because I'm here and active in the community. I'm not even that active. But you know what? I haven't made a dime off of any of those. (and some of those have cost me enough to buy a central-valley condo) - As for the parts of my business that actually make me money? I could do those from just about anywhere. Of course, that probably says more about my skillset than anything else; I've had serious offers from people with serious money (well, serious money by my standards)
My own experience? moving to silicon valley was more than worth it. But, I've lived in silicon valley, I've lived very near berkeley and I've lived in the central valley. I haven't spent serious time other places. Avoid the central valley. It's not cheap enough to put up with the culture and weather, in my opinion.
Yeah, housing is expensive. but the thing about housing? well, the increase is a percentage of the cost of housing, so if you are okay with modest digs? 2x what you would pay for modest digs in the central valley (probably 4x what you'd pay in the midwest) still not very much money compared to what you are getting paid, and I'm okay with modest digs. (Of course, if you like really nice digs... that percentage increase really hits you.)
One big downside to the south bay is that our public transit is absolute shit. You might consider the Berkeley area for that. VTA doesn't look that bad on paper? But it is nearly completely useless. BART, on the other hand, is pretty good by west-coast standards.
As far as I know, the case for being on the ground with your fellow enthusiasts and competitors in California was best made in 1985, by Arnold Schwarzenegger:
"The kind of people who train alongside you in a gym makes a difference. If you are surrounded by people who are serious and train with a lot of intensity, it's easier for you to do the same thing. But it can be pretty hard to really blast your muscles while the people around you are just going through the motions. That is why good bodybuilders tend to congregate in certain gyms. By having the example of other serious bodybuilders constantly in front of you, you will train that much harder.
That is what made Joe Gold's original gym in Venice, California such a great place—a small gym with just enough equipment, but where you would constantly be rubbing shoulders with the great bodybuilders against whom I had the privilege of competing-like Franco Columbu, Ed Corney, Dave Draper, Robby Robinson, Frank Zane, Sergio Oliva, and Ken Waller. Nowadays, it's rare to find that many champions in the same place, but if you aren't sharing the gym floor with great bodybuilders like Flex Wheeler, Shawn Ray, Nasser El Sonbaty, or Dorian Yates, it can be very motivating if there are pictures or posters of these individuals on the walls or championship trophies displayed.
In 1980, training at World Gym for my final Mr. Olympia competition, I showed up at the gym at seven o'clock one morning to work out and stepped out on the sundeck for a moment. Suddenly the sun came through the clouds. It was so beautiful I lost all my motivation to train. I thought maybe I would go to the beach instead. I came up with every excuse in the book-the most persuasive being that I had trained hard the day before with the powerful German bodybuilder Jusup Wilkosz, so I could lay back today—but then I heard weights being clanged together inside the gym and I saw Wilkosz working his abs, Ken Waller doing shoulders, veins standing out all over his upper body, Franco Columbu blasting away, benching more than 400 pounts, Samir Bannout punishing his biceps with heavy Curls.
Everywhere I looked there was some kind of hard, sweaty training going on, and I knew that I couldn't afford not to train if I was going to compete against these champions. Their example sucked me in, and now I was looking forward to working, anticipating the pleasure of pitting my muscles against heavy iron. By the end of that session I had the best pump I could imagine, and an almost wasted morning had turned into one of the best workouts of my life. If I hadn't been there at World Gym, with those other bodybuilders to inspire and motivate me, I doubt that day would have ended up being so productive.
Even today, when I'm training for other reason, such as getting into top shape for a movie role, or just trying to stay in shape, I absorb energy from people working out around me. That's why I still like to go to gyms where bodybuilders are training for competition. Even today, after all this time, it still inspires me."
/The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding/, by Arnold and Bill Dobbins, p. 87 in the 1999 edition. http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0684857219/
I mean, for some things? that's great. It's annoying even in sports, if you ask me, but it's effective there, and hey, that's what matters, right?
But for technical work? the "give 110%" attitude is extremely destructive. Extremely destructive. you will get far more done working a 30 hour week than you will a 70 hour week. Far more.
It's not about how many hours you put in. It's not about Tony Robbins style emotional bullshit. We aren't bodybuilders, and while many people here /are/ sales (and like I said, for them, face time matters) technical people aren't sales.
(Offer not valid for people who like sun between November and March.)
SF has a strong hacker culture, tons of meetups and talks going on every week (education), and SV in general has a strong pay it forward culture.
>>> no one around you cares about the same things you do
is what I like. The diversity. I can get completely lost in a tech problem that I'm working on, and when I go out and talk to a neighbor, or chat with parents at soccer practice, the topic might be astronomy, biology, politics, or agriculture.
First, the VC climate is different and employee option pools are just shitty (5 to 20%). You won't find good engineers willing to work for non-founder equity. The people who work for 0.1% of a mediocre startup are not good and you'll have to hire $200-400/hour freelancers to fix their work after you fire them. (One startup offered me $275/h to fix its Rails app and I've never even used Rails.)
Second, the quality of startups is just not there. Granted, 97% of the startups in the Valley are total garbage as well, because the VCs have no taste or insight, but at least SV has that other 3%. New York doesn't. Most of the founders are people who failed out of finance but managed to snag enough connections (as a consolation prize) to raise VC.
Third, there are startups that luck their way into a few good engineers for a little while, but in NYC, they never keep them. There's a lot of title inflation in NYC (Senior Engineer by 24, Managing Data Scientist by 26) but the people with any ambition leverage their inflated titles into better positions in finance (starting around $300k) or at companies like Google and Facebook.
New York is the place where you use startups to get better Wall Street or Google jobs.
"DC and LA seem to send messages too, but I haven't spent long enough in either to say for sure what they are."
...and then went on to opine on both those places, with relatively shallow stereotypes.
It's also true there's lots of people who participate in entertainment because they love it. They love making stories, they love acting, they love singing, dancing, they love making sets, effects, animation, soundtracks, songs, whatever. They know their products can change minds and change the world, too. A lot of these people aren't so different from your typical hacker.
There's also a lot of shenanigans and bullshit from people looking to hustle a buck or make their next fortune. I'm sure you can find the analog.
I'll also note that I live in West LA in a few miles from my job, which takes me 10 minutes to commute to, and which pays wages which are probably average for an SF webdev job (though possibly somewhat above average for an LA webdev job).
And you can find 2 bedroom apartments are available for under $2000, 1 bedrooms between $1000-$1500 (though you can get a luxury place or something by the beach if you really want to pay a lot more).
It's certainly not a perfect place (I'd be happier with it if there were more varied weather, and more access to nature and quiet space), and of course, not everybody's experience with LA is like mine. In fact, LA is so big and so varied that what I've come to suspect over my experience there is that there simply isn't any single summary that can capture it.
(That's a rather cynical view of the Bay Area, but hey, it balances out the rather common cynical view of LA that was expressed above. :) )
Disagree on the weather, though. I'd appreciate a bit less fog (not that it's anywhere near as bad as SF) and like my constant highs between 60 and 80 just fine. Maybe some better close skiing would be nice, but I've found lots to keep me busy between the Malibu Mountains and then further up the coast like Santa Barbara, Ojai, etc, outdoors-wise.
[1] Roughly: http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1738808199#map=12/34.0541/...
It was the kind of place where confidence intervals are a subject for smalltalk and ads for genetic research are geared toward everyday commuters.
I can't speak for everyone, but I think something interesting happens when you live in a place like Cambridge for several years. You start to feel less intimidated by the competition for knowledge.
Don't get me wrong — you still try to keep up — but Cambridge begins to calibrate your ego. You realize that you're never going to be the smartest person in your domain, let alone every domain. For this reason I appreciate the city more as I get older, and I'm glad I moved back to work as a software dev.
I have noticed the inverse is also true (as a few posters have already pointed out).
Some places just scream ignorance and sloth.
But hey... do you want good conversation or good weather?
If you do want good conversation how much is it worth to you?
Enough to spend 50% of your income on housing?
Sometimes being alone is where you get real thinking done.
Not always, but often.
OTOH, the energy, the vibe, the ambition that pg talks about here... I so want to be around that and more like minded people. And while the Raleigh / Durham area has a burgeoning startup scene, I don't get the impression that it can come close to touching the energy in, say, Palo Alto or Mountain View, or San Francisco.
Guess I need to just drag my ass out West and take it all in sometime. I keep hoping a consulting gig will take me out there and give me an excuse to go for a few weeks, so I can check it out. :-)
Durham, in my mind, had a weird vibe. Despite growing up there, I think what I remember best is taking a swing dance workshop (in my mid-twenties) from Sharon Ashe. Sharon had been at the heart and center of the San Francisco lindy hop community, possibly the best swing dance scene in the world. She had co-founded the 9:20 Special, which still attracts a crowd of hundreds every week.
But apparently she had burned out, and had too much of the cost of living and the competition (there isn't really any smog) and decided to move to Durham. She wanted a lower-key, quieter life, while still enjoying most of what she'd enjoyed in San Francisco. At the time, this struck me as a profoundly sad thing to do, and soon after I left town.
I would say that compromise is at the heart of what Durham has to offer. This is ultimately why I left, but it has got great restaurants, good weather, a lot of culture going on, and above all a wide range of diverse, interesting, active, intelligent people. Just not quite as much of any of the above (except for the weather) than SF or Cambridge. Take that for what you will.
e-mail in profile if you have questions.
That said, one thing I love about living here (well, Chapel Hill) is that the weather is relatively pleasant pretty much all year round (read: it doesn't get really cold here, at least not usually for more than a day or two at a time). I could probably handle living in the Bay Area, but Cambridge would never work for me. Too damn cold. Same for Chicago...I love Chicago, but no way would I want to live there year round.
I never really found the vibe to be weird. It seemed like a less pretentious Brooklyn (I live in BK now). And I can understand why you would think an area you grew up in is about compromise, but I respectfully disagree. Durham is a great mix of southern charm, unique quirky culture, down home feel, and high-tech progressiveness - I haven't been able to find that mix anywhere else. It's also large and varied - the area near Southgate mall is completely different than downtown Durham.
Interesting. My main complaint about Durham was that it was very suburban; the idea of traveling between any pair of locations other than by car was wholly ridiculous. (But last time I was there, there were a bunch of new bars and restaurants downtown! This is a quite recent development.)
There is no "Southgate mall" in Durham. That said, I'm not disputing that it has a lot of good points. Including the beer :)
I agree with PG that the best conversation is in Cambridge, MA, wealth-gathering in NY, but if you want to build your ideas - the Bay Area is the center of the modern enlightenment.
In SF, you can find a lot of people doing novel things, but you need to filter like anywhere else. It's just that the raw number of creatives here makes these groups larger. I still have yet to find the concentration of these types greater than anywhere else in the world.
And yeah, obviously Red Hat are here as well, but they're way past "startup" stage. Same for IBM, Cisco, etc. There are people here who do enterprise stuff, but they're mostly sequestered away inside big shops like IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, EMC, etc. and not really participating in the startup scene.
"Maybe the Internet will change things further. Maybe one
day the most important community you belong to will be a
virtual one, and it won't matter where you live
physically. But I wouldn't bet on it.
spoken like a true tourist. that is just nonsense.
On a slightly snarky note, I always do appreciate a jab at DC, where I was both born and raised. It really is LA with bad weather and less attractive celebrities.
I've always thought of the will to power, beyond power over yourself, as an ugly thing. But looking back at choices I've made? Yeah. I've wanted to change things. Even change things for others. And I've chosen power over money at several junctions. So, maybe I'm in the right place after all.
Everybody wants more power, nobody wants less. Also, power-over-yourself is the most fundamental thing about will-to-power (in an enlightened sense).
There's no point getting power over others if you have no power over yourself- then it's merely your appetites that have power over others, not you. As Da Vinci put, no man can have any dominion greater or lesser than over himself.
Yeah, now you are talking about a different kind of power, which is really a different and nearly unrelated thing. "Self control" or what have you. The ability to control and direct your mind and body. Sure, it's a great thing, and can be a great tool... but it's not what I'm talking about here.
I'm talking about the power to live where I want to live, and to be secure in my person and my property. To work when and as much as I want to. To obtain the goods and services I want.
All of these things require convincing others to do things for me, which is to say, power over other people; so to have a reasonable degree of power over your own life, you need a reasonable degree of power over others.