Why Omaha is a great place for startups | Hacker News Reader

Why Omaha is a great place for startups

centernetworks.com

29 pointsmoses140016 comments

You've got to be kidding. Evan Williams who co-founded Blogger, Odeo, and Twitter is from there. He tried to do several startups in Omaha before deciding that the problem was the place. So he moved to San Francisco and has been very successful. Follow his advice.

http://evhead.com/2007/11/where-should-you-be.asp

>I got a job at O'Reilly as a marketing coordinator for their software group as a way to get me to California. I was 25. I had no degree or significant tangible skills. (I could "code" HTML, ColdFusion, VB...and write marketing copy.) I had spent the last few years trying to get my own Internet company going in Nebraska, which was a painful (but educational) mess.

Maybe the problem was not so much Nebraska but the fact that he had no significant or tangible skills - in 1994-1997, when it would have probably been more difficult for a guy in the middle of nowhere to pick up the necessary skills by himself.

One guy? Were supposed to relocate our lives based on one guy's lottery-winning experience?

Citation? Evan is from near Lincoln, a significantly smaller city.

I lived in Omaha for 10 years and now live in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina where I started a company three years ago. Because of my Omaha ties we do some business there.

Omaha is a great place to live.

For startups as HN defines them, Omaha is not an ideal location. There are two big reasons for this:

1. Low cost of living. For a tech startup, Ramen and split-rent costs about the same everywhere. A low cost of living generally means that the people around you are used to paying less for things. Silicon Valley is nice because the population has money and is ready to spend it and founders can get by for dirt cheap just as they would anywhere else.

2. University System. SF, NYC, Boston (and RTP!) all have strong startup communities as well as great University systems nearby. This is not a coincidence. Omaha is an hour from the University of Nebraska. The next closest are the Iowa schools which are several hours away.

A good part of Omaha that the OP mentions is the creative scene. I am continually impressed by it. Omaha has also been making some great business development decisions over the last 10 years so I do believe the situation will only get better.

I don't understand. It sounds like you're saying rent costs the same everywhere. It manifestly does not.

If I'm going to quit my job for a full-time startup the difference between $500 on rent in Omaha and $1000 rent in SF is not large enough to optimize for.

Those numbers are probably exaggerated as well. If you really wanted to live cheap you could do $300 and $600 I'm sure. The point is that the difference between the costs of living decreases in an absolute sense when you are living cheap.

Paying double for Ramen is not a big deal if it means you are living in an area where there are investors.

The UNLincoln campus is an hour away, but the UNOmaha campus is square in the middle of the city and has developed some decent compsci, engineering, and MIS programs in the past few years. It's not yet the brain trust you'd get from a namebrand school; right now it's mostly a machine that creates new recruits for nearby businesses (Union Pacific, Con Agra, Lockheed, etc.) But I can see it becoming the sort of place that helps foster a startup community. They even have a business incubator for young tech companies (http://www.scott-technology.com/incubator.asp). Like you say, the situation will only get better.

I know nothing about Creighton (other than I am obligated to hate the school with a passion as a born-and-bred but non-attending Saluki), but it's also in the city.

I bet if everyone thinks long enough, they can come up with enough reasons why their city / state / country is great for startups.

While I do believe that location plays a large enough part in the life of a startup, once the product is up and running, do people really care if the next cool product was built in eastern Timbuktu and not in the Bay Area?

Its not that one place or another is a great place for startup xyz it is the fact that Omaha is in the middle of the country and no one associates it with creativity, entrepreneurship, or technology. But there is a growing group of people in those scenes here, and we have as much to offer talent wise as the bigger cities.... If you can't tell I am biased because I live in Omaha and know most of the people they are talking about in the article. But you are right there is no reason why some city should not be included, so make it a point to be the one that gets these people together in your city and make it happen. That is what so many of the people in this article are doing, growing a community, and making things happen.

Why X is a great place for startups [where X is a member of the set of US cities larger than 100,000 people but not including San Francisco]

Anyone but me first read that as, "Why Obama is a great place for startups"?

Getting old sucks.

And you can have Warren Buffet as your neighbor!

And then you realize you live in fucking Nebraska and fellate the business end of a 12 gauge.

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