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Comment by ig1 | Hacker News Reader

I imagine the factors that came into play:

1) It's an major English speaking city with a culture many of the YC partners are comfortable with. Running an event in a country with a foreign language and culture is hard.

2) It's well connected with flights from pretty much every major city in Europe and has direct flights from SF & NY. Not only for attendees but also for convincing speakers to attend.

3) It's by far the biggest startup/tech hub in Europe (excluding Israel) and YC is very pro-hub (one of the reasons YC moved from Boston to SF).

Obviously there's downsides to London, mainly being that it's an expensive city but given that it's a one-day event that gets mitigated to some extent.

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> It's an major English speaking city with a culture many of the YC partners are comfortable with. Running an event in a country with a foreign language and culture is hard.

There is no major European city where you could not get by with just English.

> It's well connected with flights from pretty much every major city in Europe and has direct flights from SF & NY. Not only for attendees but also for convincing speakers to attend.

But there are better cities for that purpose: Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Paris.

> 3) It's by far the biggest startup/tech hub in Europe (excluding Israel) and YC is very pro-hub (one of the reasons YC moved from Boston to SF).

That is actually an excellent reason to do it somewhere else.

Really, missed opportunity.

There's a significant difference with being a visitor to a foreign country (where you can just wing it) and running a several hundred person event. Something getting lost in miscommunication can easily become a big deal.

(in practice you'd hire a local events company to manage it, but still it's messier)

I'm not sure I follow your reasoning for doing it in a non-startup hub though ? - certainly you could make an argument for doing it in one of the other hubs like Berlin but doing it somewhere like Frankfurt doesn't seem to make any sense to me.

Frankfurt and even Hamburg are quite alive, Frankfurt is extremely central. It's an event for Europe, by doing it in London you are far away from most of Europe.

Frankfurt is a huge hub when it comes to transportation, and there are facilities right at the airport.

As for your 'miscommunication' suggestion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxUm-2x-2dM

Frankfurt is certainly a commercial/financial hub, but it's much more expensive to get to from say Paris or Barcelona because those routes aren't served by the budget airlines as it's not a tourist destination. But the Barcelona to London route is served by at least four budget airlines.

Even from eastern Europe, flying to Frankfurt from Warsaw is almost twice as much as to London (although the trip to London is an extra 40 minutes).

So Barcelona it is then ;)

Ryanair flies to Frankfurt-Hahn which is 1.5 hour with bus outside of Frankfurt. Lots of budget airlines also fly to Cologne/Bonn which is 1 hour away with train.

Ryanair don't fly to Frankfurt from Paris or Barcelona, they only serve a handful of major city routes (primarily London and Rome). And at the point where you flying into a different city it's no longer an "easy-to-get-to" location.

> Ryanair don't fly to Frankfurt from Paris or Barcelona,

http://www.bravofly.com/offers/flights/frankfurt-barcelona/r...

As for 'flying into a different city', almost all of Londons airports except for Heathrow are more than an hour away and most of the cut-rate lines fly into the aiports furthest away.

I know you're trying to find all kinds of reasons to justify the choice made but all this nonsense is a bit strange. First you contend that you could not get along in Europe with only English, this contradicts my experience from travelling through Europe for many years (yes, I do speak multiple languages but in every country I've been to as soon as it's business English is the norm, even in France when dealing with foreigners). Now you make it seem as if a major hub for air traffic in continental Europe is somehow at a disadvantage to London.

I don't get it. Can't we just agree that there are viable alternatives that would have been a lot easier to reach for a lot of possible attendants?

Did you look at the pricing ? - it's 306 euros with stopover versus 190 euros direct Barcelona to London (for one day return on day of startup school). There are certainly other viable candidates to host such an event such as Paris and Berlin, but Frankfurt isn't one of them.

As I said running an event is different from visiting, you're dealing with venue staff, caterers, security, insurers, etc. it's certainly all doable especially at the high-end of the market where everyone speaks english but it adds non-trivial overhead and you will be paying a premium.

As soon as you require all your vendors speaking English you're price segmenting yourself into a more premium market. There are some cities where everyone speaks English, but in many major European cities many caterers, etc. will only speak their native language. I've even found smaller hotels in Paris, Madrid, etc. often not to have english speaking staff.

> Did you look at the pricing ? - it's 306 euros with stopover versus 190 euros direct Barcelona to London

For one, you said they did not fly there, second it lists 81 euros here.

Yes, my mistake I was checking via Skyscanner who gave the cheapest route as Lufthansa. Hmm not sure why I'm seeing different pricing, but if the budget airlines do fly that route than obviously I withdraw my point.

[edit: it looks like bravofly is also returning the lufthansa flight for me even when using the same link as you]

Running an event in a country with a foreign language and culture is hard.

Getting a bit off-topic, but this is no longer really true in a lot of Europe. I haven't tried organizing an event in France without speaking French, but it is perfectly easy to organize an event in Denmark without speaking Danish. So many events are organized by multinational organizers that doing all the organization in English is not only possible, but becoming the default.

Israel is not in Europe.

hahaha

Their Europe expert is even worse than their Afghanistan expert!

We sure put dumb people on those boats.

edit

I do wish everyone the best of luck :)

is it really true that Israel is the biggest tech hub in Europe? (if we consider that its part of europe ) ,I always though its Berlin

Israel is certainly bigger than Berlin. It's not clear which is bigger between the UK and Israel as it depends which metric you use.

I wouldn't call it a hub though.

The Israeli tech scene is actually very heavily networked probably more so then any startup environment outside of SF.

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