Comment by LogicX | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LogicX | Hacker News Reader

For me, the biggest headline out of this not being mentioned is that half a billion in VC was just raised in Hollywood, FL.

I'm building a startup community in Myrtle Beach, SC and Paul Reynolds is one of the founders of Startup.SC with me. Paul is involved in Magic Leap as a director, and after working remotely, just moved there last month. It's very exciting to see unfold!

It drives home the fact that a startup can make such headlines not only outside Silicon Valley, but even outside other well known northeast tech metros. It's the sort of news I feed on to explain scalable startup growth potential: Magic Leap has done a spectacular job attracting talent from all over the country. There are worse places to be than the Fort Lauderdale, FL area.

I watched the revival of the Boston startup scene while involved with TechStars, DogPatch labs, etc. from 2009-2012 and although we certainly don't have the same resources, I'm doing my best to apply those principles to the Myrtle Beach market. I hope to one day have a startup come through Startup.SC which can also demonstrate the ability to attract talent and investment dollars to a coastal city not known for tech, and demonstrate that a company can thrive!

Edit: And not going unnoticed in Miami: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article2942814.html

Yep, Magic Leap is headquartered in Florida, but they didn't get the investment until they opened an office in Palo Alto:

http://recode.net/2014/10/20/look-who-else-is-joining-google... "People familiar with the company say Magic Leap was having trouble convincing Silicon Valley types to drop everything and move to Hollywood, Fla., where it is based... So it recently opened a Palo Alto, Calif., engineering office..."

They're currently hiring engineers in Palo Alto: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/14797737

And their engineering VP for "perception and core software" is based in Palo Alto: http://www.linkedin.com/in/garybradski

The primary bottleneck among most top-tier VCs is partner time and travelling is a huge time-sink. Hence why most VCs tend to focus over a relatively small areas.

If a VC is looking at investing in a startup in a location where they have no activity then they're going to have to do trips out just for that specific startup (for due diligence, board meetings, etc.) and they're also going to have a harder time providing value-add (lack of local contacts, etc.)

Hence for a startup outside of a cluster to be worthwhile it has to be significantly better than the local dealflow and the deal has to be of a significant size. So such deals are always likely to be a rarity.

(Having a founder who's already built and sold a billion dollar company also helps immensely; if you're in that small category of people you can probably raise money regardless of where you're based)

I look forward to either disproving this, or being defeated by it. My stance is that great connectivity and communication (think google hangout) combined with cheap flights between Myrtle Beach and Boston can make it happen. Investors may be enticed by additional reasons to head to Myrtle Beach: golf, vacation, warmth.

Strangely enough, the kind of immersive experience technology that Magic Leap is developing might just help with that problem.

I think you're focusing on the wrong things.

VCs (largely) want solid personal relationships with their companies and that's something that's not happening over skype/hangout anytime soon. A few thousand dollars on flights also isn't a big deal when you're investing millions; time is much more important than money.

Your best bet would probably be to:

(1) Get solid local VCs who other (non-local) VCs are happy to co-invest with.

(2) Build thematic clusters, because a partner at a VC who's interested in multiple companies in an area is much more likely to fly out then for an individual company.

That single $542mm investment in Florida almost exactly doubles all VC investments made in the state year-to-date. [1]

Here's how I would read this if you're not located in a major tech hub where VCs readily fund companies and have offices:

1. Attracting a $500mm investment from Google or any other institutional investor is an outlier case regardless of where you're located.

2. You need to have groundbreaking, path forging technology and an amazing team to get on the radar when you're far outside of a major tech hub.

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/10/17/interactive-m...

I think #2 is the salient point there and displaces #1.

Creating a "groudbreaking, path forging technology and an amazing team" is the outlier, not raising a half a billion in funding. If you can achieve the former, then your odds of the latter go up by many orders of magnitude.

All I remember is that Webvan attracted ridiculous investment as well and look how well that turned out. Google can waste billions on utter speculation and never notice the blip. If you can attract such enormous funds why not, the worst that happens is you fail.

For me, the main story is that there is still money thanks to people like Google and AH to go after the big bold crazy technology dream. Kudos to all Rony, Google and AH for the courage and vision.

Startup.SC is really exciting -- I live in the Charleston area (but work for SV companies remotely) and hadn't heard of them before.

The quality of developers and ideas coming out of this town hasn't been that great, or (as I hope) I am having a terrible time finding the right community.

You should come visit our community and mingle with our members at an event: http://meetup.com/Startup-SC Or reach out to me on twitter: @MikeSchroll @StartupdotSC

We have some top-notch devs working out of our space: Ex: Two remote workers for Quirky.com.

I too am in a secondary market so I want to believe ;) But it'll take more than this to really prove anything. It seems like every 18 - 36 months there's this sort of "exception" to the rule vs indicating any type of sustainable change in where the majority of dollars and interest flows. This feels very much like that.

I live in the area and we have a lot of difficulty finding talent. I see they are hiring for a lot of very specialized positions and I wonder how difficult it will be to fill them in this area.

Very Difficult, I own a house in Hollywood Fl,(Well.. close enough Miramar), There's a reason I live in the Bay Area now and rent my house.

Its going to be very difficult for them to hire such specialized skill sets ANYWHERE. They need to find very high end optics and microprocessor experience, and thats tough to find either in palo alto or hollywood, fl

@logicX would love tot alk to your friend Paul. I run RefreshMiami, the largest startup community in South Florida, we'd love to get someone from MagicLeap to give a talk.

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