Local here. Feel free to contact me (check profile) for anything. :)
We have a incubator called parallel18, and a couple of working spaces. It's not a super huge tech scene but the people are awesome.
Millennials returning to Puerto Rico, launching startups
11–20 of 83 posts
Re: Millennials returning to Puerto Rico, launching startups
#12I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, but left to work in tech. As with any place, there's some good points and there's some bad points. Below are some points that someone moving to Puerto Rico might want to know.
In my opinion, their greatest achievement has been in its educational system. Despite its huge list of problems, UPR enables people of any background to receive an affordable high quality college education. In the US, you're basically forced to take out huge loans that might take decades to pay off. This should mean you'll get access to lots of highly educated individuals, although I don't know if that's the case in practice.
One of my biggest complaints is its poor representation in the US government. If you're living in Puerto Rico you can't vote in any of the US's elections, even though the actions of the president and congress could potentially affect you. e.g. You could get drafted and sent off to war.
Puerto Rico has its own constitution [0], which arguably grants stronger rights to its citizens than the US constitution. For example, wire-tapping is explicitly illegal. It also includes entries allowing employees to organize into associations and collectively negotiate with their employers, as well as go on strike.
An interesting point is that everyone is required to get a voter ID in order to participate in an election. This isn't seen as a problem, and getting one is incredibly easy. I found it incredibly surprising this wasn't the case in the US.
Food is amazing, but there's very little variety. Since there's so few people from different cultural backgrounds, you mostly get the same templates repeated everywhere. In the last decade it has been slowly improving. If you're a vegan or vegetarian, or if you require a gluten-free diet (i.e. coeliac disease), you'll have a hard time eating out.
Due to cabotage laws, you can't import directly to Puerto Rico. Everything has to go through a US port, which translates to increased costs.
Shipping stuff to Puerto Rico is usually more expensive than shipping stuff to the contiguous United States. I'd guess it's comparable to Hawaii.
Even though both English and Spanish are considered official languages, you'll have a very hard time living there if you don't know Spanish.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Puerto_Rico
Re: Millennials returning to Puerto Rico, launching startups
#13> They are motivated both by an urge to help lift Puerto Rico out of its quagmire, but also by a profound attachment to the island — its beaches and countryside, its friendliness, its intimacy and the tug of family. They're probably more motivated by the complete lack of federal income tax[0]. Funny that this wasn't mentioned once in the entire article. 0. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2014/07/04/hate-taxe.…
Yeah, I was about to say that it's probably largely because of the policy relief under Fortuño and to some extent his successors. Like how you would expect people to have returned to Detroit if they would make the occasional policy decision which doesn't involve spending more of other people's money.
It's pretty interesting to see how this works out within the U.S. when it comes to personal income tax[0]
Re: Millennials returning to Puerto Rico, launching startups
#14Local here. Feel free to contact me (check profile) for anything. :) We have a incubator called parallel18, and a couple of working spaces. It's not a super huge tech scene but the people are awesome.
How's the internet there? I'd imagine that would be a significant barrier to productivity.
Re: Millennials returning to Puerto Rico, launching startups
#15I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, but left to work in tech. As with any place, there's some good points and there's some bad points. Below are some points that someone moving to Puerto Rico might want to know. In my opinion, their greatest achievement has been in its educational system. Despite its huge list of problems, UPR enables people of any background to receive an affordable high quality college education.…
How is healthcare in PR now?
Re: Millennials returning to Puerto Rico, launching startups
#16Local here. Feel free to contact me (check profile) for anything. :) We have a incubator called parallel18, and a couple of working spaces. It's not a super huge tech scene but the people are awesome.
How's the internet there? I'd imagine that would be a significant barrier to productivity.
To boost productivity, wouldn't you want the internet to be really bad most of the time? Like "only good enough to read textual docs and ssh into AWS" bad.
Re: Millennials returning to Puerto Rico, launching startups
#17I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, but left to work in tech. As with any place, there's some good points and there's some bad points. Below are some points that someone moving to Puerto Rico might want to know. In my opinion, their greatest achievement has been in its educational system. Despite its huge list of problems, UPR enables people of any background to receive an affordable high quality college education.…
How is healthcare in PR now?
I can't speak for its quality, but in terms of cost it's much more affordable than the US equivalent.
According to the article, finding specialists in certain medical fields is apparently beginning to become a problem.
Re: Millennials returning to Puerto Rico, launching startups
#18Local here. Feel free to contact me (check profile) for anything. :) We have a incubator called parallel18, and a couple of working spaces. It's not a super huge tech scene but the people are awesome.
How's the internet there? I'd imagine that would be a significant barrier to productivity.
Its good and reliable. I pay $65/month for 20Megs. Been working remotely for about 5 years and no major issues.
Re: Millennials returning to Puerto Rico, launching startups
#19I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, but left to work in tech. As with any place, there's some good points and there's some bad points. Below are some points that someone moving to Puerto Rico might want to know. In my opinion, their greatest achievement has been in its educational system. Despite its huge list of problems, UPR enables people of any background to receive an affordable high quality college education.…
How is healthcare in PR now?
If you need a new head, there are plenty of donors.
Head-icare, and Head-icade.
The gubernment really cares about them peoples.
Re: Millennials returning to Puerto Rico, launching startups
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
How's the internet there? I'd imagine that would be a significant barrier to productivity.
To boost productivity, wouldn't you want the internet to be really bad most of the time? Like "only good enough to read textual docs and ssh into AWS" bad.
Well, depends on what you do. Sure, it can be nice to be offline for some coding, but most work these days, even predominantly coding work, is a team affair and requires communication to work well. Further, being able to get quick access to docs, tickets, etc. is quite useful.
But also, if one is responsible for the functioning of significant amounts of infrastructure, then it's not so great to have to worry about internet flaking out in the middle of working through production issues.
But yeah if you were working on something solo, then bad internet wouldn't matter as much.