Starting a Company Outside Silicon Valley Just Saved Me $1.1M
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Starting a Company Outside Silicon Valley Just Saved Me $1.1M
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Re: Starting a Company Outside Silicon Valley Just Saved Me $1.1M
#2What about the opportunity cost that he potentially lost by starting his company outside of Silicon Valley? I am not saying that he definitely did, but the fact that OP doesn't mention it at all makes his whole post feel a bit disingenuous. In fact, it reminds me a lot of people who talk about how much money they saved by not going to college and how it is the way to go for everyone, despite studies [of US colleges] showing otherwise.
P.S. I don't lean one way or the other about colleges, there are definitely cases where not going is a good idea. However not even seriously looking into upsides of going and closing eyes on potentially missed opportunities will devalue your argument.
Re: Starting a Company Outside Silicon Valley Just Saved Me $1.1M
#3Similar things can be said about starting a company with a fully remote team. I’d estimate we saved much more than $1M for our thirty-person company. An additional benefit is that you can recruit the best talent from anywhere, so long as they have experience working remotely (it’s a bit of a risk to experiement with someone who hasn’t done remote work before). With this setup, I’ve been blown away how easy it is for us to recruit amazing people. It would be much harder recruiting for local engineers wherever you are based, whether that’s SV or Philadelphia.
Re: Starting a Company Outside Silicon Valley Just Saved Me $1.1M
#4I always assumed the valley focus was because, yeah VC money there, and VCs wanted people close by to help (well if they help), and just generally there are a lot of good people there. By no means are those bad reasons, but not everyone will have those reasons.
A calculator seems a bit simplistic but I would generally agree that if there isn't something outright drawing you to that area, you don't have to be there and there are costs.
I worked for a really large company a while back. They bought some smaller company and discovered a support center ... that I worked at. They thought they'd try doing support at that site as they suddenly had support there.
For less than half the cost per employee we managed to do twice the workload, higher customer satisfaction, and we often were requested by customers who quickly realized we wouldn't just shut down cases on them. Almost immediately there were tensions. I'd go out and visit and oh man it was tense. There was this idea that support just had to be in the valley because straight up the managers and folks working there didn't know there were technical people... anywhere else (this was before we had other islands of tech in the US).
I even bought it for a bit thinking I was going out to meet some high performing folks and found ... way not that.
It was amazing that they had (including some management) convinced themselves that stuff only happens in the valley and if they hadn't seen it they wouldn't have believed it was possible outside (and some did not, oh the excuses).... and that was just for a maintenance type task like tech support. (granted this was some high end stuff so it did take good people, but they're everywhere)
Re: Starting a Company Outside Silicon Valley Just Saved Me $1.1M
#5penny wise, pound foolish
Re: Starting a Company Outside Silicon Valley Just Saved Me $1.1M
#6You could save a ton of money starting a restaurant on the North Pole! Free real estate, low bill to light the place during half the year, what's not to like. As much as I hate the draw of SV if I were to start a company that needs that kind of funding I would do everything I could do to do it there. Why hamper yourself on purpose, the $1.1M saved might easily translate into a couple of missed connections worth a very large multiple of that amount.
Re: Starting a Company Outside Silicon Valley Just Saved Me $1.1M
#7penny wise, pound foolish
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Re: Starting a Company Outside Silicon Valley Just Saved Me $1.1M
#8Personally, I wouldn't start a company in silicon valley. On the whole, it looks to me like the downside of doing that far outweighs the upside.
Re: Starting a Company Outside Silicon Valley Just Saved Me $1.1M
#9Similar things can be said about starting a company with a fully remote team. I’d estimate we saved much more than $1M for our thirty-person company. An additional benefit is that you can recruit the best talent from anywhere, so long as they have experience working remotely (it’s a bit of a risk to experiement with someone who hasn’t done remote work before). With this setup, I’ve been blown away how easy it is for…
I started my company fully remote but doing payroll in multiple countries is a pain. Have you solved this? I'm limiting my employees to the areas I've already registered with the proper authorities and not hiring in any other locations.
Re: Starting a Company Outside Silicon Valley Just Saved Me $1.1M
#10What about the opportunity cost that he potentially lost by starting his company outside of Silicon Valley? I am not saying that he definitely did, but the fact that OP doesn't mention it at all makes his whole post feel a bit disingenuous. In fact, it reminds me a lot of people who talk about how much money they saved by not going to college and how it is the way to go for everyone, despite studies [of US colleges]…
What would the opportunity cost? What does silicon valley have that philly doesn't?