Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We moved to Turkey from San Francisco to continue working on our startup

shafyy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 190 posts

Re: We moved to Turkey from San Francisco to continue working on our startup

#61

Post by naravara »

gwbas1c wrote: post #23

> We tried to raise money from VCs in SV twice, and we failed. Why? Our product wasn’t good enough and we didn’t have enough growth. Maybe it's time to stop, or take your experience and re-apply it elsewhere? The thing with software is that it's very quick to prove (or disprove) a business model. If you're working on something for years and don't have the profits (or free users) to show, it's unlikely that you'll suc…

>The thing with software is that it's very quick to prove (or disprove) a business model. If you're working on something for years and don't have the profits (or free users) to show, it's unlikely that you'll succeed.

Uber is a pretty strong empirical case study in why this argument is wrong. The entire DotCom bubble, in fact, has been a similar case study. When you prop things up with VC funding it actually becomes very hard to disprove bad ideas because price signaling and market logic stops working. It becomes entirely driven by the animal spirits that govern pitch meetings for as long as the BS stream can be maintained.

I mean, people are still pouring money into cryptocurrency! And it's quite likely that lots of good and potentially successful ideas are being starved of funding because of oxygen being taken up by sexier and flashier ones that will flame out quickly.

Re: We moved to Turkey from San Francisco to continue working on our startup

#62

Post by ataturk »

conanbatt wrote: post #38
dmortin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's strange that a rich area can't take care of this problem. E.g. supporting the homeless some way, cleaning them up and helping them to find some job and housing.

California and San francisco are amongst the most corrupt states I know. Believe me, I am from Argentina, I can smell corruption a mile a way. 2.5 billion dollars spent on a broken bus station, and they are going to fix long-term homelessness with 800 million, and a poop patrol that earns 100k+ a year per employee?

NY State is the same way. People live in their own little worlds and ignore what I tell them even though it is based on experience.

These big cities and big states have massive slush funds that are tapped by corrupt politicos. It's becoming a 3rd World system in the US.

Re: We moved to Turkey from San Francisco to continue working on our startup

#63

Post by temptemptemp111 »

superpermutat0r wrote: post #10
shafyy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you live now?

Split, Croatia. Weather is equivalent, smaller city, lots of foreigners, and a growing IT industry. For a foreigner it's also very easy to just come and live in Croatia, they give staying permits to anyone who comes to just live and spend money (not work) but after you find work, getting an EU blue card is a piece of cake.

What's the fastest residential fibre you can get there?

Re: We moved to Turkey from San Francisco to continue working on our startup

#64

Post by Kalium »

dmortin wrote: post #13
superpermutat0r wrote: post #4

I can't even work in SF. The time wasted to drive to work kills me, I can't get desensitized to all the homeless shitting on streets, stabbing themselves with needles, talking schizophrenically in a dead language, every time I go grab a coffee or lunch in a cheaper area, it's like watching animal slaughter every day. Quality of life definitely much better in Mediterranean city I live today.

It's strange that a rich area can't take care of this problem. E.g. supporting the homeless some way, cleaning them up and helping them to find some job and housing.

There's a witch's brew of reasons for this. A lot of those who persist in living on the street are hardest to help, for reasons that often involve medical issues, psychological issues, addiction issues, or a general aversion to getting off the street. California makes involuntary commitment extremely difficult (for good historical reason), so people who refuse help or treatment don't get any.

SF is also incredibly bad at making use of a vast pool of resources. The amount of money spent to help the indigent is substantial, but no amount of ineffective spending can address real problems. Other changes that might help, such as constructing homes for the homeless, run into stiff political resistance in a permitting system designed to make it easy to block anything.

That residents and voters seem to care more about what makes them feel compassionate than what demonstrably helps also helps little.

The result is a mess.

Re: We moved to Turkey from San Francisco to continue working on our startup

#65

Post by zzzzzzzza »

rtio wrote: post #21
dmortin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's strange that a rich area can't take care of this problem. E.g. supporting the homeless some way, cleaning them up and helping them to find some job and housing.

Not really. Tends to be the same in any booming city. The opposite is the exception.

Progress and Poverty, Henry George

Re: We moved to Turkey from San Francisco to continue working on our startup

#66

Post by CPLX »

shafyy wrote: post #25
superpermutat0r wrote: post #4

I can't even work in SF. The time wasted to drive to work kills me, I can't get desensitized to all the homeless shitting on streets, stabbing themselves with needles, talking schizophrenically in a dead language, every time I go grab a coffee or lunch in a cheaper area, it's like watching animal slaughter every day. Quality of life definitely much better in Mediterranean city I live today.

Oversimplifying here, but the homeless probem arises due to high housing cost and poor health care system. In addition to fighting the symptoms (which is already being done ok-ish), we need to fight the mentioned root causes. Unfortunately, the health care problem goes back to CA or even on a national level. Often times, mentally ill or people that lost their jobs for another reason become homeless, and from there th…

I dunno. As someone who lives in NYC where we really just don't have the same problem at all it's pretty clear there are some policy reasons involved too.

Re: We moved to Turkey from San Francisco to continue working on our startup

#67

Post by asdfman123 »

As an outsider, at this point I have no idea why anyone would want to do a startup in SF. I mean, obviously, all the connections and resources are nice, but you are literally burning investor money on $5k/mo rent. That's absurd.

Rent out a house in Austin, Texas for $2k and each of your co-founders can share a room. There's investors and as deep a talent pool as you'll ever need unless you're GoogleAmazon and you need a constant stream of talent to feed your machine.

Heck, I live in Houston. I'm working on a startup idea in .NET Core and Vue. If it ever takes off, it will be extremely easy to find 5-10 .NET developers. Hell, if I ever need another really good senior developer I can poach them for $140k, which is a really good salary here. Aren't they paying juniors in SF that much now?

If I ever need to hire 500 developers and a few experienced distributing computing PhDs I'll be too busy rolling in cash to care. I'll just sell my company to someone else and be too busy sailing around the mediterranean to care about talent shortages in Houston.

For the record, I live in a 3 bedroom house right near downtown that costs less than a year's senior dev salary in SF. Are any of you SF people going to be able to get that, unless you become fantastically wealthy?

I'm not trying to be all sour grapes, it just doesn't make sense to me.

Re: We moved to Turkey from San Francisco to continue working on our startup

#68

Post by almost_usual »

argd678 wrote: post #26
jdsully wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren’t supposed to tell people that! Also it rains and is dreary all winter there.

You forgot the food also kinda sucks, just about anything in the Mission beats the pants off the PNW.

You had me until you said 'the Mission'. I've never been to Seattle but it must be the only city in the US without good hispanic food.

Re: We moved to Turkey from San Francisco to continue working on our startup

#69

Post by mplewis »

toasterlovin wrote: post #60
shafyy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oversimplifying here, but the homeless probem arises due to high housing cost and poor health care system. In addition to fighting the symptoms (which is already being done ok-ish), we need to fight the mentioned root causes. Unfortunately, the health care problem goes back to CA or even on a national level. Often times, mentally ill or people that lost their jobs for another reason become homeless, and from there th…

The specific problems OP mentions are not due to high housing costs. What about rent being expensive means people have to shoot up or defecate in broad daylight on a public street?

When you're homeless, you don't have your own private bathroom.

Re: We moved to Turkey from San Francisco to continue working on our startup

#70

Post by rolleiflex »

I'm a startup founder living in San Francisco, currently in Istanbul, Turkey, for a half work trip, half hiring. First of all the same caveat applies: if you want to live in Turkey, you have to know Turkish. Turkey is closer to France than Thailand in terms of tolerance for English, tourists get a pass, but otherwise fiercely protective. If you're not a visitor, you are expected to know at least basic Turkish or be a social pariah.

The second thing is, also the reason I'm here — Turkey does have a good market for engineers, but the wages are fairly close to the US average in PPP terms. I think Udemy does have a team in Ankara, and there are quite a lot of local and profitable startups, so the competition for talent, while not at SF levels, is not nil. This is being exacerbated by the relative ease of leaving Turkey, lots of good developers have already left because of the illiberal climate of the past decade, for jobs in London, Berlin, Stockholm, New York and San Francisco. They're in pretty high demand far as I can see, because they do provide a good balance of western-ish values, decent langauge skills and an up to date tech stack.

Their willingness to move to the USA is pretty low, however, far as I can see. Berlin seems to be much more palatable to them. If the country recovers and ends up being a more livable place, I do suspect Turkish engineers' willingness to move to even Berlin will likely drop commensurately.

Third, the country is cheap, but it's not India, Philippines or Thailand cheap. It's a good deal for someone from Switzerland to live in an Aegean paradise and still be in the broad EU time zone, within 2 hours flight distance to Zurich. But it's probably not cheap enough to pull people from San Francisco, unless they're Turkish.

Why am I not moving there? Well, I need access to investors, potential customers, collaborators, and yes, even employees in San Francisco. Istanbul is a great city to live in, but it definitely has its fair share of predatory investors that you don't ever want to talk to — in fact, that's the vast majority of investors here, as you'd expect from any non-tech-hub — and mid-to-upper class tech talent, but SF / NY / Seattle still wins in terms of average skill. I do visit every 6 months, though, and I would love to have an office here eventually.

(If you live in Istanbul, we're hiring for a remote Go engineer position for Aether. Email in profile if interested!)

Post reply on HN