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

shafyy.com

101–110 of 190 posts

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

#101
post #3

> It’s true, though. The concentration of talented, hard-working, smart people in SV is astonishing. I’ve lived in the Bay Area for a long time, and recently moved to Seattle; I find the rank and file talent in Seattle to be a good noch or two above SV. I’ve also heard that from startups too who looked to Seattle after not finding the talent they needed.

>who looked to Seattle after not finding the talent they needed.

Were they offering competitive salaries? I doubt it.

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

#102
Great post.

It's important to be close to your customers. If your customers are in SF, then being in SF can make sense. Another reason why you may want to be in SF is you need access to SaaS veterans at the VP level.

Having someone in the team who has already done it is the best growth hack.

But then, NY is getting as good as SF for that, and, you get to live in an awesome city (I live in NY).

All other reasons often raised like "pool of developers" or proximity to investors are BS.

Like mentioned in the post, you don't need to be close to developers and having coffees with investors is a waste of time especially in the early stages.

I lived for 3 months in SF. It was very unpleasant. The reasons are listed in the comments and in the post. And I am affluent enough to afford to live alone in a 1BR, dine out, drive my way around.

Raised money, got the hell out back to the east coast.

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

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They spend vast amounts of money on the problem, but the way they approach the problem makes the solution intractable. To the extent the drug addicted and severely mentally ill homeless can want things, and want the right to continue their current life, they are afforded that right. That is to say, it is their fundamental right to use drugs, live, and defecate on the street (I know these things are illegal, but reall…

SF spends $250 million in 2017. 1/3 on actual homeless, 2/3 on preventing homelessness (e.g. rental subsidies). https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Bu...

other rich areas violate civil rights. when people say "take care of it" they mean "we'll tolerate wild indiscretions"

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

#104
post #66
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…

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.

the real difference is winter, people who have nothing to lose and no ties in NYC hop on a freight train and head west

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

#105
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you sure climate isn't the main factor? If I were homeless I'd go to SF over NYC due to the mild winters.

Well SF get's also cold af. I would go to LA or San Diego. So, while it might be a factor, it surely isn't the main factor.

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

#106
> We can’t grab a coffee with a random investor tomorrow. We don’t meet as many driven people who are interested in tech. We can’t go to fancy networking events.

In Bodrum, that's correct. That's where people go for vacations. But compared to Istanbul's 16m, San Francisco is a village with a population of less than a million people. Even the whole Bay Area has half the population of Istanbul despite being five times bigger. There are many, many universities located there which results in a huge number of startups, investors, incubation centers and alike. I feel this perception comes from a very biased viewpoint. SF isn't the center of the world.

> And there aren’t millions of coders who live nearby to potentially hire

Hell, just mail me the position details and I can max out your inbox with people who would love to work for less then a quarter of SV rates.

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

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simplest hypothesis is that drug use and mental health lead to homelessness. And if that's the case, then the problem isn't housing costs (though high housing costs are a problem, just a separate one), it's that people have addiction and mental health issues.

The problem with your simple hypothesis is that the data doesn't back it up. Drugs & alcohol account for 15% of the reasons for homelessness in SF, and medical issues/illness account for 7%[1]. The data shows that housing costs and financial instability are the largest causes of homelessness in SF. [1] http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017SanFranc...

Sorry, I should have been more specific: I am referring to visible homelessness, people living on the street, etc. The colloquial meaning of the term 'homeless', in other words. I should have been more specific, especially given that this confusion regarding the use of this term is a pet peeve of mine.

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

#109
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you sure climate isn't the main factor? If I were homeless I'd go to SF over NYC due to the mild winters.

The overwhelming majority of homeless people in California lived in the same county they currently do before they became homeless. Climate is clearly not the main factor.

71% in SF homeless already lived in SF, 90% already lived in California: https://socketsite.com/archives/2016/02/san-franciscos-homel...

the cite link in that article is dead but refers to http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/2015-San-Fra...

75% of LA homeless already lived in LA: https://www.lahsa.org/documents?id=2059-2018-greater-los-ang...

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

#110
post #2

>Obviously, VR will transform the nature of remote work. The rest of the post makes perfect sense given their situation. This, however, is pretty silly. I do firmly believe that there is a need for better remote collaboration tools. I see pretty much zero evidence that VR is an essential part (or even an optional part) of that.

I 100% agree with the author on this. VR in its current iteration is clearly not suitable for this in any way, but down the line the fundamentals of VR align perfectly with some of the pain points of remote collaboration. With all current collaboration tools the parties are still bridging the gap of working in different places. In VR, everyone is inhabiting the same virtual space. It's just completely different. Practically, all things switch from n representations to 1 representation. Psychologically we register the interactions completely differently because the parties are saying things not in their room with a video displaying them in your room. They're saying things next to you, to the person sitting across from you, while turning and walking away. The fidelity of interactions (and in turn the interpersonal bonds and memories you form) is just an order of magnitude higher.

If hardware is good enough for this to be a practicality, we may be working in AR 100% of the time anyways, and depending on if you want to be remotely present with others, you just swap out your real environment for a shared virtual one. In that dream scenario, the glasses or whatever are high enough res anyways you'd rather use them to make virtual dynamic user interfaces than stare at a static 2d monitor.

It's going to be a long, long, long time before any of this happens but I'm guessing these are the kind of far-off things the author was implying.

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