31–40 of 76 posts
Working at a startup in NYC I have to disagree with pg as well. I think if anything the vibe is "i am more hip than you are". The place where the vibe is "i have more money than you do" is in Westchester, NY - where all the wall streeters live. They commute in and out, and take all their money to build big homes on the water up there. That has been true since the mid 1800s. The people who are actually into the cultur…
Frankly, it's almost impossible to find good engineers in NYC. The banks do take them all, that doesn't mean that it's impossible to start up in the city, it is just harder. On the west coasts, startups compete with other startups and employees bounce around making similar amounts of money. In New York, startups compete with financial institutions which can and do throw enormous amounts of cash at employees without a…
I have to agree with this. It took us (massify.com) forever to find talent. NYC has an agency mindset which doesn't work in a startup environment. So you hire people from razorfish, digitas, r/ga, etc. but they're expecting the same 9-5 lifestyle and have a hard time adjusting.
When PG says New York City, I usually take it to mean Manhattan. Brooklyn and Queens are both pretty awesome. If anyone here is from NYC, I'd love to start some real-life gatherings for YC'ers. Edit: on this topic, I believe reddit started in brooklyn and later relocated. Can anyone confirm?
Frankly, it's almost impossible to find good engineers in NYC. The banks do take them all, that doesn't mean that it's impossible to start up in the city, it is just harder. On the west coasts, startups compete with other startups and employees bounce around making similar amounts of money. In New York, startups compete with financial institutions which can and do throw enormous amounts of cash at employees without a…
I have to agree with this. It took us (massify.com) forever to find talent. NYC has an agency mindset which doesn't work in a startup environment. So you hire people from razorfish, digitas, r/ga, etc. but they're expecting the same 9-5 lifestyle and have a hard time adjusting.
Working at a startup in NYC I have to disagree with pg as well. I think if anything the vibe is "i am more hip than you are". The place where the vibe is "i have more money than you do" is in Westchester, NY - where all the wall streeters live. They commute in and out, and take all their money to build big homes on the water up there. That has been true since the mid 1800s. The people who are actually into the cultur…
The hip thing is definitely true but I think it depends on age.
The radical reduction in startup cost for technology companies is THE technology-business event of the last twenty years. It absolutely decentralizes tech startups by making VCs much less important. Yes, the Valley still has an edge in terms of people, but if you're used to being the center of the universe, having an edge isn't the same.
This explains local startup scenes, and makes it obvious they'll become more important in future, not less. Paul Graham isn't just wrong for the obvious reasons - because anybody who says NY is about any one thing is smoking crack, for instance, or because of the Valley's echo chamber, or because there must be something in Boston's relative non-entity-ness despite its incredible programmer population, etc., etc., etc. - he's also wrong because he's ignoring the ginormous sea change in startup capital requirements that his own business revolves around, and which he himself first identified in one of his essays years before anyone in the Valley ever blogged about it.
He's ignored his own discoveries.
When PG says New York City, I usually take it to mean Manhattan. Brooklyn and Queens are both pretty awesome. If anyone here is from NYC, I'd love to start some real-life gatherings for YC'ers. Edit: on this topic, I believe reddit started in brooklyn and later relocated. Can anyone confirm?
Tech meetup is pretty decent http://newtech.meetup.com/1/
Someone I met was throwing around the idea of a language agnostic hacker meetup with a simple programming/logic puzzle as the barrier to entry. Much better idea than tech-meetup!
PS. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=240529 for our new ruby meetup :) Sorry about the self-promotion...
The thing is, any reasoning that assumes Silicon Valley is where it's at ignores all the TechCrunch articles about "the crisis in venture capital" and the inability of the VCs to find companies that need their money to lift off at all in the commodity-hardware/open-source-software era. It's very, very unlikely that the Valley-centric monoculture of the past will continue to characterize the startup scene. NY has a st…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to agree with this. It took us (massify.com) forever to find talent. NYC has an agency mindset which doesn't work in a startup environment. So you hire people from razorfish, digitas, r/ga, etc. but they're expecting the same 9-5 lifestyle and have a hard time adjusting.
So, by "not the same 9-5 lifestyle," what do you mean? I would hesitate to put words in your mouth, but please tell me the startup lifestyle you have in mind, and whether it is of equal quality. I'm going to give you a handicap, though: You cannot use the concept of "doing something you love," because you cannot require that your employees love it as much as you, or you'll find nobody at all.
My experience is that a lot of agency people have a lot of problems coping in environments without a lot of process, nor are they inclined to feel ownership.
There is no sense of equal quality when comparing the lifestyle of a startup to that of working at an agency (of which I have 10+ years experience working in). At an agency, there are people above you and people below you and despite whatever flaws in the process that the agency has, it at least has one.
Figure that most early stages are typically 3-4 people. Process isn't as important as this stage as getting stuff done and getting stuff out. In fact, an intricate involved process at this point would do more damage than good.
At 5-10 people, process starts becoming important, but that process must be devised amongst the people in the company. Most agency people we've had come work at Massify during this period had a hard time adjusting as we attempt to soothe the chaos. It takes a fairly rare blend of ambition and drive to succeed in a startup at this point.
And, btw, if you're handing out equity, they sure as shit better love it or they should really move on. They needn't love it as much as I do, nor do I expect that from them, but they better have some affection for it or they should hit the road. When things get grim, it's this certain love or passion for the product that carries you through.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point of submitting this wasn't to pick on pg -- it's a thoughtful piece, and adds a new voice to the discussion. Interesting conversations have two sides.
Thats true. It was not a comment about this article, it was a joke about many articles appearing in a short time frame all disagreeing with PG in some way or another. All the responses seem to have come out at once. Conversations are good, although I have a running disagreement on a different thread over the logic of some comments, I have to say they are enjoyable to read.