Why Paul Graham is wrong about New York City

Post by Tamerlin » Tue, Jul 08, 2008, 11:58 PM UTC

jawngee wrote: post #39

iron_ball wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean self-starting, self-organizing out of the box thinkers that can deal with the chaos of an early stage start-up. 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 experie…

Post by ig1 » Wed, Jul 09, 2008, 12:12 AM UTC

byrneseyeview wrote: post #10

aditya wrote: post #6

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 wonder if the banking thing isn't as much of a problem as it seems. I work as a financial recruiter, and one of the patterns I see is an on/off relationship with startups and banks, e.g. working two years at Goldman, then one year at a new search engine, then a year at Credit Suisse, then three years starting up a new wiki-based whatsit. If you know you can quit and -- within a few months -- be earning a great livi…

Post by itsandrew » Wed, Jul 09, 2008, 12:16 AM UTC

aditya wrote: post #37

fleaflicker wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech meetup is pretty decent http://newtech.meetup.com/1/

Tech meetup is full of entrepreneur-wannabes, FAIL. 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...

Post by itsandrew » Wed, Jul 09, 2008, 12:26 AM UTC

aditya wrote: post #15

wallflower wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In NYC, they have laws that a renter must earn an annual income that is 52x the monthly rent to qualify to rent the apartment (yes, subletting from someone is one way around it). In NYC, a 1BR apartment that you live in by yourself is a status symbol. The average monthly rent is north of $2,500. Spending $2k+ on rent just to live in the city, maybe that's more about ego than it is about money..

Maybe that's the reason a lot of startup action is happening in Brooklyn, where all the cool designer types and hackers are moving to. The rent is lower and the people are just nicer, in DUMBO where our startup is based there's atleast 5 other startups in a 10 block radius. Which, while not SoMa is still pretty good :)

Post by wheels » Wed, Jul 09, 2008, 12:35 AM UTC

tstegart wrote: post #13

timr wrote: post #5

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.