I'm sure that this is true, but it's awful and broken and we ought to find ways to fix it. There's way too much talent and energy spread all over the world, and frankly the group-think that melts young, brilliant brains into caring way too much about mobile apps for taking pictures of your food is sad, and boring.
Location matters for your startup (with city comparisons)
31–40 of 51 posts
Re: Location matters for your startup (with city comparisons)
#32A more important factor compared with density is, in my view, whether startups are the main game in town. This determines what kind of talent you can attract. In London you are competing with cash flow oriented industries that will set expectations for the compensation mix, so you are in practice left with somewhat marginal people and not the best. This crowding out effect, compounded by the relatively small exits pr…
For the UK startup scene to really succeed ..... how about if people located their startups in places where people can actually afford housing costs ? such as - Sheffield, Leeds, Birmingham, Nottingham, Newcastle etc .
Re: Location matters for your startup (with city comparisons)
#33A more important factor compared with density is, in my view, whether startups are the main game in town. This determines what kind of talent you can attract. In London you are competing with cash flow oriented industries that will set expectations for the compensation mix, so you are in practice left with somewhat marginal people and not the best. This crowding out effect, compounded by the relatively small exits pr…
For the UK startup scene to really succeed ..... how about if people located their startups in places where people can actually afford housing costs ? such as - Sheffield, Leeds, Birmingham, Nottingham, Newcastle etc .
One can't create beautiful things in ugly places.
Re: Location matters for your startup (with city comparisons)
#34The density/city comparison thing is really hard to measure, but I'd argue it doesn't make a whole lot of sense: Since people are showing off re SV, I'll do the same for Chicago- where I've in the past couple of weeks met: CTO for Barack Obama (ran into at falafel place), Founder of Groupon (stood next to at Weezer concert sponsored by NEA, talked to him for a bit), Dave McClure (He's an investor in us, we had dinner…
A local (Chicago) angel/entrepreneur & friend of mine told me that it is a lot harder to get follow through from VCs & angels in Chicago. I wonder if your experience comports with that view.
I personally have pessimistic view on the Chicago area in the intermediate term (5-10.)
Regards, TDL
Re: Location matters for your startup (with city comparisons)
#35Unfortunately it's almost impossible to move to these hot cities from many countries. Visa is really a problem. So we need to work hard to get our own local startup hub. I'm from Armenia.
FYI, UK introduced a "startup visa" this April.
Really? Smart move on their part. There's so many talented engineers in the developing world that are 'hungry for it' - Just what startup founders are looking for in a partner.
Re: Location matters for your startup (with city comparisons)
#36Why density? Does density really matter? Isn't the absolute number more interesting because whatever be the chance of meeting an important (to your success) person, you have a bigger pool to pick from. Case of city A: Say, there are 50,000 residents of which 500 are of interest. There's an event hosted and 25% of those "interesting" people show up. You, who's attending this event, have a pool of 125 people out of whi…
I think the truth is that the absolute number, along with density are both important. That's why Boulder - apparently 70% more entrepreneurial than Silicon Valley - cannot really claim to be better than SV, which has an entrepreneurial population 15 times larger.
That's exactly what I was going to say. This is a good first stab at measuring something important.
One thing I was wondering was what "population" was used. I assume it's the city population. Using MSA or CSA populations could lead to very different results, most likely favoring smaller locales.
Re: Location matters for your startup (with city comparisons)
#37I don't think takes away from the main point of the article, but there is a bit of a logical fallacy in the opening:
18 months ago I relocated from my home town of Glasgow, to London, just 400 miles away. An important reason for the move was because I had just started working on my new startup, Teamly, and I know that location matters, even when running an internet business. Don’t kid yourself otherwise, your chance of success is seriously improved when you’re in a startup hub.
18 months later and moving to London has proved to be a smart move, for all the expected reasons, as well as the unexpected recognition by the UK Government of London’s startups with the launch a year ago of “TechCity“.
I don't think you can really say that moving to London to operate your business there versus operating in Glasgow was a "smart move", as you have no way of knowing what level of success your startup would have had in Glasgow (since you never experienced this alternate reality).
Sure you made a lot of great connections as a result of your move, but it is impossible to know what connections you never made because you weren't in Glasgow during those 18 months. There is no way of knowing whether you missed out on something (a chance meeting/encounter/coffee, etc) which, while it may have been less probable, would have been of more value to the success of your startup.
Re: Location matters for your startup (with city comparisons)
#38Location matters. Even if you're boot strapping. I'm boot strapping Hackers & Founders. In the past three months, I've met a CEO of a 300 person gaming company, M&A execs from Fortune 500's, Engineer[0] from Google Finance, the head of the Singularity Institute, artists that make 2 story flaming sculptures, an architect that works on computational architecture, a man who built a battery that charges in 10 minutes tha…
Are there any practical (mathematical?) techniques to measure "openness" of a startup community's network? You may be 2-3 degrees from John Doerr, but the question is, could you actually get a meeting with him? Just my intuition, having lived in the Valley (8 years) and Austin (10 years) is that the Bay Area gets a B- for openness, compared to Austin which gets an A-.
You may be 2-3 degrees from John Doerr, but the question is, could you actually get a meeting with him?
That depends.
Adam Rifkin, the founder of the 106 Miles meetup and pretty kick ass nice guy and serial entrepreneur, was funded 12 years ago by Kliener Perkins. So, if you got to Adam's meetup, and bump into him, you're now 1 degree of separation away from John Doerr.
So, if you take Adam out to coffee, and talk to him about getting an introduction to John, Adam can certainly provide an into to John, but he's far more likely to talk to you, get a feel for what you're doing, and then provide introductions to 10 other investors and amazing people that could probably provide as much or more value than John Doer.
Good question.
There's also a very strong culture in Silicon Valley of "quality introductions".
The perceived value of a person's personal network in Silicon Valley is directly proportional to the quality of introductions that person can make to others. (Read: matching person to investor)
Re: Location matters for your startup (with city comparisons)
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the truth is that the absolute number, along with density are both important. That's why Boulder - apparently 70% more entrepreneurial than Silicon Valley - cannot really claim to be better than SV, which has an entrepreneurial population 15 times larger.
I was really surprised to see Boulder on that list... had no idea that there were apparently many start ups there, even if it is just by percent.
Boulder's startup scene has skyrocketed in the past several years. At monthly startup meetups, hundreds of people usually show up to check out what everyone else is working on.
It's not quite a Silicon Valley, and its score is probably exaggerated by the difficulty in defining a population area that's relevant to the startup scene. However, most startups in the scene are in Boulder proper, and most founders seem to live in the city as well. So the density is there, and it's quite easy to run into other startup people on the sidewalk or in coffee shops.
Re: Location matters for your startup (with city comparisons)
#40Seems like a better approach would be to identify cities with the most startup "clusters"? Identify a cluster, then look at the population(s) of that census tract or zip or whatever. Using city-level population just makes small cities look great (Boulder) and big cities look terrible (NYC), when I'm pretty sure there are neighborhoods in NYC that blow away Boulder.
Agreed, a hybrid of absolute numbers of startup people and density is probably the most appropriate.