How To Build A Startup From A Beach

I am born and raised in a sunny southern city and always admired nordics (from canada, north europe, moscow till japan) to excel at technology. Now in nordic town of 9 months of cold, I always witnessed due to snow, cold climate, and restriction to be at home most of the time, people focus more on brain work, and in south more on outside activities(cafes, dance) etc. That said, california is against my argument, but I find it really curious to understand which climate is the best one for programming; though I bet more on stockholm than hawaii.

Only a rather small part of Japan is cold (North of Tokyo basically, in terms of population the cold part of Japan would make around 15-20%). Most of Japan is between warm and subtropical. Okinawa is tropical.

Taiwan, quite similar to Japan in many respects, is tropical (same weather as Okinawa basically, it's quite close). I've been there recently for a few weeks and temps were in the 25C-32C range most of the time. Boiling hot. Yet this is one of the places of the world where more shit gets done and invented per capita. I was in a technology park, spending a lot of time in cafes, and it felt just like Palo Alto (but more on the EE side rather than on the CS side).

Now, these people have great beaches and a weather that'd allow you to spent most of the year if not all year in the beach, but they find a balance and are every bit as industrious as any cold Nordic country if not more. Same can be said for a good part of Southern China and South Korea.

It's a matter of culture, not weather. Responsibility and hard work need to be nurtured.

Your post really hit home with me (plus, I'm French too). I can relate to what you're saying because I spent most of last year in Southeast Asia developing websites/web apps an I found it to be quite isolating at times. Not having people around who know what the heck you're talking about is tough.

Since then I came back to Europe and after a while not really knowing where to go, I started from fresh in Paris (never lived here before), still working on my own projects but trying a bit harder to go to meetups, meet other entrepreneurs, developers etc. Still isolation is a danger when you're working all day on your own stuff.

I was really seduced by the 4 hour workweek ideas at the time and I'm still trying to find a way to make it sustainable and satisfying. Having a home base + having the freedom to go for semi-extended travel at times is very appealing to lots of us I know :-)

> If you're browsing HN and in Honolulu, let's grab a beer.

Hey that's me. I'd love to grab a beer sometime. I can probably get a few other techie friends to come out as well. Hit me up via my email (in my profile) or message me through Google Plus:

https://plus.google.com/116596920914693118138/posts

Maybe we could meetup next weekend?

I couldn't agree more. I thought this was going to be a post on how to remotely handle a team that isn't connected to the world but it was a fluff piece about having fun at the beach and living with friends in Hawaii while building a product.

I was going to post something similar to this but you basically said the things I wanted to. I live in the Virgin Islands. Hawaii is definitely different than many, if not most, tropical places in the world. I've been to Hawaii and it's absolutely nothing like the third world country this place is.

While I live in paradise, I suffer through frequent power outages, shoddy Internet and a thorough and complete lack of decent techies to relate to or interact with. I pay 5x... yes, 5 times what most pay for electricity. Customer service is completely non-existent anywhere on the island. You can never find what you want at the store. Trying to find computer parts or anything technological is nearly impossible. Shipping is slow and unreliable. Even if you happen to get something, the absolutely terrible electric company (which has a stranglehold on everything here) ensures your tech stuff will be fried sooner or later with or without a surge protector. The racism is absolutely rampant here; the crime and violence is staggering.

Sure, the beaches are fun and the weather is nice, but the isolation can be extremely disheartening and it is not an easy place for a techie (or anyone else) to be. I work for a company in a room with 9 other programmers. I can't remember the last time any of them even mentioned a new web framework or a new programming language or anything of the sort.

I yearn for more and am planning on leaving to go where I can be more successful and happy being the developer that I am.

This blog post would have been much better titled: "How to Move to Hawaii with Some Friends and Build a Startup."