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Location matters for your startup (with city comparisons)

scott-allison.net

41–50 of 51 posts

Re: Location matters for your startup (with city comparisons)

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

More on UK visa: http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/03/17/uk-beats-the-us-to-a-tec...

Re: Location matters for your startup (with city comparisons)

#42

A 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 .

I completely disagree with this, simply because there is already a fantastic and large hub in London. There's hundreds of startups here already and proximity to VCs, in one of the world's best cities. It makes a lot more sense to build on something that's already strong, and make it stronger.

I think one of the smartest things this Government has done is to recognise that and ignore calls from people outside London to create something elsewhere. But yes, London is frigging expensive. That said, you can live close to, but outside London and it's no more expensive than the other places you mention.

Re: Location matters for your startup (with city comparisons)

#44
post #11

Don't relocate, bootstrap :)

It's not just about funding. I find being in Boston makes finding advisors, mentors, ents and domain experts really easy. You don't necessarily even need to be actively networking, you can learn tons 'passively' simply by attending meetups, events etc... While location shouldn't matter when it comes to the company itself, it makes significant difference in terms of getting access to a really powerful support network.

Re: Location matters for your startup (with city comparisons)

#45
Some questions come to mind:

How many startups in Silicon Valley actually STARTED UP in Silicon Valley, versus moved there after they got some traction?

What is the success RATIO in Silicon Valley, USA versus Unknown, USA? IOW, in SV there may be more absolute success stories, but relatively-speaking is it higher?

I don't think anyone has the numbers to prove this, but I'd love to see them if they do. All posts of this type seem to drop back to anecdotal evidence.

Re: Location matters for your startup (with city comparisons)

#46

A 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…

Re: your comment around destroying agencies, I disagree inasmuch as believing the forward thinking agencies are/will actually spawn their own IP divisions, and thus feed into the startup scene in the future.

Re: Location matters for your startup (with city comparisons)

#47

Just remember quality of life with these things. I know this will be an unpopular opinion round these parts, but SF is not somewhere I'd ever chose to live. The bad points vastly outweigh the good points for me.

I guess everyone is different, I love silicon valley for many things, the quality of life being one of them (and the weather). Maybe it's just me but I'm from a cold, wet and windy country called Scotland :)

Actually weather is one reason I wouldn't live in silicon valley - it doesn't really have any. It's either flatline boiling hot, or if you go north it's windy and foggy all the time. It's like being stuck in a never ending summer.

I live in England, where we get glorious boiling summers, wet and windy autumns, snowy winters. I know that's not for everyone, but the sheer variety is something I love.

To see the scenery and wildlife change by season is something that really makes life interesting.

Re: Location matters for your startup (with city comparisons)

#48

I 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…

Thanks for pointing that out, but putting it another way, the things I expected I would benefit from by being in London did occur, along with the pleasant and unexpected bonus of the government's tech city initiative.

Re: Location matters for your startup (with city comparisons)

#49
post #30

Location 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-.

Also, I've also thought of Silicon Valley investor, operator and notables networks as a type of graph problem. And, I've often thought of working towards a specific introduction as a type of graph traversal problem.

What node foo in this graph do I need to connect to? What nodes bar[] surround foo? What is the strength of each edge connecting bar[node] to foo?

Getting from node baz to node foo is recursive:

Get_to_Node_Foo( node baz ): Look at all the edges and nodes surrounding baz. Are you next to foo? Ask for intro. Else, move to the node that seems closest to foo. get_to_node_Foo( that_new_node ).

Re: Location matters for your startup (with city comparisons)

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

I completely disagree with this, simply because there is already a fantastic and large hub in London. There's hundreds of startups here already and proximity to VCs, in one of the world's best cities. It makes a lot more sense to build on something that's already strong, and make it stronger. I think one of the smartest things this Government has done is to recognise that and ignore calls from people outside London t…

I acknowledge London is in many ways a fantastic place to live and grow a business. Its great for the UK if we can have a growing startup hub based in London. However, while many startups will flourish in London, so many others would be completely dead in the water if they tried to grow while facing London costs. Living just outside London is surely more costly than living in a comparable area of a city further north, when you take into account a rail season ticket? Also, commuting times get silly. There's loads of talent scattered across the UK. Whats the point of trying to get that talent to move somewhere where everyone else already wants to live, and quality of life in many ways is poor as result? Silicon Valley is different because they actually pay enough for people to live there. Maybe that's the answer - startups need to start paying £70k to developers in Shoreditch when the same person would have been happier being paid £20k to live in Derby? Thanks for the response though- its interesting to debate these things. :)
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