61–70 of 76 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in Brooklyn (Williamsburg) and I know there is a lot of start-up activity around me as well. It's easy to build a web app, but building a beautiful web app requires some incredibly artistic and design-conscious people which I think NYC (and especially Brooklyn) are chock full of.
hmm.. like painters I suppose...
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…
Your average startup founder in Seattle is in his mid-to-late 30's, and has just come off of an N-year (N >= 10) successful career at Microsoft or Amazon. He's financially comfortable, and the decision to jump into a startup was probably driven as much by boredom (with the 9-to-5) as ambition. Moreover, without outside help, young founders rarely get the time of day from local investors (after all, everyone knows that you need to work at Microsoft for a while to gain experience before you can start a company!)
All of this could be viewed as good or bad, but in my opinion, it's not as vibrant, energetic or varied as the scene in the bay area. Here, young founders have an uphill climb to prove themselves -- in the bay, it's almost the opposite.
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?
Paul figured out a way to quantify something (fussiness about appearance) that seems completely squishy. That's a good skill to develop, by the way.
You know I was cleaning this weekend and apparently I missed the start of "Put the smack-down on PG" week. Any way I can catch up by Friday? Suggestions PG? I have a tentative work entitled "Why PG is wrong about the color of the HN menubar," but I'm not sure it has the same pizzaz as this other stuff we're seeing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe its not all about money, but its definitely more about money. Coming from Wisconsin and working in Manhattan, I find my midwestern frugalness is completely alien to people. Time is money here, there is no doubt about it. Walking three blocks and taking a subway ride gets thrown out the window in favor of a $20 cab ride. Its the small stuff but it adds up. When a city suffers a shortage of BMWs after Wall Street…
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..
If one is resourceful(and most starving artists/actors/entrepreneurs are) you can find apartment shares in plenty of neighborhoods for under $800/month. It's not luxurious but living in those circumstances is no less worthwhile.
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…
"Ultimately power rests with the founders. A startup with the best people will beat one with funding from famous VCs, and a startup that was sufficiently successful would never have to move. So a town that could exert enough pull over the right people could resist and perhaps even surpass Silicon Valley." http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html
Nor is it about the fact that today's abundance of great free tech enables many towns to simultaneously produce work of top quality, making the whole concept of "number one" meaningless.
Nor is it about the fact that so many towns and non-towns can produce great tech that towns become irrelevant too.
Actually, by yes, I mean no.
I think I've read nearly everything you've published. I was aware of the quote when I wrote the criticism, and I think the quote fails to address any substantive part of it. I think if you want to address any criticism I make, you'll need to write something new, or dig up something obscure which I haven't read.
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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...
Agreed. I have been highly disappointed and unsatisfied with most of the tech meetups I have attended. The large majority of attendees I have met at the events are merely non-hackers with an "idea for a website."
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?