Why you should move your startup to a small fishing town

I too live in a fishing town, yes, it's nice being a small town without any traffic or people on the street (except in Summer when we get tourists) but honestly I can't wait to move out.

I can't get fast internet, power/internet goes down when it gets a bit windy or starts raining; and it rains quite a lot, making you really unproductive. Let's not talk about 3G/4G, we are lucky to have 3G on a good day.

If I wanted to go to some conference or meetup I'd have to drive at least 4-5 hours since there's nothing here, and we don't have train or anything.

Talking about leisure time, I like surfing, but that's only viable during the Summer, there's not much else to do here other than hanging out with other people; we are lucky to have a cinema, but some movies don't even make it here (I'm still waiting to watch Interstellar).

This would be the perfect place for a lonely writer working on a novel, but definitely not for people like us, who need to be always connected and making the best use of technology possible.

Disclaimer: I've never lived in a city, maybe I'll end up hating it, who knows?

This seems like a really good option if you want to pretend to be building a startup: Come up with disruptive startup ideas while sitting on the beach, throwing house parties like in The Social Network, and drinking a beer with other people pretending to build a startup.

It doesn't sound like a good option though if you want to actually build a startup: writing a lot of code, meeting with clients, hiring great people, etc.

Just wanted to say that I lived in a small ecuadorean fishing village for 7 years, and my experience was the opposite ... but I'm not starting a startup!

My internet was even more limited (EDGE), power went out sometimes (two power bricks were enough for my mac air, though, and the cell towers never went out, so I could make it through even a multi-day outage without losing internet!), and comfy fast wifi in a coffee shop was 40 minutes away (I'd schedule voice or video meetings on days I liked to go into town to buy things or eat at good restaurants).

And surfing fast, big, tropical beach and point breaks ... well.

I bought a house down there; I'm back in the states right now, because I came back and got married to a girl from my hometown. But we're heading to Ecuador again as soon as we can. :)

But a startup? Hmm.

I think I'd have been a good startup employee, but contracting was a better fit anyway since I really appreciated multi-month blocks without work.

That might make small towns better if you want to start a "lifestyle business" instead of a VC funded startup.

You could be surrounded by thousands of people at any moment who all have headphones on and keep their gaze at a 45 degree angle towards the ground. You too can walk past homeless panhandlers asking for money and ignore them. You can hang out at hip dive-bars and pretend to be cool until the neighborhood gentrifies and you have to commute farther out to the next spot. You can sit next to the schizophrenic on the bus that went off of their meds and everyone does their best to pretend e is the hallucination and not a real person. You can go to events where every clique but your own is present. You can rub shoulders with everyone who wouldn't give a damn if they stepped on you for their next big opportunity.

You can find loneliness anywhere.

Being "always connected," I'm beginning to realize, is not always the optimal state. You lose the ability to focus, to consider the future, and form thoughts of your own. As Douglas Rushkoff suggests: we all live in the present.

For better or worse this is the way things work... but I think it's rather amazing that we have the option to work on a terrace in a medina in some North African city if we want to. And yet so few of us, at the forefront of the technology that enables this lifestyle, take advantage of it -- even for temporary periods. There's something to be said about taking a few months away from the Valley to think for a while.