Comment by memracom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by memracom | Hacker News Reader

The whole Silicon Valley advantage is fading. I went there back in 1997 when it was very hard to find technical jobs in my country (Canada) because a lot of those kinds of jobs gravitated to head office cities for large companies, and many Canadian companies were subsidiaries of large American companies. In Silicon Valley, I learned that most startups fail or are acquired within in a year or so. It's like a lottery. Then I headed to London England, found a job fairly easily and lived there for 10 years or so. Not long ago I returned to Canada, Vancouver this time, and found it loaded with startups and other tech businesses that were more established. Another Canadian city that I am familiar with is Waterloo Ontario and it is in a similar condition. I'm told that Toronto is also overflowing with opportunities both startup and more established stuff. If you are going to play the startup lottery, why not do it among folks you know.

And in case you are wondering what this has to do with Miami, I agree with the OP, just stay home and build your business (startup or otherwise) right there. You still have a ticket in the startup lottery if that is the way you want to go, but just like in SV itself, most of those startups don't last very long.

However, unlike SV, if you stay where you are then you have a better chance of building a normal business that grows incrementally by serving profitable customers, reinvesting profits, and taking a longer term view.

Readers of HN should be very aware that there are startups all over the place, and not just in American cities but in most countries of the world. Silicon Valley just isn't as special as it once was because computers and tech and Internet connectivity is now virtually everywhere that there are cities.

I always find it interesting how a company that takes off and IPOs outside SV seems to gain almost no attention even when they have profits that would dwarf most of the hot startups. I work down the street from a startup that IPO'd a couple years ago for hundreds of millions, does double digits of daily trading on the NASDAQ, and seemingly nobody has heard of. Instagram selling for a billion is cool and all, but there are many companies like this who fly 100% under the radar. If I had to guess, it is probably a focus on B2C vs B2B. (Don't have the source, but I think I read it in Inc. this month) 80% of the startups filing for IPO this year are B2B. Food for thought.

Is it really under the radar though? If you're aiming for TechCrunch front page then being in SF is probably a much better bet, but beyond that hype bubble you can still do very well. There are certainly talented people all over the country and of course you're going to save money on rent, salaries, and basically everything else if you go outside of San Francisco.

Not having ever founded a company I could be extremely wrong here but my take is that SF could be detrimental to certain startups.. If you have $x saved up to support you while you start a company it's going to last you much longer in basically any other city in the country other than perhaps Manhattan. At that point you basically have to decide which is going to be more of a factor in your success, extra time with which to build your product or physical proximity to an entrepreneurial community? Of course there's no one right answer, but I suspect that for many web-based startups the extra time and savings would be more important than the surrounding environment.

I think it's more what HN specifically pays attention to, than what gets attention in a global sense. My read is that the community here is focused on web-oriented, low-capital, low-time-to-MVP markets (Y Combinator's preferences sort of set the tone, but lots of bootstrappers have similar aims). That tends to make higher-capital, higher-time-to-market, high-R&D or high-sales-touch, slower-growth businesses a bit off the radar here.

I think partly it's that people are inspired by the category of businesses that seem like: given $30k and two years in a garage, I could do that! This requires a particular kind of company, and lots of success stories just don't seem like the kind of thing you could do in a garage, so they aren't part of this particular corner of the Valley mythos. For example, one of the top tech IPOs of 2013 is CDW, a Chicago-based B2B firm that's been slowly growing since 1984 by building partnerships and logistics infrastructure, and is now IPO'ing 29 years later. Totally different kind of company.

I think the location actually matters a bit less. People probably do pay more attention to SF-based companies just because that's where a lot of the startup-sector media is, but companies from elsewhere that fit the model I described also get press, like 37signals (Chicago) or SoundCloud (Berlin). A number of the more prominent HN posters with startups are also from outside the Valley, like tptacek (Chicago) and cperciva (Vancouver).

Hey, there's no contact details in your profile but can I borrow some of your time to chat about tech work in Vancouver? voltagex at voltagex.org

Shoot an email off to the guys at growlab. They were really helpful and inviting when last I talked to them.

Thanks for this - for anyone else wondering, http://growlab.ca/, not the portable greenhouse!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com