What Makes a City Startup Friendly? | Hacker News Reader

What Makes a City Startup Friendly?

startup.partnerup.com

8 pointsdabent15 comments

Large national airport.

I think there's something to be said for having more than one large airport, in competition with each other, in any large enough major metro area. Single-airport cities in my not-pluralizable-to-data experience have more problems with rental car shortages, weather, and traffic.

Perhaps it's just a question of number of airports per population and/or land area. About 1 per million people seems about right, even though the Bay Area falls shy of that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_United_States_Metropol... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_100_largest_metropo... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_by_p...

Is there a convenient count of major and/or minor commercial airports for these areas?

He listed 6 factors to ponder.

1. Low cost of living.

2. Nearby colleges and universities.

3. Community of experienced entrepreneurs.

4. Large national airport.

5. Plethora of professional service providers.

6. High concentration of consumers

I think bullet points 3 to 6 make point 1 impossible.

Chicago has all of these in spades except for #3; which is a doosy as it's far and away the most important.

Chicago has a low cost of living?

relative to the SF bay area? yes. (currently in chicago, moved from bay ~2 years ago)

It's not cheap if you live in a trendy neighborhood, eat out a lot, and own a car. But it is cheap if you live in a safe working-class neighborhood and rely on the CTA. In 2003 I lived in an apartment in Pilsen with 2 startup founders and lived off of $800/month - that was my share of the rent, utilities, internet, and company cellphone plan along with food. And I probably could have saved $100/month if I didn't go to bars.

I agree in general, though it's not so all-or-nothing.

Being able to live and work cheaply

I find the key to be in the above, where the focus is on ability. Two cities may have very similar overall costs of living on some generally accepted scale, yet still have significantly different costs of "living" for entrepreneurs.

Perhaps point 1 should really be "low minimum cost of living." Does anyone provide CoL spread information for the bigger cities?

Austin, Texas

Dallas Texas meets all six.. but IMHO it sucks for small startups (plenty of big tech firms though!)

I always wondered why this is.. my hunch is that is way to conservative for "innovative" minds (hence why Austin rocks)

Brussels meets these, though point 1 is only true if you're not buying property.

Doesn't have much of a startup scene though :-(

The one item that really matters is:

Community of experienced entrepreneurs.

That's kind of a chicken & egg thing though, isn't it? How do you get that community if your city isn't startup friendly?

bust ass for the rest, then don't bail out to the Valley when you get funded. yes, i'm looking at you, groupon. please don't leave us.

in my opinion, this article is answering the question "what makes a city easier to find vc money." we really need to break the mentality that palo alto and boulder are the only places where technology and web-based startups can go to market.

Why we chose the Austin Area vs. elsewhere:

  1. No Crime (NYC-Yikes)

  2. No Personal Income Tax (Calif, Mass & NYC-Yikes!)

  3. Low (all other) Taxes (Calif & NYC-Yikes!)

  4. Low to basically non-existent business regulations & red-tape (Calf-Yikes!)

  5. Reasonable Weather (Mass & NYC-Yikes!)

  6. Reasonable Cost of Living (NYC-Yikes!)

Overall Austin seemed financially the best place because Texas does not tax any personal income and that is a big savings. Since both of us founders are from California on the minus side we have found Austin to be incredibly humid in the summertime and since we are still small we might give Seattle a try very soon.

Too bad the state government of California is not as business friendly as Texas, I’m sure a lot of companies would move back quickly.

While things like cost of living, availability of specific services etc are important the article missed one thing.

In the earliest stages at least, what you need most is a place to be able to think and work and create something without too much distraction.

I'd say a good place to start a startup would be similar to a place you'd want to live if you were working on some hard math problem or something. Somewhere you can walk the streets and think about stuff, with libraries with quiet corners and ubquitous coffee shops would be my ideal. I guess that probably describes a lot of university towns, especially the older ones.

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