code

I will say the article is full of bullshit. Yes, cost of living is drastically lower and the quality of life and the surrounding is not bad at all in any way. But a Silicon Valley / SF? It is not.

If you're like me and you've lived in all 3 areas and grew up spending a huge chunk of your life in each of the 3, you'll quickly realize it's not even close in terms of the culture and resources the bay offers. I can understand the sentiment if you have a family (spouse and kids) and want to find affordable housing and all but lets not kid ourselves, that's not the same as arguing a tech centric hub worthy of comparison to the valley.

Disclaimer: I am not associated with True Ventures in any way.

However, I have been a long time customer of Wells Fargo and would vouch for them. I love their customer service and have done both personal and business banking with them. They're headquartered in San Francisco as well and are available almost everywhere nationwide. Hope this helps.

That said, if you choose San Francisco, the city is small enough so that it doesn't matter where you are but if you want to be as close to the startup scene as possible, SOMA (district) is probably your best bet. If you want convenience, Richmond is close to a lot of food places that you can walk to on foot.

If you opt for the valley route, being as close as possible to University Ave in Palo Alto is probably what you're after.

Had several problems, can't remember them all. One that I do remember is it being extremely problematic or slow loading Google Maps mashup base stuff where Safari perfectly just worked.

Talk to an attorney about something called the Termination of Service agreement, have him sign this agreement along with the Convention Invention Assignment agreement. You'll need to compensate him some dollar amount for signing the agreement in good faith but it'll be the cleanest way to separate and vitally important moving forward.

On the other hand, after launch, AWS is amazing to scale with. I use AWS in conjunction with Rightscale which I highly recommend. Much easier to deploy.

As an entrepreneur, and someone who've successfully sold his own startup, I would gladly help out other entrepreneurs but I wouldn't invest in any. Others have ask if I'd be interested in investing and simply put, I don't enjoy investing nor is it something in my nature. What I love to do and what I'm passionate about is building a company.

I'm not the type that can invest in others and casually give advice on the side lines. I am the type that is very hands on and you can't be an investor and do that unless you plan on doing very limited investing and that's it. My opinion of course. That said, that doesn't mean I'm not interested in helping people, make introductions, and give valid advice freely.

Paying it forward doesn't necessarily mean having to put in money. Everyone is different. Just because they don't want to invest doesn't mean they aren't trying to help. You need to clearly distinguish the two. As a matter of fact, I wish most people who look for investors to invest make better choices on the investors they would accept rather than focus on just the money they would get. Mark suster says it best that taking on an investment is worse than marriage as its a heavy commitment. Get to know the people who are investing in you behind preliminary meetings and understand the value in which they can provide beyond the money. Even YC are selective of who they accept.

OP, I think as long as you can build what you're trying to build and it's solid without serious issues, you're good enough. Most founders will end up hiring more technical people on to help with complex algorithms and such down the road. Not every technical founder have say, a PhD in Machine Learning for example, to build a complex semantic search engine (random example). As long as you're confident in your code to an extent to get the company up and running and be able to lead a technical team, you're probably good enough to call yourself a technical cofounder.

Fullsail has a web design and web development program but I don't know if you'd consider them elite. Web development is generally self-taught and not really something most people pursue degrees for.

I've been down this road quite a few times. To me, it really is more of a matter of asking is this person right for me if our lifestyle choices conflict. So in essense, the startup almost always win.

Having said that, I've always been impressed with the Design School each time I've been there (don't actually know if its related to what you're looking for): http://dschool.stanford.edu/

Disclaimer: I am not a design major, my design skills are self-taught, and I'm a former Stanford student.