[wenc]

pg wrote an article called "Cities and Ambition"[1] which greatly influenced my thinking on the importance of being around a critical mass of like-minded people, not just for the 1st-order effects of having the right networks and opportunities, but also for the 2nd-order effects of being subtly influenced by the intellectual energy around you.

(Side note: Eric Weiner wrote a Malcolm-Gladwell-like book "The Geography of Genius" on a similar topic; for a funny but insightful review see this review [2] where the reviewer terms this genre "American-Folksy")

These effects do shift, e.g. as mentioned in the article, Florence was the place to be for art during the Renaissance, but not so much today. NY is a big city that's constantly reinventing itself, and the gravity of tech importance has been moving toward NYC for a while now.

But as of right now, SV is still dominant.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html

[2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3KMN29SZX9ZKS/re...

[sudosteph]

Wow, good links, thanks. It's interesting to read that PG essay and realize just how drastically things must have changed in the past decade for SV people.

Like this snippet:

> How many times have you read about startup founders who continued to live inexpensively as their companies took off? Who continued to dress in jeans and t-shirts, to drive the old car they had in grad school, and so on?

Maybe it was doable in 2008, but the idea living "inexpensively" anywhere near SV just is laughable. Nobody is going to save more on clothing and cars than you will lose on rent. Even living in Brooklyn would get you significant savings over most places equally close to SFO.

Another interesting factoid he called out also has me wondering about the long-term implications of SV becoming the main magnet for startups:

> The power of an important new technology does eventually convert to money. So by caring more about money and less about power than Silicon Valley, New York is recognizing the same thing, but slower. And in fact it has been losing to Silicon Valley at its own game: the ratio of New York to California residents in the Forbes 400 has decreased from 1.45 (81:56) when the list was first published in 1982 to .83 (73:88) in 2007.

Seems to me like the trend of the extremely wealthy concentrating in California may not necessarily be a positive thing for creating an environment that can sustain ambitious people who need a place they can live cheaply while building things. Though I would be very curious to see what those numbers are looking at today.

All that said, his analysis of why he liked SV seems like it made sense at the time. It just clearly couldn't scale.

This does make me more confident about my decision to move back to Raleigh though. The "eavesdropping" thing he mentions is actually pretty great there, Durham and Raleigh have a very diverse and well-educated populace. People who don't think there are ambitious people around those parts must not run in the same circles as I do. I know more people building their own companies or side projects or just learning and building things for fun there than I could find in Seattle. It's hard to get funding there for sure - not so many super rich people around to hit up and perhaps outsiders misinterpret the more practical aims of local ambition as lack of ambition altogether. But while SV and NY and LA may send the strongest messages about power, money, and fame, I feel better than ever about being in the "Esse Quam Videri"[1] corner of the world instead.

[1] State motto of NC, translates to "To be, rather than to seem".

[mav3rick]

Seattle has many many people working on their own thing and side projects. It has an excellent talent pool of varying skills. Raleigh is nowhere near in scale right now

[sudosteph]

Everyone I know with talent here is too overworked at their main job to sustain side projects. That, rampant seasonal depression and a pervasive weed and drinking culture to deal with it all make it incredibly to hard to connect with people who actually want to collaborate on things on the side. It's the seattle freeze culture - it just isn't conducive to organic networking and small scale innovation. At least the Bay has nice weather to lift moods a bit.

Raleigh has plenty enough talent, from far more diverse backgrounds than Seattle, and just keeps growing. I don't need 10,000 engineers for a startup - I just need 10 really good ones and a pipeline for more. I've already got that network and I know the culture is better for me to find more, so I'm ready to go for it. It's a risk in some ways, but I gave Seattle a real try - it just isn't as uniquely conducive to building new things as people would like to believe.

[wenc]

I visited RDU for a week to figure out if it was a place that I would want to settle down in. I was told the American Tobacco Campus was a hotbed for new startups, and of course SAS in Cary has a big presence. There's definitely talent in the area (State, UNC and Duke) and there's definitely potential.

One thing I noticed though was the relative lack of cultural diversity and city feel (the entire RDU area feels suburban and comfortable, and lacks "struggle" as it were), but I don't know if this adversely affects startup viability, so it probably doesn't matter. I decided it wasn't a place where I would feel comfortable settling in, being a city-person, but for many people who are turned off big cities, I could see RDU being a good middle ground.

[mav3rick]

Let's see what startups come out of Raleigh vs Seattle.

[espressomachiat]

Thank you for this; always reminded of my favourite paragraph from pg's article:

>A friend who moved to Silicon Valley in the late 90s said the worst thing about living there was the low quality of the eavesdropping. At the time I thought she was being deliberately eccentric. Sure, it can be interesting to eavesdrop on people, but is good quality eavesdropping so important that it would affect where you chose to live? Now I understand what she meant. The conversations you overhear tell you what sort of people you're among.