[andrewescott]

From the title, I had expected an article on start-up communities that were themselves spread across many countries around the globe. However, it turned out to be about city-centric startup communities that can be in any city.

Are we still at the stage where a community needs to be based in the same physical place? Why don't the currently available collaboration tools enable start-ups and the communities around them to be independent of location?

Does it come down to: most VCs won't invest outside their own cities?

[prostoalex]

It's still pretty hard to beat physical proximity for teams, so most companies stick to one office for as long as they can.

While you can grow from 1 to 5 employees pretty much anywhere, going from 5 to 500 is hard outside a hub, where you can poach talent from larger players.

[acgourley]

Humans are built to socialize in meat space. I've been on HN since about the beginning. I have met... two people through it that I now consider friends. I've met so many more outside of it, it's hard to even compare the two concepts.

[zanny]

I think you are comparing nuts and bolts. HN and its other popularity-forum colleagues like reddit are not very conductive to network building or long term friendship forging. Your interaction with me, for example, is at most reading this post, maybe reading my comment history (1 in a million) and either replying with your own take on what I wrote, or moving on. There is no commonality there besides the discussion topic and the means of communication, and the dialog ends instantly when you are done posting.

I made most of my current online-friends in video games, mainly WoW, some in rpgs like Neverwinter Nights, some from my emulator days. I think it is the difference between a shared hobby and interest in it you can talk about outside the discussion channels, and the blurred lines between what HN topically discusses - since it is usually all about startups and VC and tech, it is very business driven rather than hobby driven, even when you get a fair bit of hobbyist and OT threads at the top, the culture, expectations, and environment stay the same.

[jaggederest]

That's pretty much what HN is, I believe.

[rhizome]

Why don't the currently available collaboration tools enable start-ups and the communities around them to be independent of location?

It's pretty much a monthly topic here: because companies (to paraphrase) don't like to use remote workers. The history of subculture also tells us that communities spring from groups of players: before punk rock music emerged, punk rockers were (paraphrasing again) just a bunch of underemployed and blue collar kids who fit into neither the mod nor rocker scenes.

If the desire for a decentralized and geographically dispersed startup scene gathers enough momentum, the participants will create the companies and communities that support that way of working, as well as finding the funders who will contribute working capital to these kinds of operations.