[thomasptacek]

My perception, from experience, is that it's actually harder to hire in the Bay Area than, well, anywhere else. Anyone with a modicum of talent that you interview in Sunnyvale can pull a $130k/yr job out of their back pocket, and the BigCo alternatives in the valley are actually pretty spectacular.

If you need a large team of very gifted engineers, start in a college town that isn't Palo Alto or Berkeley.

[anamax]

I don't understand why lucrative alternatives are an obstacle.

That $130k/year makes trying a startup less risky. It gave them an opportunity to save so they can live off savings. It also means that they can recover quickly from any debt they incur.

It also establishes a benchmark for a startup's value creation. If early employees can't reasonably believe that they're going to get significantly more than $130k for their efforts, either the idea/execution is too small or the founders may not play well with others, which causes other problems leading to failure.

[thomasptacek]

You're making a lot of sense; I'm just saying, my experience was that it was harder to hire in the Bay Area than it has been for me to hire in NYC or Chicago, where I hire now.

It's also obvious that developers are more expensive to hire anybody in San Francisco than in Des Moines or Minneapolis.

Also, please note the bias towards founders in these discussions. A tiny team of founders is a good start, but you eventually need actual employees.

[anamax]

There are lots of places where it's very easy to hire but that hiring ease comes from factors that reduce the success rate.

Does harder hiring in the SF Bay Area hurt or does it merely help weed out things that don't have a chance for some other reason?

As far as later stage employees go, successful silicon valley companies go elsewhere for what they can get elsewhere.

I think that you should start where you think that you have the best chance of success. I don't think that "harder to hire" or "more expensive" captures sufficient detail, but it's your company, so that's your call.

[thomasptacek]

I think you should ask questions of the conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom says one of the reasons to move a company to the Bay Area is that it's easier to hire developers. You should question whether that's really true. I gave some reasons why I think it might not be, and cited my experience. I don't think it's true. But you make the call.

Also, careful with words like "later stage". You're "later stage" as soon as you hire the first person who isn't getting a founder's stake in the company. For us, that was weeks, not months, after the birth of our company.

[anamax]

That's odd. I see founders, early, and maybe another round of folks before "later".

To me, "later" isn't until the biz is well beyond self-sustaining, when there's very little risk of failure.

[thomasptacek]

I understand, and am not arguing with you. Whatever you want to call them, that "second round of folks before later" is harder to hire than the founders. They're employees, not principals, and you can't bullshit them.