As i wrote in my previous post, selecting the correct home for your startup is of critical importance. I am in this stage now, trying to collect more information about the communities i am interested in. So far i incline towards SF, NY and Boulder CO. I am starting a research on this front in hopes of collecting as much information i can find.
At this point i am more interested in the metrics of each community, like how easy it is to find engineers, funding and support. I will try a direct e-mail campaign with people and contacts that already live in these communities. When i have collected enough data i will post my results here again.
With all the objective data in the world it is still not wise to take the decision without visiting these communities. After all, it’s people you interact with in your daily life, so it would be wise to say that the “feeling” of the community is more important. So i’ll take my final decision after i have visited each one of them, creating my subjective opinion, which of-course, i will share with you along with all the details.
Feel free to answer these questions directly in the comments or mail me with your private answers at thp at@! geowarp dot com. Here are the questions:
1. How long will i need to find a co-founder for my new startup? I am looking for a highly skilled engineer on back and font-end web technologies, who is willing to dedicate him/herself to our mission. Don’t care about age, i have enough funds to get started and i am a very like-able deep geek, with above average communication skills.
2. Having a typical all-ok startup as our sample case. How likely is this startup to find seed funding in [NY/SF/Boulder] and in what time-frame? I know and understand the numerous variants that play a key role in this process, try to be as abstract as you feel comfortable with.
3.
[Only for NY/Boulder]Up to which scale can a startup grow in [NY/Boulder]? The most important resources being:
- The pool of available or recruitable engineers. A good metric would be to think how long a startup will need to hire 50 engineers in [NY/Boulder].
- Options for A, B, C, D+ rounds of funding. I know that at B+ rounds geography is less important but still i’d like to know which are the local options.
4. At what price would you set the average cost for office space in [NY/SF/Boulder]? From what i’ve found in SF it is about $400/cubicle/Month, how [NY/Boulder] differs to this?
5. In your opinion, which is the cost of life in [NY/SF/Boulder] for mid-term (2-3 months) stay? I know in SF renting a room in a 3-4 bedroom house costs about $500/mo. How the rent and all the other costs of living differ in [NY/Boulder] compared to SF? [(or even NY)]
Thanasis Polychronakis 
Thano
My experience says that the right place for your start up is your own city and most specifically your own room. Once you get traction and some significant ( few thousands a day ) traffic you move on for sure since you will have proof that your idea works. On top of that, when you do move to SV you will have something valuable to show.
I am in pretty much similar case to yous. In 2006 , i started out of nowhere with no tech knowledge ( but with freelancers from scriptlance.com ) an online file storage service out of my room in Larisa. The thing exploded in 3 months and by end of May i had a call from Google but of course with no outcome ( still an accomplishment however, few get that ) . I suggest, stick to your own place, even room where you have complete concentration and can be as paranoic as you want with your start up, once it gets some serious traction then is time to move on. Because i had 4 failures after that i can tell you with 100% accuracy that i knew i would fail because i was not crazy about it, not waking up 4am to check analytics and traffic and the only thing i was thinking was funding and SV.
My 2cents
Elias
Hey Elias! Thank you for the comment!
You make a very good point. One has to take advantage of his local residence to develop as much of a prototype possible, benefitting from the low costs of living. However there is a point where your startup needs fuel to take off. And by fuel i don’t only mean funds (good to have) but also people to hire, informed and experienced advice and generally grow within a community that enables and accelerates you instead of not being there.
That sounds like a nice reason for a future post, exploring what is the correct timing for a startup to make the move. In the meantime my why Europe Leaks Startups to US post is somewhat indicative.
Again thank you for the comment 🙂
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