Cities and Ambition (2008)

by joelrunyon • 13 years ago

185 123 13 years ago

ycmike5• 13 years ago

This is one of my favorite ever PG posts. It's what is driving me to get out to the East Coast as soon as possible and eventually the Bay Area.

mindcrime3• 13 years ago

I've often thought about the allure of moving to the Bay Area and being part of "startup central", but I can't help but suspect that I have an overly romanticized view of what it would be like. And there are existence proofs that a startup can be founded - and succeed - in North Carolina. So while I get what you're saying, I have some major doubts about moving out there. Higher cost of living, more traffic, more smog, more competition for talent, etc., etc. - these all strike me as factors that argue against moving.

OTOH, the energy, the vibe, the ambition that pg talks about here... I so want to be around that and more like minded people. And while the Raleigh / Durham area has a burgeoning startup scene, I don't get the impression that it can come close to touching the energy in, say, Palo Alto or Mountain View, or San Francisco.

Guess I need to just drag my ass out West and take it all in sometime. I keep hoping a consulting gig will take me out there and give me an excuse to go for a few weeks, so I can check it out. :-)

nickpinkston2• 13 years ago

I moved from Pittsburgh to SF, and I have zero regrets. I've found no where in the world better for people trying to build the future.

I agree with PG that the best conversation is in Cambridge, MA, wealth-gathering in NY, but if you want to build your ideas - the Bay Area is the center of the modern enlightenment.

impendia2• 13 years ago

I've lived in all of Durham, San Francisco, and Menlo Park (next town over to Palo Alto).

Durham, in my mind, had a weird vibe. Despite growing up there, I think what I remember best is taking a swing dance workshop (in my mid-twenties) from Sharon Ashe. Sharon had been at the heart and center of the San Francisco lindy hop community, possibly the best swing dance scene in the world. She had co-founded the 9:20 Special, which still attracts a crowd of hundreds every week.

But apparently she had burned out, and had too much of the cost of living and the competition (there isn't really any smog) and decided to move to Durham. She wanted a lower-key, quieter life, while still enjoying most of what she'd enjoyed in San Francisco. At the time, this struck me as a profoundly sad thing to do, and soon after I left town.

I would say that compromise is at the heart of what Durham has to offer. This is ultimately why I left, but it has got great restaurants, good weather, a lot of culture going on, and above all a wide range of diverse, interesting, active, intelligent people. Just not quite as much of any of the above (except for the weather) than SF or Cambridge. Take that for what you will.

e-mail in profile if you have questions.

ycmike5• 13 years ago

I agree. I think if you're someone who really wants to make an impact with technology then get around people like you and stop trying to make the people around you like you. At this point, I am talking to myself :)

joelrunyon• 13 years ago

Seeing as this came out in 2008 - I'm really curious to see if PG has any updated thoughts on the cities he mentioned as well as some of the new rising tech centers (Chicago, Austin, etc)

qntmfred• 13 years ago

not to mention NYC, and especially so since he specifically mentioned whether New York could grow into a startup hub to rival Silicon Valley

michaelochurch3• 13 years ago

I like New York a hell of a lot more than the strip mall called Silicon Valley, but New York is nowhere near SV as a startup hub.

First, the VC climate is different and employee option pools are just shitty (5 to 20%). You won't find good engineers willing to work for non-founder equity. The people who work for 0.1% of a mediocre startup are not good and you'll have to hire $200-400/hour freelancers to fix their work after you fire them. (One startup offered me $275/h to fix its Rails app and I've never even used Rails.)

Second, the quality of startups is just not there. Granted, 97% of the startups in the Valley are total garbage as well, because the VCs have no taste or insight, but at least SV has that other 3%. New York doesn't. Most of the founders are people who failed out of finance but managed to snag enough connections (as a consolation prize) to raise VC.

Third, there are startups that luck their way into a few good engineers for a little while, but in NYC, they never keep them. There's a lot of title inflation in NYC (Senior Engineer by 24, Managing Data Scientist by 26) but the people with any ambition leverage their inflated titles into better positions in finance (starting around $300k) or at companies like Google and Facebook.

New York is the place where you use startups to get better Wall Street or Google jobs.

gavinh2• 13 years ago

Perhaps the title should be "Cities & Ambition & My Snarky, Arrogant Generalizations".

southpawgirl2• 13 years ago

This post is brilliant. It puts into words an unspoken but pervasive sensation I had in the small town I grew up in, before leaving for greener pastures: it didn't ask me (or anyone else) to be anyone or anything better than I already was. I hated it for its leniency, for its forgiveness that ended up being suffocating. It makes sense to choose to live in a demanding place.

rarrrrrr• 13 years ago

My city does a pretty good job saying "we like you just the way you are."

_delirium5• 13 years ago

Living for a few years in the Bay Area, I didn't really end up with the same impression, though that could be my fault. My biggest impression was that the Bay Area wants to be extremely wealthy, but feels slightly inadequate about it. There was a constant palpable rivalry with both NYC and Southern California, a rivalry that was mostly one-directional. And on the Peninsula, in particular, there was a strangely obvious class structure. In particular the startup scene around Stanford was super-weird. I didn't know the Googlers (wrong years), but the kids I knew ranged from "comfortably upper-middle-class" to "extremely wealthy". Mostly my peers were their employees, not in the founder social group; the founder social group had a remarkable ability to raise "friends & family" money despite having no product (the most recent raised $750,000 from a company in China owned by an uncle, to develop mobile games). The demographics are so unbalanced that Stanford actually will give an automatic full-ride scholarship to any accepted student whose family makes under $100,000/yr, since not many admitted students qualify for it anyway.

Overall I don't really miss it, though I did like eating VC food and drinking VC beer at the ubiquitous lavish parties. But the culture might be even weirder than NYC, in terms of what it promotes.

sillysaurus2• 13 years ago

In particular the startup scene around Stanford was super-weird.

That's very interesting. Would you elaborate a bit more about this? What was it like, beyond the fact that those people have connections that most people don't?

_delirium5• 13 years ago

I guess that's the main part, the Stanford founders I met (mostly second-hand, via friends who did work for them) seemed to have access to connections and surprisingly large amounts of "friends & family" seed funding. Maybe they were doing a ton of work behind the scenes to get it, but from my perspective it seemed like some pretty surprising piles of money accessible to pretty unproven companies (piles of money much larger than YC gives). My friends got decent pay out of it (even if below-market), so I'm not particularly bitter about it, but it was sort of an eye-opening "wow, people have friends/family who can kick in $750k just like that?" kind of moment.

Also quite different compared to the vibe around other vaguely nearby universities: Santa Clara University, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, Cal Poly SLO, etc. They all come across as more "working class", socially, which contrary to what I might've thought some years ago, seems to correlate against being startuppy. The working-class Cal-Poly/Santa-Clara/etc kids seemed mainly interested in getting a stable job with a big tech company, while the upper-class-background Stanford kids were all into startups.

yetanotherphd• 13 years ago

Based on this article http://www.stanforddaily.com/2010/08/12/diversity-remains-on... around 28% (60% of the 46% of students receiving financial aid) of undergraduate students at Stanford come from families with comes of $100,000 or less.

bane5• 13 years ago

Mostly my peers were their employees, not in the founder social group; the founder social group had a remarkable ability to raise "friends & family" money despite having no product

Wow, that kinda hit me. I grew up a relatively poor, at times in the lower-middle class. I took a weird path to college and graduated very late. $750k doesn't seem like a huge amount of money to me anymore, but perspectives change.

I did a thought experiment...had I graduated high school, went straight to college and graduated and decided to do a startup...at that point (22 year old me), how many steps out in my family would I have to go for their entire net worths could combine into $750,000 at that time. Not free money available for investment, I mean every penny everybody had.

I gave up when I hit second cousins.

Things are better these days, if I were 22 today and fresh faced out of school and wanted to start a company, I could probably run the same experiment and hit $750k before I ran out of siblings (they live comfortable middle-class lives for the most part), but again, that's not money available for investment. That's the entirety of their assets.

Having family who could pitch in that much runway without it bankrupting them is something I could never have conceived of at that age. When I was 22, $750k may as well have been a hundred trillion dollars for all the relationship it had to my life.

My second real job was with a bootstrapped startup that was the result of 4 founders maxing out their credit cards. I think their combined startup capital worked out to around $40k.

I'm old enough now where I've handled much more money than that, and I have a good sense how much of a business that buys...it's surprisingly less than you think. But given a fat seed like that I bet I could have recruited a few other poor 22 year old looking for work grads for pennies into some startup and written a vastly different story of my life.

Aloisius• 13 years ago

There was a constant palpable rivalry with both NYC and Southern California, a rivalry that was mostly one-directional.

Seriously, the only people I know of who ever talk about NYC in SV are ex-New Yorkers.+

+ I'm a 4th generation native.

allochthon• 13 years ago

There was a constant palpable rivalry with both NYC and Southern California

Living in the Bay area, I can't say I relate all that much. You hear about New York in the context of food and finance, and about LA in the context of fashion and Hollywood. But not really in terms of a competition of some kind. Maybe it's a peninsula thing.

michaelochurch3• 13 years ago

The true rich (> $10M net worth) of the Bay Area are the self-loathing ones who wish they were in New York. I wrote about this: http://www.quora.com/Silicon-Valley/What-is-it-like-to-be-a-...

The upper-middle class isn't nearly as preoccupied with location. You don't really identify with a place if you can't afford to buy a house there. (Or, if you do, you're a sucker.) The NYC envy of the Silicon Valley elite is mostly a phenomenon of the VC/MBA circle. (I've never heard of L.A. envy. Maybe in the '80s or '90s it was strong, but I can't imagine anyone having that now.)

hkmurakami• 13 years ago

Stanford actually will give an automatic full-ride scholarship to any accepted student whose family makes under $100,000/yr, since not many admitted students qualify for it anyway.

From what I understand, this is now common practice not only at Stanford but at many of the top private schools.

increment_i• 13 years ago

Great comment! Often I'll read "start-upy" articles about starting ventures and the flip kind of attitude towards guidelines like "and now it's time to ask friends and family for funding!" I can't fathom, nor do I know many people who I would consider sane, who would take money from their friends or family to start the kinds of businesses that are discussed on HN. If you end up with the next Google, then I guess it's all gravy but since insider giants like pg himself are constantly talking about the ridiculous odds startups face, you could literally destroy lives doing this.

But, I never considered that this viewpoint was a hallmark of the middle class. It never struck me that these people were never actually talking to me, but maybe to a different, more affluent class of people, in a very specific part of the world.

danhak• 13 years ago

He had me until he said this in the fifth section:

"DC and LA seem to send messages too, but I haven't spent long enough in either to say for sure what they are."

...and then went on to opine on both those places, with relatively shallow stereotypes.

meritt• 13 years ago

What is LA about if not fame, vanity and an acceptance that it takes hours to drive a few miles?

_delirium5• 13 years ago

Depends on where, but the nice parts of LA seem more down-to-earth and transit-friendly to me than the nice parts of San Francisco, believe it or not. If you consider only the Westside, bounded roughly by the 10 / Culver Blvd. on the south, Hollywood Hills on the north, the Pacific Ocean on the west, and Elysian Park on the east [1], which is roughly comparable in area to SF, imo it's much more livable than SF. Better transit & cheaper housing overall.

[1] Roughly: http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1738808199#map=12/34.0541/...

dima55• 13 years ago

Heh. Thing about LA is that it's huge. If you look for that stereotype, you'll find it. But you can also find anything else.

wwweston2• 13 years ago

It's true that there are some people who are there in LA because they've gotten the message that entertainment fame (vs a startup) is the only way they'll matter in the world, that there's vanity, and that traffic can suck away your will to live or do anything if you don't figure out a way to avoid it.

It's also true there's lots of people who participate in entertainment because they love it. They love making stories, they love acting, they love singing, dancing, they love making sets, effects, animation, soundtracks, songs, whatever. They know their products can change minds and change the world, too. A lot of these people aren't so different from your typical hacker.

There's also a lot of shenanigans and bullshit from people looking to hustle a buck or make their next fortune. I'm sure you can find the analog.

I'll also note that I live in West LA in a few miles from my job, which takes me 10 minutes to commute to, and which pays wages which are probably average for an SF webdev job (though possibly somewhat above average for an LA webdev job).

And you can find 2 bedroom apartments are available for under $2000, 1 bedrooms between $1000-$1500 (though you can get a luxury place or something by the beach if you really want to pay a lot more).

It's certainly not a perfect place (I'd be happier with it if there were more varied weather, and more access to nature and quiet space), and of course, not everybody's experience with LA is like mine. In fact, LA is so big and so varied that what I've come to suspect over my experience there is that there simply isn't any single summary that can capture it.

gavinh2• 13 years ago

The Valley urges its inhabitants to become more powerful... by creating cat photographer social networking iOS fart apps?

awakeasleep2• 13 years ago

I have to call out Paul Graham's idea that social class is dropping of the list of important things.

What it means changed a little, and I think it's now more important than ever. The thing is, someone like PG never sees or interacts with anyone lower than upper middle class. Other 'incompatible' classes are invisible to us.

There is a whole world of people in this country that he wouldn't even be able to talk to. Depending on your state, between 59 and 80% of people graduate high school. That 20-40% isn't dropping out because they're running a startup.

There is a class of people that takes advertisements at face value, as sources of information. There is a class of people that doesn't value education... There are millions of people that don't even have the same goals or life values as a middle class people do.

PG you used the cliche "second class citizen" a bunch of times in this article without thinking about what it actually means!

barry-cotter2• 13 years ago

There is a class of people that takes advertisements at face value, as sources of information.

Not in America there isn't. Well, not a social class. The amount of tv the average American watches is insane, something like 4 hours a day. It is impossible to watch that much tv without developing some rudimentary media literacy. Maybe less, and less sophisticated than smarter, more educated people but the number of people who think drinking Bud Light will actually make them more popular and win them a hotter mate is pretty damned small.

I agree with almost everything else you said. I do suspect that every YC cohort has at least one American who grew up poor by American standards though. I'm sure they're underrepresented though.

ricardobeat2• 13 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if the opposite is true. It's unbearable to watch 4 hours of TV if your mind is constantly analyzing the content. Regardless, studies show that your ability to rationalize propaganda doesn't make you immune to it. The effect is much more subtle.

awakeasleep2• 13 years ago

You have not worked with seriously underprivileged people. Poorness is related to the lowest social classes in the USA, but they're actually defined by a lack of the basic tools it takes a person to survive in modern society, like literacy and numeracy. Anyone from any walk of life can become poor.

I'd be surprised if a single y-com company had a single employee that was raised by functionally illiterate American parents. I'm not talking about a child of immigrants either, but the intergenerational trainwreck of the American underclass. Keep in mind that 14-20% of Americans are functionally illiterate.

Take a minute to imagine what your life would be like if you couldn't really read. I'm not making this up-- there are lots of people who think McDonalds is healthy because Olympic athletes are on the bag.

snogglethorpe• 13 years ago

This was a slightly silly essay that seems to essentially be more "places PG likes" than any sort of objective analysis...

Great cities certainly do have a vibe, but Cambridge (MA), although it's a very nice place to live and obviously has tons of smart people, is actually a pretty sleepy place in general; for all it's charms, it isn't a "great city." The "density of the unfamiliar" which I think tends to characterize great cities isn't really so evident in Cambridge (the presence of MIT / Harvard / etc does generate some of this, but universities tend to be somewhat closed societies).

secstate2• 13 years ago

Toss in a healthy dose of MIT becoming a shell of its former hacker-self, and Harvard being, well, Harvard, and I'd say Cambridge is the least exciting aspect of the greater Boston area.

Besides the fact that Bostonians are most definitely infatuated with pop culture and hipness. Maybe across the bridge things get more intellectual, but not so you'd notice.

I will say in PG's defense that I've never seen a city more excited about selling you a master's degree as the key to your new future life ; - ) So I suppose they do value education (an brick-for-brick there's probably more post-secondary schools in the area around Boston than almost anywhere else in the U.S. or even the world.).

fjabre• 13 years ago

Completely agree with you about the universities being akin to closed societies. I've lived in Boston most of my life and if you aren't currently attending said universities and are not a gushing alum constantly attending university sponsored events then you will find Boston and surrounding areas to be very sleepy indeed. The puritan spirit is still very much alive and kicking in the bay state.

WWKong• 13 years ago

Having lived both in LA and Bay Area the biggest difference is that Life in LA doesn't come with any baggage. You don't have to change the world. You don't have to launch the next big idea. You don't chase money as hard as Bay Area (yes). You don't have to keep telling yourself and the world that "my city is awesome". You just live a good life with good food, good people, good work.

javajosh• 13 years ago

My sense is that people in LA really want to get to be on stage. No, you don't have to be a superstar, but people in the business want to keep working in show business, more than anything. And for exactly the same reason game developers keep doing it: because they love it. They love doing things just because people enjoy it, and not because it has to be done.

There is joy in frivolity.

sanj• 13 years ago

This may be my favorite line from a PG essay of all time:

So the kind of people you find in Cambridge are the kind of people who want to live where the smartest people are, even if that means living in an expensive, grubby place with bad weather.

I say this as I build out an addition on my already expensive house, while holed up in a AirBnB victorian with drafty windows watching wet, sloppy snow make the streets into mess.

On the other hand, I've chatted about web stacks with my landlord, auto-correlation functions with a dinner guest, toy accordion repair with my neighbor, and depth-perception optical nerve cross talk with my other neighbor. That's in the last two days.

I love it here.

swalsh• 13 years ago

You'll find some of the most intelligent public conversations that can be had on the Red Line.

oscargrouch• 13 years ago

thats why i prefer nature over cities. The messages it sends is:

You can be whatever you want.. The observations and love for nature is one of the big secrets of geniuses like Da Vinci and Newton.. florence or england, just give them the means to achieve their goals..

Cities are stuck in the era they shine most.. and if you listen to them now, you will be listening to the 20, 19 or even 18 century echoes.. not the XXI we are supposed to

I think real genius has a transcendental and private path to somewhere, where they can listen whatever, and bring it back to our reality.. if they happen to listen to cities its just to give them new interpretations of it.. so we (the voyeurs of their work) can see it with new eyes..

If you listen up to most cities, you will see more what them want you to see than its own reality.. unless you belong there for more than 10 years.. and you already know it... its pretty much fake, delusional..

I dont know you, but i happen to like the real thing, i care more about the truth.. thats why nature is more seductive to me than city people or concrete walls

secstate2• 13 years ago

I couldn't agree with you more. I'm here reading hacker news in a rural town in Maine (a summer town on the coast, granted, but hey, it's winter ... ).

I love your note about cities being stuck in the era they shine. That's brilliant and so unbelievably true. I love cities and urban environments. I grew up in Chicago and spent time living in our fair city (Boston) before moving north.

But I settled up here to be close to family and to not let my ambition get to heady. You can wind up feeling really important and powerful in a city, and the discovery that barring 0.01% of the population you aren't actually very important or powerful will destroy you if that's what you built your life on. Instead I've built a life around family, farming and hacking (which incidentally, farming basically invented ... every farmer has their own solution to a problem).

kpennell5• 13 years ago

Cool!

kpennell5• 13 years ago

Excellent comment. Thank you. I love how classless camping is. You can just be human to each other. Festivals can sometimes bring this out as well.

eshvk2• 13 years ago

New York is pretty impressed by a billion dollars even if you merely inherited it. In Silicon Valley no one would care except a few real estate agents.

The only defining common factor of all the VC shops in the bay area is money. Sure a lot of them made that money in tech but it is money that lets them have power.

Also some anecdotal impressions:

I lived in SF for two years. I think the constant humdrum of tech (specifically a strange breed of big data + machine learning + web tech) is making the place intolerably insular. When I first moved there, I thought the opinionated twenty something year olds who think that their youth and opinions mean that they matter were cute. Now, it is just fucking insufferable. Building a company shouldn't be purely about getting sold, acqui-hired or building products that no one outside your iphone addled tech circle will use.

I think there is utility in moving out of the bay area to build real products. I recently moved to NYC. The tech scene feels refreshingly small, surprisingly under-dog like, I am reminded of Austin. Most tech folks I meet here are mellow, there is also a large overlap with incredibly smart ex-finance people who are humble and sociable.

Everything also doesn't seem to be focused on shipping your shitty product and tweeting about it, there is focus on building something that is not primarily focused on acqui-hired or VC-driven.

Also, more importantly, NYC is superior to San Francisco as a place for your social life. The men:women ratio is way more balanced, you are constantly reminded that your "coding skills" are not all that define you. When I first came to interview here, I had serious misgivings about the place (the climate is miserable), yet I think the thing that made me decide to move here was a conversation I over-heard in a coffee shop between two girls. It was about Python. The snake, not the language.

hnriot2• 13 years ago

I think you must have missed the good parts of SF, if you felt that your coding skills defined you. Try Cole Valley, or the Lower Haight and skip SOMA. I would take issue also with your men:women ration nonsense, SF is full of women. I suggest you stop eavesdropping conversations girls are having near you and get out more! NYC isn't the answer. NYC is an amazing place, it's full of life and vitality, but so is San Francico. NYC has better galleries, but SF has better weather. Might I remind you right now it's 70's in SF while you have snow...

potatolicious• 13 years ago

The "stop eavesdropping and get out more" bit seems like an unnecessarily condescending/judgmental response to eshvk's comment, especially considering he hasn't said anything to suggest he's poorly socialized or a hermit.

This reminds me somewhat of response to people complaining of the Seattle Freeze (the infamous propensity for Seattleites to be simultaneously polite yet unfriendly). The standard response when this is brought up is to insinuate the complainer is antisocial. This, despite being so widely felt by so many that it has a name.

_zen• 13 years ago

As a native to NorCal, might I remind you this weather is incredibly unusual, and we're in a drought. I dislike the cold, but we need rain. If I wanted it sunny all year long I'd move to San Diego. This lack of rain is irritating many northerners right now because it's not habitual. The only people okay with it are non locals.

The other problem with this pressure ridge, is zero precipitation is horrible for your skin. You need lotion and humidifiers to avoid cracked skin, especially through sleeping.

I like warm weather in the Spring and Summer, but most Northern California residents enjoy living here for the seasons. It's almost depressing without them.

eshvk2• 13 years ago

I think you must have missed the good parts of SF, if you felt that your coding skills defined you.

As a person who got into programming five years ago after finding out math doesn't get you jobs, I would be worried if my average coding skills alone defined me.

Try Cole Valley, or the Lower Haight and skip SOMA.

I lived a block away from Cole Valley, dated girls in the Lower Haight, spent never more than an 8 hour day in SoMa. Your move! :)

Might I remind you right now it's 70's in SF while you have snow...

As do all my friends who keep sending me pictures. However, a view as observed through a window whilst working in a SoMa warehouse is about as real as a screensaver.

beachstartup2• 13 years ago

the gender ratio in SF is completely fucked.

when i lived in SF women would be completely rude to me when talking to them in a bar or social setting. calling me names to my face, bare sarcasm, thinly beiled insults, back-handed complements... you name it, i experienced it.

that kind of shit just doesn't happen in LA or NY. or vancouver, or texas, or ... anywhere, really. it's a REALLY fucked situation. sorry, single guys in sf.

pradocchia• 13 years ago

can you elaborate on your experience in SF? what kind of insults / sarcasm / backhanded compliments?

kpennell5• 13 years ago

Yeah, it can be quite an uphill battle there.

midwestthrowawy• 13 years ago

I'm a 25 year old living in a smallish midwestern city. PG's "you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do" is something that really resonates with my experience here. Anyone want to play fortune teller and suggest places I should visit/consider moving? Some important personality points:

- builder/hacker

- eager learner

- I'll step up for tasks right away

- I deeply care about making people feel loved/included and finding people who care about me

- likes public transportation

argonaut• 13 years ago

All of those points, except public transportation, are in favor of SF, IMO. And if housing is too expensive you can live in Berkeley or Oakland, near a BART station which is a good enough option to get you to SF. Assuming you get a job.

SF has a strong hacker culture, tons of meetups and talks going on every week (education), and SV in general has a strong pay it forward culture.

_delirium5• 13 years ago

If you can get a visa, Scandinavia. :)

(Offer not valid for people who like sun between November and March.)

analog31• 13 years ago

Maybe we live in the same city! But...

>> no one around you cares about the same things you do

is what I like. The diversity. I can get completely lost in a tech problem that I'm working on, and when I go out and talk to a neighbor, or chat with parents at soccer practice, the topic might be astronomy, biology, politics, or agriculture.

ycmike5• 13 years ago

You need to get out! I'm in the Midwest too and am planning my escape route.

etjossem• 13 years ago

I moved to SF from Des Moines and it's definitely working out well. There is a strong builder/maker culture in the tech community here. Make sure to surround yourself with the right people - just like anywhere else - but everything else should fall into place. Good luck!

marrone12• 13 years ago

As a born and raised Ohioan, I am loving the East Coast. 8 years in DC and now in NYC. I've only ever visited the West Coast, but there's a grit to the rust belt and the east coast that just doesn't exist out west, and I can't live without it. Life just seems too... smooth out West.

lsc4• 13 years ago

First? I've got a Midwesterner working for me. At least for him? it doesn't seem to be hurting his work.

My opinion is that while it's super nice, socially, to be around people who are into what you are into in person, it doesn't make that much difference when it comes to getting actual work done. Now, sales? raising money? all that bullshit where you have to interact with business people? face-time matters a lot. But for purely technical work, hell, I'll be working in the same house as someone and I'll communicate via IM, because it's less disruptive.

On the other hand, he's working for me - If you want to make money? you have to find a competent business person, or at least a business person with money, and most of those guys want to look you in the eye. Not all, but most.

That's the thing; I get a lot of offers to merge, to invest, and to do other business-type things because I'm here and active in the community. I'm not even that active. But you know what? I haven't made a dime off of any of those. (and some of those have cost me enough to buy a central-valley condo) - As for the parts of my business that actually make me money? I could do those from just about anywhere. Of course, that probably says more about my skillset than anything else; I've had serious offers from people with serious money (well, serious money by my standards)

My own experience? moving to silicon valley was more than worth it. But, I've lived in silicon valley, I've lived very near berkeley and I've lived in the central valley. I haven't spent serious time other places. Avoid the central valley. It's not cheap enough to put up with the culture and weather, in my opinion.

Yeah, housing is expensive. but the thing about housing? well, the increase is a percentage of the cost of housing, so if you are okay with modest digs? 2x what you would pay for modest digs in the central valley (probably 4x what you'd pay in the midwest) still not very much money compared to what you are getting paid, and I'm okay with modest digs. (Of course, if you like really nice digs... that percentage increase really hits you.)

One big downside to the south bay is that our public transit is absolute shit. You might consider the Berkeley area for that. VTA doesn't look that bad on paper? But it is nearly completely useless. BART, on the other hand, is pretty good by west-coast standards.

leoc2• 13 years ago

My opinion is that while it's super nice, socially, to be around people who are into what you are into in person, it doesn't make that much difference when it comes to getting actual work done. Now, sales? raising money? all that bullshit where you have to interact with business people? face-time matters a lot. But for purely technical work, hell, I'll be working in the same house as someone and I'll communicate via IM, because it's less disruptive.

As far as I know, the case for being on the ground with your fellow enthusiasts and competitors in California was best made in 1985, by Arnold Schwarzenegger:

"The kind of people who train alongside you in a gym makes a difference. If you are surrounded by people who are serious and train with a lot of intensity, it's easier for you to do the same thing. But it can be pretty hard to really blast your muscles while the people around you are just going through the motions. That is why good bodybuilders tend to congregate in certain gyms. By having the example of other serious bodybuilders constantly in front of you, you will train that much harder.

That is what made Joe Gold's original gym in Venice, California such a great place—a small gym with just enough equipment, but where you would constantly be rubbing shoulders with the great bodybuilders against whom I had the privilege of competing-like Franco Columbu, Ed Corney, Dave Draper, Robby Robinson, Frank Zane, Sergio Oliva, and Ken Waller. Nowadays, it's rare to find that many champions in the same place, but if you aren't sharing the gym floor with great bodybuilders like Flex Wheeler, Shawn Ray, Nasser El Sonbaty, or Dorian Yates, it can be very motivating if there are pictures or posters of these individuals on the walls or championship trophies displayed.

In 1980, training at World Gym for my final Mr. Olympia competition, I showed up at the gym at seven o'clock one morning to work out and stepped out on the sundeck for a moment. Suddenly the sun came through the clouds. It was so beautiful I lost all my motivation to train. I thought maybe I would go to the beach instead. I came up with every excuse in the book-the most persuasive being that I had trained hard the day before with the powerful German bodybuilder Jusup Wilkosz, so I could lay back today—but then I heard weights being clanged together inside the gym and I saw Wilkosz working his abs, Ken Waller doing shoulders, veins standing out all over his upper body, Franco Columbu blasting away, benching more than 400 pounts, Samir Bannout punishing his biceps with heavy Curls.

Everywhere I looked there was some kind of hard, sweaty training going on, and I knew that I couldn't afford not to train if I was going to compete against these champions. Their example sucked me in, and now I was looking forward to working, anticipating the pleasure of pitting my muscles against heavy iron. By the end of that session I had the best pump I could imagine, and an almost wasted morning had turned into one of the best workouts of my life. If I hadn't been there at World Gym, with those other bodybuilders to inspire and motivate me, I doubt that day would have ended up being so productive.

Even today, when I'm training for other reason, such as getting into top shape for a movie role, or just trying to stay in shape, I absorb energy from people working out around me. That's why I still like to go to gyms where bodybuilders are training for competition. Even today, after all this time, it still inspires me."

/The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding/, by Arnold and Bill Dobbins, p. 87 in the 1999 edition. http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0684857219/

malandrew2• 13 years ago

pg, out of curiosity, what's your view on Berlin and other international cities of note?

ycmike5• 13 years ago

I believe in the post he said that his views are by no means nationalistic and that he feels someplace like Atlanta has the same problem as Munich. But I actually think this was in a "Startup Hubs" essay.

MatthiasP• 13 years ago

I guess he would have a much harder time getting a feeling for a city where he could not casually pick up what people are talking about due to language barriers.

wellboy• 13 years ago

Though, at entrepreneur meetups/event, it's funny EVERYBODY speaks English. Just yesterday at hy berlin, all the pitches were in English and 1/3rd of the people getting food/drinks are non-Germans. So almost every conversation between 3 people had one english speak and was thus held in English.^^

malandrew2• 13 years ago

    "Maybe the Internet will change things further. Maybe one 
    day the most important community you belong to will be a 
    virtual one, and it won't matter where you live 
    physically. But I wouldn't bet on it.

I would say that this is somewhat the case already, it's just that recognition online doesn't translate to the real world. Many people in open-source community wield as much power as the CEOs in Silicon Valley. Depending on what you've open-sourced, you have power over the powerful. Linus Torvalds and the community he fostered for example is responsible for empowering many of the powerful in technology.

ptc• 13 years ago

I'll just leave this here:

http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

grey-area• 13 years ago

What a hateful, small-minded little diatribe.

Jd• 13 years ago

Here are some cities I've lived in:

    Tokyo, Xi'an, Harbin, Rome, Assisi, Florence, Jerusalem, Berlin, Munich, Lyon, Palo Alto, DC, Boston, Providence, Philadelphia

My general assessment is that American cities feel more vibrant while European cities feel more sleepy. Cambridge is one locus of intellect for its own, perhaps the best left although I think American pragmatism chokes great thinking. For true intellectual engagement I think you have to poke around Europe and find the older generation of scholars and artists. As for Florence, pg should know folks like Pietro Annigoni that at least were keeping old traditions alive. Europe is in many ways like a very wonderful museum with a few old curators, but that old museum beats most new museums by a large margin.

jqm• 13 years ago

Interesting observations.

I have noticed the inverse is also true (as a few posters have already pointed out).

Some places just scream ignorance and sloth.

But hey... do you want good conversation or good weather?

If you do want good conversation how much is it worth to you?

Enough to spend 50% of your income on housing?

Sometimes being alone is where you get real thinking done.

Not always, but often.

bane5• 13 years ago

I grew up outside of DC and can probably say this about the city:

Washington D.C. thinks of itself as the center of power of the entire universe. And in a lot of ways it is. But it's a weird city. Power in D.C. is indirect and complex. You can't really start at the bottom and work your way up to positions of extreme power (though it's a popular story)...hard ceilings are everywhere. To be clear, I'm not talking about the more or less irrelevant city government.

The best way I can explain it is this, power in D.C. is build on a tripod. You must have all three of these things to be powerful: money, widespread popularity, and cunning (not intelligence).

This is different than other cities, where elements of this tripod exist, but aren't necessary to be powerful in that city. For example, in NYC, money is sufficient to be powerful. But even billionaires have failed to attain power in D.C. In NYC political connections are useful for making more money, but aren't strictly necessary. In D.C. political connections are critical. In NYC, you have to have alpha-like mammal aggressiveness (not necessarily intelligence), but in D.C. it's reptile like cunning that's needed. You can draw different but similar differences with other cities and power.

Power in D.C. is also incredibly transient and fickle. In theory, power in D.C. can accumulate to the point that a single individual can more or less wipe out all life on the planet, then just a couple years later has trouble keeping reporters off of his vacation property. It's a tower of power that's built on sands that shift so fast it makes the stock market look like a simple linear function. Everybody falls from power in D.C. It's the tallest tower there is, but the downward drop is inevitable. The key is making a soft landing when you do. That way you can take a "fall back" position to power in NYC on the board of an investment company or the Bay Area where you can become an Angel investor.

But you'll notice that people who are really powerful in one place rarely move from where they know how to operate, and when they do, rarely gain positions of equivalent power in their new homes. They just operate differently. Throwing money around in D.C. might make you popular for a bit, but without cunning you'll just be that guy who throws lots of parties.

It reminds me of the old saying

"Rich is being a millionaire basketball player, Wealthy is being the guy who signs the checks"

add to that "Powerful is the guy who proposed the bill that got turned into a law with teeth that regulated the NBA and bankrupted the wealthy owners."

sounds2• 13 years ago

"cunning (not intelligence)" - well said.

Intelligent people often think intelligence trumps cunning. Truth is, cunning people are very, very successful. Don't underestimate them. (I have.)

ekm2• 13 years ago

Isn't cunning just malicious intelligence?

wozniacki• 13 years ago

Could you give an example of how this power dynamic might work in a non-House-Of-Cards setting, you know, in a non-political setting?

Certainly everything in D.C. need not revolve around Capitol Hill/K-Street, right?

heynk• 13 years ago

Similar to GP, I also grew up in DC and would say the GP's description of DC's power complex is extremely accurate. The point is that even though the word 'politics' is used often, this structure is present in every industry. To thrive in DC, no matter what you're doing, you need the whole tripod.

bane5• 13 years ago

I'm not familiar with House-of-Cards sadly.

But yes, everything in D.C., even for 30 or 40 miles outside of the city, is absolutely consumed by the Federal government.

The downtown of D.C. proper, outside of the tourist areas, is almost entirely composed of foundations and think tanks and non-government organizations who's mission in life is to try and influence executive or legislative policy decisions. There's almost no other real industry by comparison. The tech scene in D.C. is dominated by fed contracting megacorps and small tech businesses that exist only to partner with those companies in order to get the small business set asides. The non-Fed tech sector in D.C. is abysmally small. It exists, and there are hacker meetups and proper commercial companies here, but the ecosystem for those companies is pretty sparse. Most of the non-fed commercial tech companies you find are IT services companies that help build internal infrastructure for non-tech companies.

D.C., the city, also dies after working hours and on weekends. There's minimal night life. It's slowly changing, but nearly everybody who works in the city in the Fed space, lives outside of the city. It means commuting here and traffic is easily as bad as L.A. It's so bad that many of the Agencies are moving or opening very large satellite offices 20 miles or more from D.C. just so they can find qualified workers.

The really powerful people, people sitting on all three legs of the tripod, don't live in D.C. at all. They'll live in Northern Virginia or Southern Maryland. If you want to bang into a Senator or a cabinet secretary while grocery shopping, go shopping in McLean or Great Falls.

It doesn't help that the residential parts of D.C. are rather grim and not very pretty. Even the old historic row houses are rather gritty looking piles of old bricks with broken sidewalks outside and overgrown weeds and grass everywhere.

But I think it's also that the atmosphere in the city is so stifling, the constant ladder climbing and political backstabbery so intense, that people just want to get away from it.

Take a look at the large West Coast tech companies with offices in and near D.C. and you'll see that, down to the position, they all open up their offices to cater to the Fed space. Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Google, etc. all have offices near D.C. and if you check out the job listings all require clearances and/or experience doing business with the Federal government.

Practically, nobody cares about how much money you make, or your investment abilities in D.C. It's your positional authority, and what that means, earned through the tripod of power, that people care about.

hawkharris• 13 years ago

I can relate to the intellectual energy that PG describes. Going to a high school in Cambridge, equidistant from Harvard and MIT, I used to feel intimidated by the city's collective brain power.

It was the kind of place where confidence intervals are a subject for smalltalk and ads for genetic research are geared toward everyday commuters.

I can't speak for everyone, but I think something interesting happens when you live in a place like Cambridge for several years. You start to feel less intimidated by the competition for knowledge.

Don't get me wrong — you still try to keep up — but Cambridge begins to calibrate your ego. You realize that you're never going to be the smartest person in your domain, let alone every domain. For this reason I appreciate the city more as I get older, and I'm glad I moved back to work as a software dev.

manuelflara• 13 years ago

Loved the article and its key idea that big cities send some kind of message about what people living there care the most about. Barcelona's message is clearly "enjoy life".

wwweston2• 13 years ago

"Every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most people who live there. If you can read people's thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place, you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thoughts. What ever that majority thought might be- that word is the word of the city. And if your personal word does not match the word of the city, then you don't really belong there."

- _Eat Pray Love_, Elizabeth Gilbert.

hnriot2• 13 years ago

" in London you can still (barely) hear the message that one should be more aristocratic."

spoken like a true tourist. that is just nonsense.

cperciva• 13 years ago

You know PG was born in England, right?

k0mplex• 13 years ago

Paul is describing an 80's New York. Paul doesn't use the word culture once in the essay. The word art only appears in reference to Europe and Paris. The strongest signal from New York is now much more about art, culture, and taste than about money.

midas007• 13 years ago

Perhaps he got an advance preview on that recent Scorsese movie.

I had to turn it off after 10 minutes because it jumped the shark with attaboy puerility.

michaelochurch3• 13 years ago

New York is all about money if you don't have it.

Actually, it's about real estate and legacy. Until you own a genuinely nice place (those start around $4 million) it's about real estate. After that, it's about preschool and grade school and making sure your kids have the connections to make something of themselves. Once those are shored up, it's about taste and the arts. Not before then, though, and most people don't get that far.

msabalau• 13 years ago

New York has been about art and culture for a very long time. That's because the artists are, economically speaking, a courtier class, and the best way for them to thrive (and therefore the best way to surround yourself with fellow full time working artists) is the locate yourself near the people with money.

ilamont• 13 years ago

Where would London fit on your continuum?

zw123456• 13 years ago

Come to Seattle and learn about another dimension.

brenfrow• 13 years ago

What kind of things do you think Seattle is know for, or breeds?

crucifiction• 13 years ago

Marijuana and IPAs

doktrin• 13 years ago

This is an inspired, and inspiring, piece of writing.

On a slightly snarky note, I always do appreciate a jab at DC, where I was both born and raised. It really is LA with bad weather and less attractive celebrities.

andy_ppp• 13 years ago

London would probably be "get on that fucking tredmill so you can buy a house you can't afford in an area you don't want to live, with a job you hate, to pay for a lifestyle you don't agree with".

disputin• 13 years ago

Precisely why I'm reading this post - in the hope of finding somewhere else. I was hoping there would be more mention of European cities.

lsc4• 13 years ago

PG makes me want to move to Boston/Cambridge. And his summation of silicon valley sounds... almost sick. But then I review my own behavior, and perhaps I am motivated more by power than I like to think?

I've always thought of the will to power, beyond power over yourself, as an ugly thing. But looking back at choices I've made? Yeah. I've wanted to change things. Even change things for others. And I've chosen power over money at several junctions. So, maybe I'm in the right place after all.

visakanv• 13 years ago

Will-to-power isn't ugly in of itself. It's what you do with it that counts. You can use it to support the weak and oppressed, you can use it to insure yourself and your loved ones (and more!) from damaging external stressors.

Everybody wants more power, nobody wants less. Also, power-over-yourself is the most fundamental thing about will-to-power (in an enlightened sense).

There's no point getting power over others if you have no power over yourself- then it's merely your appetites that have power over others, not you. As Da Vinci put, no man can have any dominion greater or lesser than over himself.

lsc4• 13 years ago

power-over-yourself is the most fundamental thing about will-to-power (in an enlightened sense). There's no point getting power over others if you have no power over yourself- then it's merely your appetites that have power over others, not you. As Da Vinci put, no man can have any dominion greater or lesser than over himself.

Yeah, now you are talking about a different kind of power, which is really a different and nearly unrelated thing. "Self control" or what have you. The ability to control and direct your mind and body. Sure, it's a great thing, and can be a great tool... but it's not what I'm talking about here.

I'm talking about the power to live where I want to live, and to be secure in my person and my property. To work when and as much as I want to. To obtain the goods and services I want.

All of these things require convincing others to do things for me, which is to say, power over other people; so to have a reasonable degree of power over your own life, you need a reasonable degree of power over others.

OldSchool• 13 years ago

One thing I don't see in the article or discussed here is that (at least I believe) a sign of reaching maturity is that you don't need to define yourself by where you live. While these places can be helpful in achieving your goals, ultimately wherever you go, there you are.

waitwhat123• 13 years ago

I need to get out of new york :(

Cities and Ambition (2008)

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