Born and raised in the midwest here, and the article has done well to cherry-pick a relatively liberal spot in an otherwise conservative state. The same could be said of the Carolinas and the infamous research triangle park.
I left the midwest for the west coast because of the culture, full stop. I was tired of my state representatives writing my sexual preference off as a disorder. I was angry when the state decided a pharmacist could refuse to sell me birth control and I hated the legislative decree that tried to exert control over what gender got to use the bathroom or not. In short, I did not want to live in a state where the legislature had nothing better to do than fight the culture war to win votes for the next election. Yeah, I cant buy a house in san jose, but at least I dont have to worry about the ten commandments showing up at the DMV in stone or some toothless anti-shariah legislation burning through my tax dollars.
Drive 15 miles outside Columbus and it doesnt matter how many VC firm employees you have in the city, the bible thumpers win this state by a landslide of gerrymandering and arent ashamed to force their backwoods culture on you from the hinterlands. The midwests relationship with silicon valley terminates at the facebook, google, and twitter HTTP connection for a damn good reason.
I think a whole lot of the divide we see is not state/region based but city vs. rural. See how many quite conservative congresspeople CA sends to the house, many of which just voted on a bill that will increase taxes on many Californians, especially those who live in the big cities. The bay area sprawls out pretty far but drive into the Sierras or up north and it's a different story. Trump won Placer county (aka area around Lake Tahoe) by 51-39%. Further north, he won Lassen county 70-20%. This in a state where Hillary won and the legislature is roughly 2/3rds Democrat.
I see no reason the cities in the midwest couldn't host a tech boom, and over time start to turn the cultural tide as a result.
More globally, this divide makes me sad. I have trouble thinking these people who hold views I find quite wrong are bad people, but it seems somewhere our national conversation has broken down completely. Sometimes maybe for good reasons, but still it's quite depressing.
Those maps are, of course, a little deceptive because of the population density in urban areas. What looks like a little bit of blue land accounts for over half the population.
that jibes very much with the sort of stuff I read by Victor Davis Hanson on the two states of California, the coastal vs inland. I think he says something to the effect of Coastal California is Massachusettes, while inland California is Alabama or some other state analogy of the like. It's pretty intriguing watching his lectures online and reading his pieces. He has a very deep take on the rural vs city perspective having grew up in rural central valley California on his multigeneration family farm and coming up to do academic work at Stanford and hanging out at cafes and the like on University Ave and other Palo Alto experiences.
You’re not the first person I’ve seen equate the plight and horror of slaves and slavery to the contemporary condition of the LGTB community in a modern, first world, secular society, but I can’t help but wonder at exactly how it is that you arrived at that conviction.
(1) that's not what “equivocate” means (as in there is no definition of “equivocate” which fits that sentence structure.)
(2) If you mean something like “paints an equivalence between”, I didn't. I provided an illustration of the concept that the existence of a cultural difference does not imply equal validity of both sides of the difference.
(3) The attitudes rejecting homosexuality are almost entirely not found in secular society, though they may be found in national whose government is, nominally at least, secular.
2. you did, and your illustration provided no such thing; it’s a strawman with no bearing in reality, and your very self-same argument can be used to undermine your own position...
I'm having a hard time understanding why you would think this. Is the suggestion here that people who are morally sincere can't be bad (whatever their moral views may be)? Or is it that you just don't view homophobia as a genuine moral failing?
> I'm having a hard time understanding why you would think this.
Why I would think what?
>Is the suggestion here that people who are morally sincere can't be bad (whatever their moral views may be)?
No, the suggestion is that morality and ethics are complex cognitive, spiritual, religious, and cultural structures that don't boil down to some silly binary regarding ones stance on one issue.
The point is, saying someone is "bad" on the basis of their view on any one single topic is ridiculous, especially when there is a wide range of opinion on the matter. It's essentialism at its absolute worst. The link I provided shows that 98% of Nigerians have negative views towards homosexuality - do you really think that 98% of Nigerians are bad people? Of course not - there are nuances to these issues.
My greater point is that what I'll call "liberal religiosity" - this idea that if you break in any way from the standard liberal dogma, you are cast as a heretic and judged a "bad" person, like all these supposedly "bad" people in the Midwest who probably go to church every Sunday, help their neighbors out, act decently towards one-another, etc.
>Or is it that you just don't view homophobia as a genuine moral failing?
I am acquainted with one very churchy person that admitted to cutting off all contact with a friend of theirs after that person came out.
Yes, that does make them a bad person, and that makes it impossible for them to be more than just an acquaintance to me. And it also makes their religion--or at least their personal interpretation of it-- a bad religion. My imaginary friends don't get jealous of my real friends, and if yours ever do, you might want to consider pretending to break with them instead of turning on your real friends. It's up to you to determine if your imaginary friends have ever actually prevented you from making a real friend.
Ethical development has come a long way over the last 5000 years, but even the semitic monotheist religions have all had "That which is hateful to you, do not do to others," for the last 2000. And yet the faithful still put their own hateful words in the mouths of their gods or their prophets for the credulous to hear and repeat. They do it for money and for status, and care little for the consequences.
It is wrong. We can explain its wrongness with ethical treatise, and demonstrate the wrongness with game theory and Monte Carlo methods. Private behaviors of any sort are fundamentally unsuitable as discriminators in public life. To the extent that they leak, only that portion that is visible to the public should ever matter.
> My imaginary friends don't get jealous of my real friends...
> And yet the faithful still put their own hateful words in the mouths of their gods or their prophets for the credulous to hear and repeat. They do it for money and for status, and care little for the consequences.
To be honest, that attitude doesn't sound any more enlightened or tolerant than the attitude of the person that was being described.
Yeah, I'm not a very likeable person. People don't like me, and that suits me fine, because I'm not too fond of them either. Things might have been different if I hadn't so often been on the receiving end of so many spiteful kicks, but there it is; experience taught me not to trust strangers, and to not rely on others for anything important, including just doing the job they get paid to do.
At least I know that about myself. I don't have to pretend to be a "good person", and can just be a "barely good enough person". I won't judge you if you don't judge me.
If you're my friend--and I do actually have some, shockingly enough--I won't turn my back on you because I don't think you measure up to my standards. It's more likely I'm just avoiding you because I don't think I can measure up to yours, and I'm ashamed and embarrassed of things I have said and done in the past. I can't even imagine how someone could cut someone else out of their life just for being homosexual and still know what friendship means. That person would definitely do exactly the same to me if they ever realized I was atheist, so we can't be friends, ever, even if they thought they wanted to be.
I just can't bring myself to tolerate the intolerable.
You become bad when you take action on it. If you believe homosexuality is a sin and that gay marriage shouldn't be allowed I don't know if that makes you a bad person.
If you vote for a person who says they will ban it, then yeah that's actually taking action to deprive another person of their rights. I don't support that and consider it bad.
I disagree. Expressing an opinion via voting (in the US) means nothing unless more than half the people who vote agree with the person. It's not directly depriving anyone of anything, and if they're in the minority, their vote doesn't have a direct impact on anybody.
Thus if voting leads to somebody losing rights that they ought to have, there exists a problem with the larger community more than one bad actor.
There was a lot of uproar a few years back because Brendan Eich donated a relatively small amount of money to a anti-gay-marriage group, but what got me was that nobody he worked with had any idea. It sounded like he treated everyone fairly regardless of orientation.
To me it speaks volumes (positively) about someone's character if they participate in the democratic process, but if their opinion doesn't win out, they're willing to accept it and live with it.
You know, in the context of a conversation about California vs. the world that's enlightening. When a midwestern state passed a law against gay marriage they were probably doing it with a heavily gerrymandered legislature.
When California did it, they did it with a popular referendum.
That is a super dangerous road to go down. Good people can hold horrible ideas and horrible people can be right about some things (Hitler and the nazis were absolutely right that smoking was dangerous).
As a 99.9% libertarian the idea of messing with other peoples sex lives is completely alien to me, but just because others are wrong doesn't make them bad people; I believe it is important to separate the people from their ideas.
I don't think it is possible to separate a person from their ideas. You are the sum of your ideas. If you hold a bad belief, that is a bad piece of your whole personality.
None of us are perfect. We all have bad ideas sometimes. That means nobody can be an entirely good person.
But the converse is possible; we can separate the idea from the person. And when judging the merits of the idea, we certainly should.
Consider that if you separate all the ideas from a person, what is left? An empty shell of a body? Does it still have a person in it?
I don’t know about the smoking thing but Hitler was famously a vegetarian. Many environmentalists argue that if we eliminated meat production the planet would be better off.
They've been indoctrinated into a deeply subversive ideology. That ideology commands them to believe god and religion before country, before mere laws of man. Rural America believes this is a Christian nation, founded on Christianity. And there is to be no discussion of this. The ideology itself is what broke down any chance of conversation.
Rural Americans have no idea "in God We Trust" is not original, that it was added in 1956, that "under God" was added to the pledge of allegiance in 1954, they have no idea that Article 6 of the constitution explicitly says no religious test will be required to hold public office, and they insist that the 1st amendment does not make the U.S. a secular state. And they think it's a lie that there is such a thing called the Treaty of Tripoli, written by Washington and Adams, ratified unanimously by teh senate, that says "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion".
In the original case of Loving vs Virgina (1967), the state judge pointed to the bible, chapter and verse, as moral and legal justification for anti-miscegenation laws. Interracial marriage was illegal in nearly 1/2 the states up until that time. And the same arguments then were the same nut bag religious arguments used most recently with those opposed to gay marriage, and transgendered people having equal rights.
Is there really a conversation to be had here? The racism, bigotry, misogyny, sure they all pre-exist religion, but they are enhanced, coddled, protected, by the most popular variety of it in rural white America. I would never work or live there. I don't even care to visit. And I see no time in the near future where this will not be true. They do not want their culture to change. There is nothing wrong with it. Everything wrong is with the gays, the godless, the Muslims, and the illegal immigrants stealing white American jobs, and sluts having abortions. And they have a president who perfectly represents them in helping them blame others for their problems.
> Rural Americans have no idea "in God We Trust" is not original, that it was added in 1956...
'And this be our motto-"In God is our Trust"'. From the 4th verse of The Star-Spangled Banner, written in 1814. (You did know that it has four verses, right?)
Now, The Star-Spangled Banner wasn't officially the national anthem until 1931, and "In God We Trust" wasn't officially the national motto even then. But the idea of that as the motto is far from new, even if it wasn't officially true.
I know that the Star-Spangled Banner was set to the tune of the Anacreonic Hymn, which is a drinking song, so if anybody ever got as far as the fourth verse without forgetting any of the lyrics, they're definitely singing it wrong.
While I understand what you’re saying I’d respectfully disagree in places. You point out that most of these ideas predate religion and I think most people hold the more backward ideas due to habit and overall culture rather than explicit religion. Also I believe that one of the most potent forces for greater acceptance for LGBT people has been that more and more people are coming out and that people realize, “oh hey that’s my daughter or my cousin”.
I think it’s helpful also to recognize that while it is indisputably right that LGBT people have full equal rights and standing, that idea is relatively new to the broader discourse. It’s going to take a little time for it to fully sink in everywhere, the wrong perspective has a large historical head start. I firmly believe it will happen, just over 50 years ago we had explicit Jim Crow in the south. While there’s still a ways to go, it’s amazing how much progress we’ve made in such short time.
But for that to happen I think we have to be a bit patient and willing to talk to people whose views we might find cringeworthy. You can’t persuade someone you’re not communicating with.
Most gays don't come out of the closet in religious families, they fear for their life for a reason. The mere fact those who do come out sometimes are a potent change for their families, proves how impotent the religion is when it comes to protecting those same LGBT who put their lives on the line when they come out.
Just two days ago, a southern evangelical asserted to me, "literally gays brought about the end of nations, being gay should not be legal let alone gay marriage." Listen to a translation of this: Gay's are seditious, they are traitors to their country, they commit treason. In the U.S. the only crime that calls for the death penalty is treason.
Considering this merely cringeworthy, needing patience and persuasion? I think the body count of dead LGBT, black, brown, women, children, Muslim, Jew, and many other minorities, is sufficiently high that no more such coddling should be on the agenda.
Advocacy of violence and discrimination should be taken seriously, not suddenly papered over with calls to patience and persuasion just because it's backed by religious belief. Too many people in urban areas have no concept of violent religion and probably think it doesn't exist in America. Newsflash city people! You're ignorant! I for one am not amazed at all, I'm appalled and feel betrayed by how long the progress thus far has taken.
I'm sorry I really didn't mean to come off as dismissive. I have zero doubt of the murderous hatred for gay people (among many others), and the danger people face when they come out. I have many friends in the queer community, I don't in any way intend to minimize these things.
The person you mention holds truly awful views. And I don't know what to tell you, except that at least some people can change. I've seen it myself and I'll cop to when I was younger being squeamish about gay marriage. A decade later I was jubilant when Obergefell came down. Was I a bad person then? Am I better person now? I'd say I wasn't then and I'm still just as imperfect. I just learned more, and although I am ashamed I was wrong, I'm glad I eventually got it right.
Dan Savage gives as advice to people coming out to their families to give their relatives a year to be offensive. A year to ask the just plain ignorant questions. After that, there's a hard space to say, "you accept me or I'm out". Obviously that has its own problems in certain situations, but given the years he's been giving it, it sounds like its been working and it gives voice to the spirit of what I'm advocating.
I think plenty of people hate the gays, the jews, the browns and whoever else. Plenty of those will never change, I can't defend those. But I think many more will, and I think we have to find a way to create the space for them to change without coming at them straight out of the gates with moral condemnation. Good people can be misguided, but they'll never come around if we start from, "you're evil". That said at some point, if you willfully refuse to see the light, there is an end to the conversation.
As someone who grew up in Columbus, went to school in Cincinnati, and moved back to Columbus for work, I think you're being a little dramatic here.
I don't know where you're from in the Midwest, but the vast majority of people I interact with around here are extremely live-and-let-live. In fact I can't remember the last time I came across someone or a situation that was actively hostile about beliefs or sexual orientation. Obviously these are just my anecdotes, but I run in a pretty sexually and racially diverse scene and they all love Columbus as well.
Your hyperbole and vindictive reactions to a diverse region of the country are certainly going to help close the divide.
That's the attitude that I like. I can't stand false liberals and progressives. Nobody gets to tell anyone how to live their lives. If I wanted that I'd move to a rural village in Pakistan.
Columbus native here. It varies wildly; my wife lived in an upper-class suburban area and reports an experience similar to yours, but I grew up in a poorer, slightly more rural-adjacent area. I can’t even begin to count the number of times I was called a “faggot” for things like wanting to recycle or not wanting to get in fistfights. I overheard racial epithets on a near-daily basis; telling racist jokes where the punchline was the death or maiming of a minority were widely socially acceptable.
Culture is the #1 reason that I have no desire to move back to Columbus.
I graduated from Ohio State in 2011 and moved away in 2012, so much more recently than that actually. A woman that I dated in high school is now a teacher at the school we graduated from, and she told me that she sees pretty vile behavior from her students (particularly after the election). So we are not talking about a long time ago, nor are we talking about one or two isolated incidents.
Motivation to get out and vote, probably. Remember Proposition 8 in California?
A Democrat just won in Alabama. It's about motivation for voting. The research triangle in NC is the most heavily populated area in NC, it should carry the state with 1/5 of the state's people living there and actually voting.
the article has done well to cherry-pick a relatively liberal spot in an otherwise conservative state
Aren't those called "cities?"
arent ashamed to force their backwoods culture on you from the hinterlands
I lived in Cincinnati Ohio for 5 years. How did people force their backwoods culture on you? I had zero culture forced upon me. I was the subject of a targeted racial harassment once, and I remember one unpleasant discussion with a cringe-inducing person once. Most people there in the late 90's/early 2000's were fairly live and let live. Where they weren't, aside from the above, much of this came from the Left, as an instance of the left eating itself.
"How did people force their backwoods culture on you?"
I'm not the OP, but this seemed pretty clear:
"I was tired of my state representatives writing my sexual preference off as a disorder. I was angry when the state decided a pharmacist could refuse to sell me birth control and I hated the legislative decree that tried to exert control over what gender got to use the bathroom or not. In short, I did not want to live in a state where the legislature had nothing better to do than fight the culture war to win votes for the next election. Yeah, I cant buy a house in san jose, but at least I dont have to worry about the ten commandments showing up at the DMV in stone or some toothless anti-shariah legislation burning through my tax dollars."
And from that, I take it that nothing ever happened to him in-person. Did another person do something to him in particular? I think that says a lot more about culture than news/politics issues. From that standpoint, my life here in the Bay Area scores a lot lower than my life in Houston or Cincinnati.
First you ask what the person is even upset about, when they made it very clear in the very post you were replying to. Then, when I point this pretty obvious thing out, you change the standard to "nothing ever happened to him, in person". What?
A) Things did happen to him. Being denied birth control is a thing that happened to him and his partners. I don't really understand the "in person" qualifier you tacked on. Are you implying people in the Bay Area are "doing something to you in particular that happened to you in person?" Any examples?
B) "I think that says a lot more about culture than news/politics issues. From that standpoint, my life here in the Bay Area scores a lot lower than my life in Houston or Cincinnati." I'm not sure I follow here? The OP was talking about a situation where they lived outside the bay area and left that other place because they felt picked on and are feeling more comfortable in the bay area. You've decided that this is "about culture", and then immediately jump to "this is why Houston is better than the Bay Area", which makes no sense whatsoever.
>In short, I did not want to live in a state where the legislature had nothing better to do than fight the culture war to win votes for the next election.
California doesn't fight the culture war? California is the primary exporter of the left-wing culture. It just happens to conform to your political leanings, so you like it there. And THAT'S OKAY, I'm not saying you are wrong, you're just now on the side that you agree with.
>Yeah, I cant buy a house in san jose
Who cares about home ownership when you can use whatever public toilet you want!
Who care about owning a house when you can't marry the person you want to live in it with. When you can't fill it with the kids you both want. When you can't sleep together.
California isn't denying people fundamental rights. That's the difference.
"Who cares about home ownership when you can use whatever public toilet you want!"
You mean they're allowed to exist in public? If you are not allowed to use the bathroom that corresponds to your identity, you're basically not allowed to use the bathroom in public at all. Which means you're not really allowed to be in public at all.
This is the sort of reasoning and rhetoric that pushes people like me, political moderates, away from the left.
If I’m following you correctly here, because you can’t use whichever public toilet you want, you are denied a fundamental right, stripped of all public personhood, and not allowed to even venture outside at all.
I never meant me, personally. But a trans person, absolutely. Having to use a misgendered bathroom can not only be extremely uncomfortable, it can be extremely dangerous. A trans woman going into a men's room faces a very real threat of rape or assault.
And, quite frankly, being unable to empathise with those who are different than you kinda indicates to me you never were inclined to the left, and used that opening paragraph to drum up fake support.
You know, a couple weeks ago, I was reading a link (from HN, IIRC) about liberal (really!) feminists who didn't want to share a public bathroom with someone who was genetically male but self-described as female. They viewed it as males defining what female is.
The article went on to describe how feminists who hold such views have been subject to literal physical attack by others on the left.
I'm pretty sure I can paint something in that as "denying people fundamental rights"...
"Why not let anyone use any toilet regardless of identity?"
That's the idea behind single person restroom facilities, and it's a pretty good one. Unfortunately, in many places it just isn't feasible to renovate the existing facilities. And having a multi user restroom not be set up like that exposes people to the same dangers as if a trans woman was forced to use the men's room.
What does a single-person facility have to do with it? Why is it legitimate to segregate multi-person facilities based on gender identity but not on sex?
If men’s restrooms are dangerous for trans women then certainly they are dangerous for gay or gender-nonconforming men as well. These men certainly have as much right to avoid a dangerous situation as trans women do, no?
I was raised in the rural midwest and moved to San Francisco for the same reasons as you. It is shocking how much religious extremism, homophobia, and racism exist in the midwest. Growing up in the midwest, kids and adults alike would come up us and tell us we were going to hell, or to go back to where we came from, or call us racial slurs like "sandnigger". Grown adults had no problem harassing little kids at school or the playground. People shot our windows a few times. Racism is so widespread in Missouri that the NAACP has issued a travel advisory and warned minorities to not travel there. Earlier this year a Garmin engineer was murdered in Kansas by a racist who walked into a bar and shot two Indians. There is no way I would raise my children in the midwest.
Sure, but there are plenty of places like that in California as well. Drive a couple hours north of SF or east of Contra Costa or south of LA and you run into similar cultures. CA is the state that created Reagan, after all. San Diego might be the most conservative big city in the nation, albeit in a different type of conservatism.
The Midwest might be generally more conservative, but tech companies are going to started in cities like Columbus, not the rural area.
I come from the Midwest. Nothing the GP described is inaccurate. It's not a strange priority to want to live some place that society doesn't try to enforce rules from a 2000 year old religious text.
There's a little hyperbole there. Religious folk like the decalogue near courthouses (but generally lose lawsuits about those); they don't think Moses received the rules of the road in stone. And I can't imagine anti-sharia laws "burning through tax dollars" any faster than other window-dressing-type bills in liberal legislatures. Red and Blue legislators gonna bloviate and introduce useless bills, but no one "funds" them.
But, it does seem striking to say you can't live in even the watered-down religious culture of the Midwest (which is no deep South). Like, Lake Wobegone Lutherans are too much anymore.
I won't gainsay that either way, but recognize you're no longer talking about tech as a search for profit or talent, but an aspirational social structure.
It wasn't inaccurate 10 years ago. I get the feeling the OP hasn't lived in the midwest for quite some time.
Generally, no one cares. Yes, there are still some bad laws in place, and there are some assholes, and you'll get old farts who want the commandments in front of courthouses. But predominately, no one cares. Live and let live.
Going to grandstand for a second: For some reason people have this sense that if you don't support something, you must hate it. There's no middleground in left-leaning politics. I'm not gay. Frankly, I seriously cannot put into words how little I care about your sexual orientation. So, that surfaces in the fact that I'm not out at LGBT rallies supporting new laws. That's called "live and let live". This idea that everyone has to stand on some side of an issue is pervasive in our culture, I believe fueled in-part by machines like Facebook for engagement and likes. Its impossible to give a fuck about everything; I let the people who actually give a fuck fight those battles, and I'll fight my battles.
Because discrimination doesn't affect you you don't care about it. That isn't "live and let live", that's "I've got mine so who cares about anyone else". It's one thing to not be able to put effort into every issue, but it's another to try and claim those issues don't exist and discount the experiences of people who have actually been affected by it.
What I'm saying is that there shouldn't be an expectation that everyone has an opinion on every controversial topic, and your lack of an opinion on it shouldn't make you a bad person in the eyes of one side or the other (or both). Not having an opinion on a topic does not mean I ignore its existence.
Oh wow. Exactly when did it become someone's constitutional right to marry whoever they want in the United States? I must have missed that amendment.
I'll make a deal though; if the democrats who are generally out at rallies campaigning for LGBT "rights" want to attend a few NRA rallies in support of an actual constitutional right to bear arms that is under constant attack by their own party, I'll believe that you care about about rights. Doubtful. What you actually care about is your personal values, and sometimes that conveniently lines up with the rights you think are granted to you by your government.
In 1868 with the ratification of the 14th amendment (specifically the Equal Protection Clause). It doesn't specifically guarantee that everyone has the right to get married to anyone that they want, just that everyone must have an equal right to marry anyone that anyone else does. So a state could get rid of marriage altogether, but if it allows it at all it must allow everyone the same choices of who to marry that it allows anyone else.
Left-leaning politics consists largely of a collage of special-interests that band together to increase their political power. Essentially, everyone has agreed to take a stand for all the members of that collage in order to hold it together. Hence the lack of middleground.
Owning property is the exercise of a fundamental American right. It has nothing to do with cost. Try telling a rural Alabama homeowner how "luxurious" a life he leads over a market-rate renter in Union Square NYC, where the rent would easily be 3X the total mortgage + tax + insurance of the former.
> but your blatant ignorance of what actually happens in the midwest
you missed quoting the part where the OP mentions moving from the Midwest.
I don't think freedom of religion (including freedom from religion) is a strange priority. Nor is wanting to get away from legislation that discriminates against you.
I live there now. I get called homophobic slurs while riding my bike to work. I get coal rolled. People swerve at me in their trucks attempting to assault me. And I live in a university city.
For what it's worth I am not gay, I just have the audacity to not always drive my car. And then there are the culture warriors in the state legislature, doing things like prohibiting municipalities from passing their own non-discrimination ordinances that include gender and sexuality.
And then there are the confederate battle flags plastering trucks and houses all over the rural areas that surround my city in this very northern state. And the wildly increased incidences of bias crimes.
No, I think there are plenty of issues that currently affect the Midwest, and while it may have certain redeeming aspects, we're not doing the region any favors by glossing over the ugliness.
Coal Rolling is an automotive subculture where people modify trucks to create large clouds of dark exhaust smoke under acceleration and then expel said smoke onto vehicles they deem inferior. Common targets include small cars, hybrid/electric vehicles and two-wheeled vehicles.
> ”Rolling coal is a form of conspicuous air pollution, for entertainment or for protest. Some drivers intentionally trigger coal rolling in the presence of hybrid vehicles (when it is nicknamed "Prius repellent") to taunt their drivers, who are perceived as being environmentally motivated in their vehicle choice. Coal rolling may also be directed at foreign cars, bicyclists, protesters, and pedestrians.”
As someone born and raised in the Midwest (and who takes great pride in that) now leading a company in SF, the difficulty truly isn't lack of capital, it's lack of founder talent (and ideas). People with big ideas that can inspire the best technical leaders to join their crusade. There are plenty of great schools (Michigan, Purdue, IU, ND, U of Chicago, Northwestern, Rose Hulman, Depauw, U of I, and many more) churning out folks that are hungry to work hard and get ahead. What's missing is a sufficient population of 25-45 year old inspiring founders with enough of a nest-egg to take a big risk, willing to put a hold on family life, and with a big idea.
There's a second problem that comes about when these rare combination of things come together - which has to do with cap tables... In that good teams get pummeled on early stage valuations compared to the coasts, resulting in exits that return far less to founders than investors (and thus stunt "the ecosystem" growth that exists in SV), but this is secondary to above IMHO.
Nah. The second thing is the main thing. Your first point is just the typical SF exceptionalism narrative that has been touted by the Bay VC startup ideology for the last 20 years.
The sad truth is, it's not a coincidence that so many of the biggest economies in the world are built inside of self-perpetuated real estate bubbles. Pockets of land trapped in by ocean and mountains. There's a feedback loop involved in companies that get big enough to own their own buildings, their companies' continued growth drives up the value of their real estate which they can re-finance for easy loans.
There's plenty of people who think it makes sense to take the startup culture to cheaper areas like the midwest or Austin. And they "succeed" in founding profitable startups. But they'll never create the next great thing, specifically because the big companies in big cities didn't succeed in spite of their higher costs, but because of them.
I think if I wanted to move silicon valley I'd look for some cheap semi-peninsular coastal city which is currently priced like a midwest city. Then I would drive up that price. I've eyed Charleston SC as a potential target but I've never actually been there to know if that makes sense.
what you're claiming is plausible but how many successful companies are actually refinancing real estate they own in order to get capital (for further growth?)? do you have proof this happens as regularly as would have to happen to be the largest component of sv success, as you claim?
> the difficulty truly isn't lack of capital, it's lack of founder talent (and ideas)
IMO the VC culture in the midwest is also a lot more conservative. The money isn't held by former programmers, as they are in SF. They're usually more finance execs.
Couldn't agree more. Was trying to make that my second point - how founders (and early employees) getting diluted and end up not having the gains to pump back into investing when exits actually do happen. They may be able to retire, but they can't also invest $10M over 10 yrs - it's one or the other.
Yup, there's a network of angel investors here. But most of the VCs tend to invest in very traditional markets, regardless of founder talent. It's more worth your time to fundraise out in the valley and setup shop in the midwest.
Operating costs here are so cheap, and a lot of uninspired talent around. You can tell because of the sheer number of consulting firms in the midwest. There just aren't enough great companies to keep people's interest. Anyone who's worth their salt leaves, and then comes back when they want a family.
I went to one of those great midwest schools (though you missed it). But, I left as soon as I graduated.
Since then I've lived on the east and the west coast (in popular, expensive cities), and nearly all of my classmates are no different. Places they go other than those two coasts? Other well known places... The Texas Triangle, Colorado, Chicago, Florida...
It's exciting and fun to think that the "next Silicon Valley" will pop up in one of those midwest cities that has been in decline since the mid-20th century... But the truth is, if there is going to be a "new Silicon Valley", it will be in a boring, popular (probably expensive) place... I'd sooner bet on the Texas Triangle...
I don't see it changing in the short term, though I think there's potential in the long term. In between, I feel like towns need to organize around a particular niche / focus. For example, Indianapolis is a hub of marketing technology (ExactTarget, Aprimo, etc.). It's hard to compete w/ the (PR?) machine the coasts give you, but if you have a competitive advantage in some market - don't ignore it just because it's not SaaS. Examples include autos in MI, Medical Devices in Northern Indiana, manufacturing region-wide, distribution, real estate (Simon Malls, General Growth in Indy, Chicago respectively), etc. Build for those local customers and then spread geographically. I feel like that's overlooked far too often in the "David" (non-Goliath) markets.
The midwest isn't in any regard lacking entrepreneural mass. The parent is taking liberties with the premise. There are as many entrepeneurs per capita in Ohio and Illinois as there are in California (defined by new business formation and new employer business formation).
The problem is what you'd expect in fact: network effects, hyper concentrated talent pools, extraordinary expertise, very large amounts of capital tilted toward higher risk / higher return pursuits.
If you're in Kansas and have the next big tech idea...
- If it requires significant venture capital, you're not going to be able to locate that capital in Kansas. The capital available in Kansas, isn't interested (it's only interested in hindsight; Silicon Valley capital is actually often interested a decade or two before an idea / business concept is ready to boom, which produces a constant cycle of being early with things, which finally only work years later). If you're in Kansas and need to raise $100m or $300 million over six years to build the next great fast growing technology business, you will not be able to find that scale of VC there, period. I can't emphasize that enough, there is no scenario under which you will ever raise that capital in Kansas - it did something like $13m in total traditional VC deals in 2016.
- If it requires the most talented engineers (and lots of them) to scale big + fast (ie the engineers that are among the best in the world at that thing), you're not going to find that talent in Kansas. The hyper concetrated talent pools available in California, give you that critical mass for almost any given technology focus. You see similar effects for eg biotech in the greater Boston area (which gives that area vast advantages for the next great biotech start-up as opposed to somewhere in Ohio).
- If you need exceptionally talented managers, with experience at building large, fast growing, cutting-edge technology companies. You're not going to find very many of them in Kansas. There's an immense experience advantage in Silicon Valley, generations of it has built-up in fact. These people make a critical difference during any kind of meaningful ramp growth phase.
- If you need the world's best venture capitalists, to help steer your new tech company through all the typical dangers for such a company, you're not going to find them in Kansas. The best VCs can help you recruit in a huge way, for both executives and engineers; they can steer you through all sorts of problems in fund raising and public relations; they can push through political obstacles with their connections and wealth (ie pick up the phone and get someone politically powerful in Washington DC on the other end of the line). A VC in Kansas has no ability to do most of those things.
The list just keeps going.
In short: the risk capital isn't there, the hyper concentrated large talent pools for a given expertise are not there, the management experience is not there, the venture capitalists are not there. There are plenty of entrepreneurs to go around, and if they want to create the next great tech company they usually have to leave for all the previously listed reasons.
Unless the Midwest replicates California's laws on ownership of IP vis-à-vis employment (i.e. it is illegal for companies to claim employee IP for work done outside of work even via a contract), and that non compete clauses are invalid it's at a huge disadvantage.
Without at least those two the Midwest don't even stand a chance.
Perceived culture in the Midwest is also problematic.
USA is dependent on immigration to fill the science and engineering workforce, which is one of the ingredients of SV revolution. (https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43061.pdf)
Someone denying there is no racism/xenophobia issue in the Midwest isn't listening in my opinion.
My intuition is that the sex appeal of SV versus Midwest won't be compensated solely by VC money. It will require a cultural change, which has been going backwards those last 10 years imo. And that's why the author wrote this article - not to inform us that Midwest is good, but because there is a real issue in getting talents to the Midwest.
How far down the list of top tech companies do you have to go before you come to one based in Canada? You won't find one in the top 10. You might not even find one in the top 50. If you're looking to bet on strength, that's not promising.
For whatever reason, Canada seems to be able to produce a real contender only occasionally. True, we had RIM and before that Nortel. But RIM is a shadow of what it once was, and Nortel is long gone.
In tech, Canada is a backwater, and seems likely to stay that way.
The problem there is the climate, and I say that as a Midwesterner used to cold harsh winters. SF, LA, Seattle, and Austin all have more human-friendly weather more of the year. People here in these comments complain about the winters in Ohio, and winter in Toronto isn't going to be any nicer to live in.
Additionally, Toronto arguably has a worse housing situation than SF. While dollar for dollar, prices in SFBA are higher, your housing cost will likely be a higher percentage of your monthly take home in Canada as the pay is less than SFBA and housing costs are still high and rising.
>Someone denying there is no racism/xenophobia issue in the Midwest isn't listening in my opinion.
You say this, but still the Detroit area hosts quite a large immigrant population, many from a group that experiences a lot of hate in the US (Arabs), though I'll admit, it's probably because the city is on the border with Canada, which makes it an easier place to get to given many immigrants here initially went to Canada from their home countries.
Still, the region isn't alien to the idea of bringing in foreign labor to fill in employment gaps, it's pretty common at least in Detroit, and I imagine Chicago as well.
The invalidity of non-compete clauses and the inability to take IP away from employees are, perhaps, geese laying golden eggs for California. It can be argued that they give phenomenal power to employees that figure out the right way to do something and punish employers that won't listen. As a hypothetical, a former employee might start a competing company and let the market figure out who is right. Without these, it can be argued that employees are less motivated to figure things out because they have no way to capitalize on their ideas unless the decision makers of the employer (whom they probably may never meet in their lifetime) buy in to the idea. [1]
Your understanding of CA labor law is a bit off. Employees cannot have a side business that competes with their employed business. E.g. if I work for Salesforce, I can't make a side project that does sales client / customer tracking. But I could make a Twitter clone and market that.
The IP protections are important because they mean that anyone can actually start a business, let it grow on the side, then, when ready, jump ship. All of this without fear that your employer, who is doing nothing for the side business that you're working on, will come and take it all. This key piece of legislation enables most of SVs success.
I work in the Midwest, and being worried about noncompetes and ownership of IP out of the office clauses has had a strong dampening effect on my motivation to work on anything software related on the side while I've been employed, for the most part. It's actually part of what started getting me into board game design in my off time, because there's no way my companies could have a valid claim against that.
For most companies with IP clauses, the company owns 100% of the IP (and your company). Additionally, VCs won't invest if there are problems with the IP.
The law of non-competes in Minnesota is entirely court-made, in contrast to states such as Wisconsin and North Dakota, where it is governed by statute. See Wis. Stat. § 103.465; N.D. Cent. Code, § 9-08-06. Non-competes are “disfavored” under Minnesota law for being a partial restraint on trade. As such, they are to be strictly construed, with any ambiguities interpreted against the employer. Lemon v. Gressman (Minn.App. 1999).
Acceptable interests include (1) protecting against deflection of trade; (2) protecting confidential business information and trade secrets; and (3) protecting customer goodwill. The question boils down to whether the departing employee can hurt the former employer.
I've only seen one issue of a non-compete being enforced is when a reporter went to a competitor and took the same job and was accused of taking confidential information to his new employer. The judge ruled against the reporter and banned him from working at the competitor for one year:
Higgs wrote that given Ridder's past conduct and his cavalier attitude toward his use and disclosure of confidential Pioneer Press information, it seems to the court that his past actual misappropriation is a good indicator of possible future use of that information.
The court said there is also a substantial threat that Ridder will further misappropriate confidential Pioneer Press information, or use the confidential information in the future.
The judge ruled that restraining Ridder from further misappropriating confidential Pioneer Press information is necessary to prevent further injury to the St. Paul paper's competitive position in the industry.
Make a note the story is from 2007. A decade ago and I haven't seen any case remotely close to this since then.
Washington state law says in Title 49, Chapter 44, section 140[0];
Requiring assignment of employee's rights to inventions
- Conditions.
(1) A provision in an employment agreement which provides
that an employee shall assign or offer to assign any of
the employee's rights in an invention to the employer
does not apply to an invention for which no equipment,
supplies, facilities, or trade secret information of the
employer was used and which was developed entirely on
the employee's own time, unless (a) the invention
relates (i) directly to the business of the employer, or
(ii) to the employer's actual or demonstrably
anticipated research or development, or (b) the
invention results from any work performed by the
employee for the employer. Any provision which purports
to apply to such an invention is to that extent against
the public policy of this state and is to that extent
void and unenforceable.
(2) An employer shall not require a provision made void
and unenforceable by subsection (1) of this section as a
condition of employment or continuing employment.
(3) If an employment agreement entered into after
September 1, 1979, contains a provision requiring the
employee to assign any of the employee's rights in any
invention to the employer, the employer must also, at
the time the agreement is made, provide a written
notification to the employee that the agreement does not
apply to an invention for which no equipment, supplies,
facility, or trade secret information of the employer
was used and which was developed entirely on the
employee's own time, unless (a) the invention relates
(i) directly to the business of the employer, or (ii)
to the employer's actual or demonstrably anticipated
research or development, or (b) the invention results
from any work preformed [performed] by the employee for
the employer.
Please note I have made another comment in reply to someone else's about California state law, you can search for it.
California Labor Code, Division 3, Chapter 2, Section 2870[0] states;
(a) Any provision in an employment agreement which
provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to
assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his
or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the
employee developed entirely on his or her own time
without using the employer’s equipment, supplies,
facilities, or trade secret information except for
those inventions that either:
(1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to
practice of the invention to the employer’s business,
or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or
development of the employer; or
(2) Result from any work performed by the employee for
the employer.
(b) To the extent a provision in an employment agreement
purports to require an employee to assign an invention
otherwise excluded from being required to be assigned
under subdivision (a), the provision is against the
public policy of this state and is unenforceable.
I have another comment in response to someone else's about Washington state law, you can search for it.
I was recently having a discussion with the founder of a very successful company. I was asking him how they got their start and their initial customers. They were not from the Silicon Valley originally.
He said it was slow going at first, until they moved to the Bay Area and started going to meetups. He said that meeting potential customers in person was what really accelerated their initial adoption, far more than their write-ups in the press or their "free customers" from their accelerator program.
My point is, that will be hard to replicate anywhere else for a long time. The density of startups and the opportunities that presents will be hard to have somewhere else -- it's a chicken and egg problem.
I had a friend who started a VC in Montreal. You know what happened as soon as the companies got successful? They took a round from a VC in the Bay Area and then moved here. They kept their dev office in Montreal for the "cheap labor" but made their HQ here.
I suspect that is what will happen with these investments too. Most of the companies will probably leave Ohio when they get successful.
And then they'll exit and have a bunch of money to invest where they now live -- the Bay Area.
You're right. There has been no fundamental change, either internal to SV or external, to cause Silicon Valley to lose its status as the epicenter of the technology world and the unparalleled access to capital that the region enjoys [0].
Interestingly, Cleveland in the early 20th century provides a case study that compares favorably to modern Silicon Valley. The key? Access to capital.
First, we have John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Why did Rockefeller move Standard Oil's headquarters from Cleveland to New York City? Two main reasons:
1) a concentration of financiers that he needed to continue to grow his business and
2) oil was flowing to large port cities as the international markets grew exponentially lessening Cleveland's importance in the network. [1]
These were both rational reasons for moving and the second represented a fundamental shift in the oil business.
A research article into Cleveland's entrepreneurial decline in the 20th century points to a similar finding:
"Additional contributing factors may include the destruction of the complementary financial institutions that had supported entrepreneurial ventures in the region and changes in the regulatory regime that advantaged New York and made it difficult for regional capital markets like Cleveland‘s to recover their earlier vibrancy." [2]
In the early 1900's Cleveland was described as such:
"It was also an important entrepreneurial center, with well-developed, largely informal, networks linking inventors to new sources of capital and to product markets." [2]
This sounds a lot like Silicon Valley and especially what you describe in your comment.
[0] Yes, cases could be made that housing in the Bay area, unfavorable immigration climate, increased competition from abroad, and even the maturation of the current mobile environment represent viable threats to the long-term entrepreneurial dominance of the Valley.
[1] Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller by Ron Chernow
> There has been no fundamental change, either internal to SV or external, to cause Silicon Valley to lose its status as the epicenter of the technology world and the unparalleled access to capital that the region enjoys [
What about climate change and the impending major droughts in the next 5-10 years?
The situation you describe will be positive for the Midwest. Many of those engineers at the dev office back home have options and, should the company have a successful exit, are well positioned to start new companies or angel invest, and do it where they are. This isn't going to happen overnight, and more teams and founders will stay put and still be successful over time.
Plus, engineering is core to many tech startups. It's a big change in the industry that they are successful having the dev teams back home and bay area investors are cool with that! (disclaimer: I'm the founder of a midwest-startup with coastal VC)
I think you have to specialize on a certain industry, not just tech in general. Minnesota has quite a few startups in medical tech and there are big med tech companies there too that buy these startups. Same in Boston. That's an industry SV simply doesn't understand and being in SV is not an advantage. Banking may be a similar case.
Same thing with athletic/outdoor apparel/footwear. There are so many companies headquartered in Portland, Oregon in this industry. It started with Nike, then Adidas and Columbia Sportswear. Now it seems like you can't throw a crampon without hitting another athletic/outdoor apparel/footwear startup.
10-30% of their exit will go back to ohio to be reinvested, too. that 10-30% goes a hell of a lot farther out there, where office rent is 1/10th and engineers cost 1/2 as much as bay area.
I don't know what's more amusing: the thought that VCs think they'll get plentiful cheap labor in the Midwest (that's what this is really about) or devs in the Midwest thinking VCs will bring SV-level wages and benefits to them instead of saving on all that because "cost of living."
I work at a Drive portfolio startup. This is neither Drive's nor my employer's opinions on this topic. There are pros for living here (lower cost of living etc.), but I genuinely hate the weather here. I find every opportunity to be out in SF during the winters. Oh and there aren't many meetups/conferences here, which is a HUGE problem if you're looking to grow/network with people as an engineer. People are generally skeptical and uninviting for newer ideas. Hiring is difficult too. If given the chance, I'd choose Seattle or SF.
The lack of network reveals itself in subtle ways.
I'm at a tailgate, a curious friend of mine reveals that he was trying to learn Ruby. I ask a couple very _basic_ questions, and I get looks of "not here".
Anything too technical comes across as exclusionary. The nice thing about SF is that every third person you run into is an engineer, so you never have that social problem. In fact, you have the opposite problem of always defaulting to "talking shop" with someone new.
I don't know where to start because all of this is true. I miss my mortgage that was less than my rent here in Boston. The weather in Boston is pretty much the same as Chicago, so I'm incredibly jealous of my co-workers on the west coast. There were some good meetups in the Chicago metro area though.
I think what got me the most was a dearth of jobs outside finance & Content Management Systems.
And Columbus has extremely mild winters compared to other areas in the midwest!
I worked out of Columbus for a week and REALLY loved it, but getting up before sunrise to get in a morning run while it was 'only' 75f and 127% humidity was a real downer. I think I could stomach the winters more than the summers.
Better than SF proper, I suppose, but unless you're only counting days of sunshine you're gonna get left behind by most of the valley, starting with temperature.
The Midwest has crappy weather, and rich people as a rule don't like crappy weather. This alone will prevent many investors from moving to the Midwest.
Geographically, Texas and the east coast near North/South Carolina are the most likely places for the next silicon valley. Both are in proximity to large population centres and have relatively good weather, cheap COL, low taxes, and plenty of 'natural beauty' type things that rich people like. Hills, driving distance to ocean, forests, etc...
I lived in the Midwest and IMO it's mostly cold flat and boring endless farmland with little natural beauty and no access to large water bodies outside of Chicago area. It also has high taxes and cost of living. Not really anything attractive about starting business is there.
Hah! Minnesota has 10,000+ lakes and tons of natural beauty. We have a lake cabin/home that we visit year round.
I LOVE winter here, couldn't live without it. Yes, I love the cold. Dress properly and it is quite enjoyable.
I'm by no means "rich" but I make well into six figures in software and I love this area and would find it hard to move anywhere else.
Occasionally I visit one of my clients that is in Silicon Valley. While California is absolutely gorgeous in certain areas I find the highways and dreary brown awful for the most part. The only time I really enjoy it is in very early spring (Feb-Apr) when it is green for a short period of time.
Before I moved to Minnesota (from Europe)I was very skeptical about this. But my first trip to BWCA and North Shore, changed all that. Crystal clear lakes, beautiful forests and prairies changed me for ever. If you are into bicycling, Minnesota has one of the most robust biking trail systems.
Minnesota seems to be almost Scandinavian in some aspects and I do find it absolutely beautiful.
I don't know why people keep bringing up the weather. I moved from OK to CA because there was nothing to do in Oklahoma, especially for someone with a family. There is an endless amount of things to do in California. I can drive a couple hours and ski, or 20 minutes and surf. Plus all the amusement parks, museums, amazing national parks, Mexico close by, and just what not. The weather was an unexpected bonus for me.
All true, but for me the most unexpected surprised about living here (specifically the Bay Area) is the relative lack of mosquitos. Coming from Ontario, that is a huge change!
I always forget about what the mosquitos are like in Ontario until I visit my parents' house in the boonies up there in the summer time.
I think that within a 10 km radius of my parents', there are at least 4 streets that are named "mosquito [lane,street,road]" and by god are they aptly named (in the summertime).
In general, not a ton of bugs on the west coast. I'm in SV now but grew up in the northwest, and every time I go elsewhere, there's a new unpleasant surprise. The last one was the northeast.. yeah, I know it's gonna be humid, but random downpour on an otherwise nice summer day, bugs everywhere, blah!
I feel the same way, only about western Oregon/Washington. There really are places that it is possible to make six figures while being surrounded on all sides by tons of natural beauty, but SV isn't one of those places.
no access to large water bodies outside of Chicago area
The great state of Michigan would like to have a word with you.
It also has high taxes and cost of living.
Wait a minute, are we still talking about the Midwest of the United States? Because high taxes and COL are the last two things I think of when I think “Midwest”.
But cold, flat, and boring I’ll grant you. I don’t live in Indiana anymore for good reason.
Yeah, if you want forests and driving distance to an absolutely massive body of water, Michigan is the place for you. It's anything but boring fields, especially along the west coast.
You're looking at income tax only. Illinois has other taxes that are very high. In particular, their property taxes are the highest in the nation (along with New Jersey). As I'm unfortunately discovering, as I'm looking to buy my first home here.
> Also this article shows Effective total state and local taxes in 2017. Illinois ranks the highest at $8,011 median per household, while California ranks almost at the bottom, at $4,774: https://wallethub.com/edu/best-worst-states-to-be-a-taxpayer....
Okay, but if you look closer I bet you can see the problem there. That chart refers to the "Median US Household" defined thus: annual income of $54,286 (mean third quintile U.S. income); owns a home valued at $178,600 (median U.S. home value). In Silicon Valley, that comparison would be between someone earning poverty-level wages who inherited a shack on the edge of town versus a reasonably comfortable midwesterner.
In this comparison between IL and CA we're making, the cost of living and real estate completely dwarfs the tax burden in its effect on the lower ranks in Northern CA. The difference in income tax would be hugely in favor of IL if you were at the very high end. Perhaps there's some middle ground where IL looks worse in the comparison, but I wonder if you'd really be better off financially in California. (edit: Northern California)
Check my original comment again. I only claimed the taxes were high. I specifically said the cost of living in Illinois isn't too bad, especially compared to Silicon Valley. I'm well aware the cost of living in California is extremely high.
That being said, the compensation in California is a lot, lot higher to help offset that, at least for our field. But I'm still not too interested in moving out there because I would have to basically give up on owning a home for quite some time, whereas I can afford to buy a nice house in the suburbs right now in Chicago. Also other reasons, like all my friends and family are here.
But, the property taxes are so high here that a lot of people pay more in taxes than they do on their mortgage, which is just odd. I could get a place equally far away from Chicago but over the border in Indiana and be paying almost a third as much in property taxes.
I moved from Illinois years ago because of taxes and bad job climate. My parents paid about 20% more in property taxes than their mortgage, and we had just an average sized lot. It's not uncommon at all in Illinois.
Most of my family and friends are also there, but it was a lot better for my financial future and retirement to move away, enough that it was worth leaving friends and family behind.
Illinois has the highest move out rate of any state. And the average income of people moving in is almost 20k lower than the average for people moving out. The government is also in tatters and the college system is languishing from lack of funding. It has one of the highest rates of students going to school out of state and college costs are astronomical because the state doesn't even give their public universities much.
Corruption in the Illinois government is unbelievably bad and the state is basically run by Madigan and a network of powerful unions with historic mob ties.
IMO you're probably much better off in Indiana financially if you're looking at your and potentially children's financial futures. I would really do the COL math before you buy a house there.
My disposable income increased from essentially zero to about 35k a year from a strategic move to a state with higher software engineer demand and much lower tax burden.
Yeah, you're probably right, and a few years ago I probably would be more inclined to do what you recommend. But then I met a girl who I'm most likely going to marry, and she's not too comfortable moving very far away from her mom and her friends, and she doesn't make new friends too easily.
And I'll admit, it's rather nice being close to family for simple things, like having someone who you can trust to come by and take care of your dog so you can head out all day, rather than being forced to board him. If we're going to have children in the next couple of years, we'll have free babysitting help, which I hear from other parents is worth a whole lot more to your sanity than a higher salary.
And between the two of us, we do alright financially. We are tighter than we'd like to be, but that's mainly due to both of us still having student loans to pay off than anything else. Once those are paid off we'll have a lot more breathing room (although that will still be a few years).
But the job climate is pretty bad here, I'll agree. I'm not really looking forward to my next job search. I probably should start looking already, but the last two were pretty rough, so I'm not looking forward to it and have been dragging my feet getting started.
I also know first hand how tough the universities have it right now, as I used to work for one and I have family that still works at one. I've heard that the state has been as much as a year behind on the money they're supposed to be paying the public schools.
Also there was the proposed bill to privatize all the public universities put up a year ago I think, which to me is the most ludicrous idea ever and I'm surprised he was taken seriously.
They're not just behind on paying, they straight up stopped giving the MAP grant last year which had paid about 30% of my undergrad costs at state school. If I wanted to go to college now I would have had to move out of Illinois until I had residency in another state. Student loans won't even cover state school costs.
Free babysitting help is worth a lot, but depending on your wife's career it still might make financial sense to move. If you're in the Chicago area like most people in Illinois, Indiana is doing great(for the Midwest), and Michigan's economy is still way better than Illinois. Madison is a tech hotspot and a great place to raise a family too.
Two out of three software companies I interviewed at in Illinois shuttered their offices in the state in the last two years. The companies that are staying are all going downtown. Software jobs are pretty damn rare out in the suburbs and it was definitely a bunch of 'take what you can get' shittily run companies because they could be.
The thing about California is, a lot of the people who move out there, eventually move back. I'm not privy to everyone's finances but I never got the feeling most of them were coming back with pockets filled with gold.
I'd be tempted to make the commute from Indiana to Chicago. Isn't there a train for it and everything? The commute's no worse than many in CA, although I suspect for a native it's viewed as a little extreme. (and of course, there's a lot to be said for actually living in Chicago)
Manhattan doesn’t have bad weather at all. It’s pretty well rounded. Some days a little too hot and some days a little too cold but never heat as oppressive as Georgia or cold as frigid as Maine.
It's certainly not California in that regard. Winter may not be like Maine and Summer may not be like Houston, but August in Manhattan can get pretty unpleasant. There's a reason wealthy New Yorkers summer in the Hamptons. And, while it's warmer and less snowy than Boston or Chicago in the winter it definitely gets its significant snowstorms.
> but August in Manhattan can get pretty unpleasant
For me it's not even the heat that's the problem, it's the goddamn smell of hot garbage. At least the outer boroughs are better in that regard to Manhattan.
Yeah it's not just the temperature per se which wouldn't be so bad if you were out in a forest someplace. But the garbage, all the people, etc. that make a dense city pretty unpleasant when the mercury creeps up.
Ehhhhhh, about 15 minutes after the first snow you prep yourself for spending the next 5 months or so sloshing through giant deep puddles of pitch-black semi-frozen slush. Plus everything ends up with a fine dusting of road salt.
The Chicago metro area has almost 9.5 million residents, 2.8 in the city proper. The larger Great Lakes Basin, depending on how you look at it, has anywhere from 35 to 60 million residents.
> cheap COL
Chicago can be pricey, but almost every other major city in the region is around 20% less costly than Austin (using Austin since it's got the largest pull of your mentioned alternatives).
North Carolina has the 'triangle' area which has seen huge growth for many years. Texas has Austin, which is probably the closest to SV of any place I've ever been. It looks so much like SV you could probably confuse the two in pictures
Same. Except I'm not as optimistic about Atlanta because the state is mostly poor and it's farther from the huge cities on the upper east coast. NC and Texas are both booming state-wide and have 'world cities' in reasonable driving distance.
Filmed yes. But then where does the film go for editing, color correction, adr, and other post? Hollywood. And then the executives screen it and then it’s dostributed and all of that is in LA too.
The expensive parts have moved elsewhere (principal photography and special effects) because it’s easy to transmit data, but all the stuff that comes before and after still happens in Hollywood for the most part.
> The expensive parts have moved elsewhere (principal photography and special effects) because it’s easy to transmit data, but all the stuff that comes before and after still happens in Hollywood for the most part.
So you'll concede that a strong cost play exists to move away, and are basically betting that inertia maintains the status quo?
Absolutely. I myself run my company as fully remote for this very reason. But I think I'm pretty leading edge in that respect -- most companies still believe having an office is important.
There are post production facilities all over the world, for instance Wellington has a cluster of world class facilities in the suburb of Miramar like Park Road Post and Weta Digital
With 2Gbps fibre connections there is no reason to think that places are required to be geographically in the same area.
Georgia will soon pass a post-production tax incentive designed to draw the other parts of the industry to Atlanta and capitalize on the production momentum.
I would disagree - as someone from Cambridge/Boston that frequents SF I would say Silicon Valley isn't all it's hyped to be. The majority of startups I come across out there are simply looking to get rich quick and are in it for the game rather than actually innovating anything.
When it comes to actual innovation I have yet to find anything comes close to the level Cambridge/Boston is on, especially in life sciences & AI. If only it weren't for the frigid winters...
Also a Boston native that's moved to Silicon Valley.
The rule of thumb I've seen is that technologies are invented in Boston and commercialized out West (either in SV or Seattle). Microsoft, Facebook, Reddit, YCombinator, and DropBox are all Boston startups...but you wouldn't know it unless you're intimately familiar with their histories.
This has a lot to do with the business cultures of the respective places. When I was working in Boston, the message I got was "Work hard for 30 years, build up expertise, and then maybe you can get a VC to fund your startup - but only if it's in an industry where you know who your customers are and how to make money!" And then Google came calling and was like "Wanna help us redesign the search results page?", and I saw many of my colleagues leave and successfully found startups, and folks here are like "Got an idea? Just go quit and start working on it, and if it turns out to be worth anything funding will be available."
I'd say that Boston understands technology better than Silicon Valley, but aren't very savvy about how to apply it for maximum impact. In Boston, people really really want to be smart, and thorough, and innovative, and fully explore all the implications of what they're doing before they bring it to market. In Silicon Valley, people are like "You know a tiny bit more about something than somebody somewhere else? Great, bring it to market, listen to feedback, and then go hire some smart MIT grads to work out the details."
The market seems to reward the latter approach much better. Silicon Valley's internalized the counterintuitive market maxim of "It's better to be differentiated than good", while Boston is still hung up on being good.
That's a goos point. However, not sure how one would compare Boston to SV then.
It seems like Boston has a few good unis, which SV also has. So, the number of good ideas that come out of it are maybe equal, but all of the rest (which is 95%) that comes after, is 100x better in SV, no?
As someone who would love to move back to Boston that's a very hard sell. Especially when the biggest success story is Hubspot (of "Disrupted" fame) which is more Silicon Valley than Silicon Valley is.
A lot of perception is flavored by the fact that a lot of the time "tech" gets defined as what dominates Silicon Valley. So you get taxi companies counted as tech and bio/pharma or fintech often not.
That said, while California does have a lot more VC funding, New York and Massachusetts and #2 and #3 even though Boston/Cambridge in particular tend to not be mentioned in these kind of discussions.
Toronto has been Hollywood North for a long time now. It's interesting to see how defensive people from SV are on this topic. No empire lasts forever and SV won't either. It's naive to genuinely believe that there are no smart people outside of SV, or that everyone wants to move to SV.
Remote only is the next silicon valley. Office space in a major city is a luxury, and having to do all of your work 8 hours in a row at a specific time is a waste of productivity.
Don't underestimate the impact of the generational gap here.
As an 85er I grew up on IRC, AIM, Gchat, etc.
I just moved into my first management role. It only took me a few months to realize I'm a better manager of remote staff than in person staff. I actually prefer remote now. I'm not in tech nor am I someone who's considered socially awkward or anxious at all.
The next SV is more likely to be China than anywhere in the US other than SV. Massive amounts of capital + appetite for risk and experimentation + love of technology + huge market. Just don't get on the wrong side of the CP and you're golden.
No way! China is basically a closed system. You can’t even give stock or stock options to foreign employees if the company is not foreign.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot going on in zhongguangcun and Shenzhen, it’s just mostly chinese startups employing Chinese, nothing like SV at all.
Seems there are different definitions of "SV". Mine is a geographic region with the unique combination of ingredients for incubating new technologies into valuable businesses and services that mature to some form of market liquidity. Has nothing to do with where they hire their employees from.
So a monoculture hiring Chinese employees catering to Chinese consumers. Why should we even care then? Google and Facebook employ more Burmese employees in SV than China does in all of its tech companies, guess what companies are dominating the emerging internet sector in Myanmar, a country literally in china’s own backyard? China’s Silicon Valley is an internal concern that has nothing to do with the rest of the world.
>China’s Silicon Valley is an internal concern that has nothing to do with the rest of the world.
This is pretty short-sighted and naval gazing, but I cbf to argue it. I'll just point out there are people with far more credibility than HN rando's demonstrating with their actions the opposite of what you're saying. [1]
China's internal markets are at minimum twice the size of the US and EU (or 3x-4x if you include the underdeveloped areas of the country). They can create a SV that's bigger than SV just by serving their own internal markets.
Honestly? Austin is probably already the next "Silicon <Noun>". We have like 160+ people net move here a day and it's a massive tech hub with UT Austin here, Oracle building a big office here, some good coding bootcamps, etc etc. Fastest growing city in the country several years running. Very liberal with plenty of cultural attractions (SXSW, cafes/bars, "keep Austin weird" etc). I'm guessing due to a combination of close cheap land (to build large logistic centers), access to good highways, access to a port, generally permissive state/business relationships, growing young demographic that Amazon will probably build their headquarters either in Austin or somewhere along the Dallas/San Antonio corridor.
I mean, where else is there in the midwest? Illinois is dying under poor governance and high taxes (pension obligations are constitutionally protected until hell freezes over). Indiana and Ohio just don't seem prosperous. Maybe Atlanta Georgia is the only other growing mid-size city outside of the coasts?
Ryan: “I’ve actually done a lot of market research and it actually turns out that southwestern Ohio is going to be the next Silicon Valley. They call it the Silicon Prairie.”
For those not familiar with the episode: the character is totally full of crap; trying to explain that his reason for moving to Ohio has nothing to do with his ex-girlfriend moving to Ohio. Funny to see "Ohio is going to be the next Silicon Valley" come around again (but this time in actual news).
Yep, I like the current trend where remote jobs are becoming more common so you can live in the Midwest while employed by a high paying SV/NYC/etc job. I don't really need the cultural elements of SV being spread across the US, that's part of the whole reason why I love the Midwest to begin with.
You don't know what you're saying. They'll bring higher home prices, more traffic, Californian politics, complaints about the weather, snide remarks about how things are better in CA. What's not to love?
Just ask Coloradans, it's wonderful to have your state taken over by people who don't share the same political culture, have far more money, and don't care much about land use!
I'm from Ohio and moved SF almost exactly 7 years ago. 8 plus years ago I felt like a complete outsider the the business world. I'd been using linux since redhat since version 2, taught myself perl, php and later rails and javascript. I'd go to small business association "meetups" and events and talk to people about a website I built that would allow non-developers to build customized open source software packages like wordpress/oscommerce/phpbb and have it auto-installed and hosted on a custom domain using ec2.
Even the successful tech investor there, who seemed more lucky than anything, didn't have a clue what I was talking about or why anyone might want to do that. I also went to the local small business offices seeking help and they didn't get it either. If you weren't an automotive, manufacturing or physical product company, they didn't take you seriously, didn't know what you were talking about and didn't see value in anything computer or web related.
I also didn't really know anyone remotely interested in the web or linux except one guy. If I had to sum it up I'd say that they're generally quite a few years behind in everything from technology to civil rights. Finding good employees will be hard but possible. Finding forward thinkers is going to be exceedingly difficult. When I lost my job working on microsoft products at an automotive logistics company, I gave up on Ohio and moved to SF. It was one of the best decisions of my life. Since I moved it's been horrifyingly clear that Ohio is in a downward spiral. I joke that I'd sleep on the ground in SF before I'd go back to Ohio but I'm not entirely sure it's a joke.
The Next Silicon Valley will be in Texas, because I live here :)
That is wrong kind of thinking, but here is my 2-cent thesis, Tech has not outgrown into such mature industry, you will have whole series of regions with robust tech and venture economies, so in that sense there won't be one next silicon valley, but a whole series of mini-silicon vallies.
Wouldn't diversity be an issue in a place like Ohio? My perception of the Midwest is that it's much more homogeneous and less inviting of minorities than California. Consequently it might be hard to attract diverse talent to relocate there.
But those "33% Asian" consist largely of 1st or 2nd generation Americans. People who largely still hold strong cultural ties from the dozens of countries they came from (along with their languages).
The Bay Area's diversity is more than just "lots of Asians." Also, "Asian" is a pretty broad category. The numbers you quote just don't create an accurate picture. It's far more accurate to say that diversity in the Midwest practically starts and stops with "both black and white folks live here."
Integration/segregation is also significantly different.
Yeah if you don't count the massive number of Middle Easterners in Detroit or Asians in Madison or the Somalians in Minneapolis or the Croatians in Kansas City or Greeks in Chicago and Detroit or the large Hispanic population in almost every city in the Midwest.
Ignoring the actual, real world diversity, yep, "both black and whites" is accurate.
Not racism- geographical chauvinism, or elitism. It's distressing such beliefs emanating from HN even as we get bombarded with stories of SV's bubble culture. And I say that as a Bay Area native.
I think it's racist to think that there are only "blacks and whites" in the Midwest, and even if that were true, that it would count against the diversity. Especially considering some of those "blacks" are actually Somalian, people from Africa with different beliefs and values who were fleeing their country's brutal civil war. Lumping them in with African Americans does a massive disservice to both Somalians and African Americans, especially coming from someone who said "Asian is too broad of a category".
It's incredibly ignorant to say Midwest cities don't have people of other ethnic backgrounds, it belittles everything those Midwesterners have worked for in this country.
You're comparing discrete regional diversity over a huge region spanning mutliple states to a single small area of northern California. Thanks for helping make my point.
It's cute that you're trying to accuse me of racism. It isn't me who thinks what you imply: it's the Midwest. Their idea of diversity is "we have black folks living here." I'm making fun of that. And I agree: their idea of diversity generally is disgusting.
You're talking to a Midwesterner here, so I don't know who you're trying to fool.
If you want to blatantly ignore the diversity that exists in the Midwest to make yourself feel better, that's fine. Just save your lies for someone else, because they're not working here.
Every place in your post where you said the word "they", replace it with "freehunter" and you'll see why you're not helping your cause but just pissing me off even more. Now you're attacking me, and I don't care for it.
"It isn't me who thinks what you imply: it's freehunter. Freehunter's idea of diversity is "we have black folks living here." I'm making fun of that. And I agree: freehunter's idea of diversity generally is disgusting."
I'm a Midwesterner, is that how you actually see me?
That's an extremely narrow worldview. The diversity of Kansas for instance in 2010 is an analog of the diversity of California in 2000 when the dotcom was happening (It's actually hard to make a direct comparison, two massively different economies and initial populations).
The major difference you might be alluding to is culture. I think in California major cities, it seems people react and demand quick action by the government to any perceived social injustice. In in the Midwest, I'd say perceived social injustices are usually corrected by community outreach, not government action. I think this is a major difference that should be studied. People in the midwest generally don't like the government in their business, as contrasted to the coastal cities, they appear to see it as the proper way to fix problems.
>People in the midwest generally don't like the government in their business, as contrasted to the coastal cities, they appear to see it as the proper way to fix problems.
You probably don't want to be the "next SV" if you want to keep it that way.
I chuckled, because some cities have gone that way, but then their cost advantage also did too. There's room for a healthy balance if people want to acknowledge and discuss some differences with respect to the other side's opinion. It's when we stop listening and looking for common ground when there are problems.
Tech job in LA and visit Kansas City, where I grew up, a couple times a year. Your analysis is lamentably parochial. There is no mapping between the "diversity" of Kansas in 2010 and that of California in 2000. Just not even close. Maybe there could be between California in 1985 (before I came here) and Kansas City now, that's how big the gap is.
The idea that attitudes toward "action by government" are significant in explaining the absence of tech from Kansas is nuts. The density of talent and the presence of tech-smart capital are controlling variables.
> Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders: 0.01%
> Two or more races: 2.8%
> Some other race: 4.5%
> Hispanic and Latino Americans of any race: 10.0% (7.4% Puerto Rican, 1.3% Ecuadorian, 0.9% Mexican, 0.3% Dominican, 0.2% Guatemalan, 0.2% Salvadoran)
> Amongst the city's white population, 9.9% were of German, 8.1% Irish, 5.0% Italian, 4.3% Polish, 2.8% English, 1.6% Slovak, and 1.5% Hungarian ancestry according to Census 2010.
> 8,796 Clevelanders were born in Europe.
Also note that the "white" ethnic groups are very active in Cleveland. There are Slovenian, Ukranian, Croatian, and Hungarian dance groups (probably more, but these are the ones I have first hand experience with).
Columbus ranks 15th in the nation for LGBT populations.
I now live in Denver, CO. That's a city where diversity is a real issue. Majority of people are white, bearded (males), and wear flannel (both).
Slovenian from Cleveland here and I can confirm that Ohio has some of the worst diversity in the country (I've lived in Cleveland, DC, Houston, Dallas, and SV) that I have experienced. The metropolitan neighborhoods are highly segregated by race and socioeconomic class. Summers regularly stay over 100 degrees and winters regularly stay under 32 for weeks at a time. It's far from the coasts and Lake Erie is disgusting (full of dead fish and debris). The people are generally racist and homophobic and like country music far too much for their geographic latitude.
Well, there's some hyperbole there, although I guess your profile does advertise "Rants and over-reactions."
It's interesting that you're Slovenian, though. Here's a question for you. According to your definition of "diversity" does the fact that Cleveland has the largest Slovenian population outside of Slovenia make it more diverse? Does the fact that Cleveland's ethnicities tend to form their own neighborhoods indicate less diversity, somehow? I always thought it was cool that Beachwood had the highest concentration of Jews anywhere outside Israel, but maybe instead of viewing that as an indicator of Cleveland's diversity, people think my God, they're putting their Jews in the ghetto.
This is purely anecdote, but I found Seattle to be significantly less diverse than Cincinnati or Columbus. The larger cities in the Midwest tend to have governments with goals that are hard to distinguish from any of the Democrat controlled coastal cities.
Portland Oregon is officially the whitest city in the USA (goes back to those early-mid 1900s laws that made it illegal to live in Oregon if you were black). So, yeah, the PNW is definitely not the place to be if you are looking for diversity.
Yeah, the northwest is VERY white and has a strong Scandinavian influence.
Meanwhile, I had a layover in Minneapolis and at the Mall of America, there were women in hijabs everywhere.
Obviously I can't speak to the experience of minorities in various locations, but it's hardly fair to paint the midwest with the brush of non-diversity.
Also, if anything, having your experience of "diversity" colored primarily by your interactions with highly-educated immigrant communities doesn't really help you understand how the broader immigrant communities integrate into the country as a whole.
Not really, no. Especially in cities and immediate suburbs, the Midwest has diversity and is welcoming of new people. Maybe you should come to Chicago or Cleveland or Columbus or Milwaukee sometime and see for yourself.
Milwaukee, seriously? I've family who live there and I visit regularly. There is a higher percentage of African Americans there than in the Bay Area, but diversity beyond that is practically non-existent (by comparison).
Yes, I do think this is a challenge for the Midwest. However, the key to solving that I believe is to focus on university towns like Madison and Ann Arbor that do draw in more diverse talent. These towns are key to the entire Midwest tech scene.
Universities are rich and white with a pinch of token racial diversity. "Diverse talent" maybe. Diverse relative to any random small city people from a few states over haven't heard of they are not.
My point was that many smaller midwestern cities have no reason for anyone not born there to come, except for college towns and a few with big employers. Those are some of the only assets that will help increase diversity over time.
I used to be a 100,000+ / year flyer as a consultant, plus I spent four years in college in the midwest. I'm a white, straight, male, but most of the country scares me to the point I have no desire to go outside the pacific northwest any longer. I've never been treated so badly by TSA as I was in Columbus, and I'm somewhat disappointed in myself that I did not file a lawsuit. To think that anywhere in the midwest or the southeast could become a prosperous center of innovation? Good effing luck with that. Oh sure, there are pockets where this bank or that manufacturer will settle for a tax deal or cheaper labour, but there's a big difference between that and the west coast culture that enables breakthrough science and engineering.
There is only one Silicon Valley. It's silly to think otherwise, although it seems to be getting recycled constantly by journalists and economic development people.
It's high time however that startups become more popular in the Midwest. If you are profitable, growing rapidly you can raise venture capital in the Midwest. However that rules out the majority of startups. That's a big reason that our best and brightest make the pilgrimage out West.
What we need to see are startup clusters, let the companies stay in place. In Michigan it is starting to happen, but progress is still woefully slow. Angels are in just as short supply as venture capital.
>If you are profitable... you can raise venture capital in the Midwest
This is the number one biggest difference between Midwest startups and SV startups. Even Basecamp said it, Midwest startups have to prove their profitability on day one before any VC will pay any serious attention. Whereas in SV, you can get money with just a team and a Powerpoint presentation.
Wonder why there are no unicorns from the Midwest? Because if unicorns made money their valuation would be significantly lower. They're only unicorns because no one knows how much they're worth, and everyone knows exactly how much Midwest startups are worth on day one.
This is cyclical news. It's an amazing marketing campaign for VCs. This is an interesting armchair idea for lots of people, but absolutely inspiring for people VCs are targeting to work for them and shoulder the non-cash component of their risk.
The key would be some fiber optic enabled always on teleconferencing pipe which connected teams in Silicon Valley to teams in the Midwest. At this point the differential for rents and cost of living between the two locales is high enough that it would far surpass the Verizon Fios/Google Fiber monthly bill.
That said, my bet would be Fresno, Brentwood, Sacramento, Morgan Hill, Santa Cruz, Monterey, Madera. California High Speed Rail is going to be a game changer. Plus even today those locations are on the way to VC vacation destinations (i.e. Yosemite, Tahoe, Monterey) which could then be expensed as business travel. And they are in the same timezone.
Reno? Easy. No ecosystem, aside from specialized things (Gigafactory etc).
I would LOVE to start an accelerator type thing just over the border of SLT, CA. But I would expect everyone would leave at the end of the it for a larger metro.
I agree with Reno. I actually think some good things are gonna start happening there due to several positive aspects. It's a big enough city to have nice cultural features. It has pretty good air connectivity. There's a younger crowd arriving and opening restaurants and brewpubs.
Re: the ecosystem. I think that's in the process of being addressed. If I'm starting a startup, I'm looking seriously at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center [0].. Tahoe/Reno are only a few hours drive out of the Bay Area and the Reno area has a dramatically lower cost-of-living.
I remember visiting clients somewhere south of Reno in some office park in the spring time. They had an awesome conference room with windows which overlooked some hills. It was this amazing verdant green color.
As someone who left the midwest for SV, I'm not looking to go back any time soon. Going to the midwest is like getting in a time machine set for 40 years ago.
You have so many good food and coffee options in SF. In the midwest? Hah, nope. Can I work on my open source without my employer owning it? No. Can I get places easily just by walking or taking Lyft line? Fat chance.
Not to mention, I experienced a shocking level of casual racism growing up there. Culturally it is not a pleasant place to be. No, I don't think we'll be seeing an exodus there any time soon.
Midwesterner -> SF transplant here. There's fundamental cultural problems in the Midwest that are basically insurmountable. Outside of pockets like Boulder, people are simply culturally uninterested in the future, changing things, or improving on their situation. People correspondingly are very content; they immerse theirselves in their families, their relationships, Football, etc. Starting a technology company here would be a very lonely endeavor.
>people are simply culturally uninterested in the future, changing things, or improving on their situation
I'll give you not wanting to change things, but people here are certainly interested in ensuring the future is good for themselves and their kids - there's just a lack of bullshitting ourselves about changing the world by working on a cell phone application.
>People correspondingly are very content; they immerse theirselves in their families, their relationships, Football, etc.
You say all of that like it's a bad thing. The Midwest is a peaceful place, and I happen to like it that way. I don't want or need a constant bombardment of Things To Do, my situation is exactly where I want it to be.
I totally agree actually, and maybe worded it a little poorly. I love it back in the Midwest and mostly think positively of it, I just think starting a technology company here would be a mistake, since they are inherently risky endeavors, and Midwesterners are culturally adverse to taking risks in my experience.
I think it would largely depend on what sort of company you wanted to start - I would agree that a traditional SV-style startup is probably going to spectacularly fail. However, my experience with starting a small bootstrapped company was very positive, especially given the lower cost of living. It wasn't anything that was gonna make me rich but it was definitely doable.
Honestly, I think the idea that anywhere other than SV is gonna be come SV is silly - but I also do want to help dispel the notion that the Midwest has no technical talent or is unfriendly to tech. We have a lot of tech talent - a large portion of it just ends up leaving for the coasts for better networking rather than setting up shop here, or working for large established companies for steady pay.
SV didn't just pop up in NorCal. It's a historical place where the first software companies and the internet were born. Silicon Valley was involved in creating Google, and self-driving cars. In other words, it's not like any city can, all of sudden, change its industries to compete with the level of IT/software innovations happening in SV.
There are people from MIT, BBN, CERN, etc. that would like to have a talk with you. (Yes, Stanford was involved early on but pre dot-com, a great deal of the early Internet work was well outside of California.)
On rainy Seattle days I often research other tech cities I could live in without a large mortgage and larger commute. I've decided, for me at least, Raleigh offers the best balance. Good economy, small-ish city, vibrant downtown, cheap-ish houses. As soon as I can, I'll be leaving Seattle for Raleigh.
If I had a pound for every time I have seen an article proclaiming xxx is the new SV id be rich.
Whilst some areas do have the required teir 1 universities and USP eg silcon fen or wider the oxford to cambridge belt a rust belt state is unlikely to succeed.
I've had an idea for a startup for over a decade and have wanted to go to YC. But hell if I'm gonna go to San Francisco from Detroit area. You guys are freaking insane dealing with that cost of living. BTW, said idea is more than ripe now and the right team could get it running it in a month.
BTW, my concept seems like it needs to be a nonprofit. It could make money but if that ever corrupts it people would be very unhappy.
I'm from Kzoo/GR but landed out in the Seattle area. While the sticker price might seem shocking at first, as a tech worker I've found my salary has scaled to meet the high cost of living (and then some). I think the high cost of living is more of a problem for people who are outside of the tech industry.
Just go forward with it anyway and see where it leads. The trick to entrepreneurship is to bring out the "great" ideas you have in your head and see where it goes.
I left the midwest for the west coast because of the culture, full stop. I was tired of my state representatives writing my sexual preference off as a disorder. I was angry when the state decided a pharmacist could refuse to sell me birth control and I hated the legislative decree that tried to exert control over what gender got to use the bathroom or not. In short, I did not want to live in a state where the legislature had nothing better to do than fight the culture war to win votes for the next election. Yeah, I cant buy a house in san jose, but at least I dont have to worry about the ten commandments showing up at the DMV in stone or some toothless anti-shariah legislation burning through my tax dollars.
Drive 15 miles outside Columbus and it doesnt matter how many VC firm employees you have in the city, the bible thumpers win this state by a landslide of gerrymandering and arent ashamed to force their backwoods culture on you from the hinterlands. The midwests relationship with silicon valley terminates at the facebook, google, and twitter HTTP connection for a damn good reason.