Re: Boulder: Why not Fort Collins? Close to Denver, beautiful area, nice weather, college town, and - more than anything else - the place is just loaded with young people, and local businesses seem geared towards a younger market more so than most any place I can think of.
I'm thinking of moving to Boulder from Silicon Valley (Palo Alto) simply because the cost of doing business is so insanely high here. My apartment rent has gone up $1200 over the past 5 years, the traffic sucks, taxes are high, wages are inflated, and we don't need to raise capital.
There are ways to deal with these factors (BART, biking to work, cooking at home, handing out equity in lieu of cash, etc...). But, why bother when there are more affordable places to do business in the U.S.?
I'm looking for a place in the U.S. that meets three criteria:
(1) a great year-round outdoor lifestyle with lots of hiking trails, mountain biking terrain, and possibly rock-climbing and/or skiing
(2) young, smart people
(3) affordable living (rental prices, food prices, traffic)
(4) a nearby university with a top-40 School of Engineering
(5) not a resort/retirement community
Right now I'm looking at Ventura, CA (ocean sports are a good substitute for moutain sports), Boulder, or Bozeman Montanta. Neither Ventura nor Boulder are "cheap", but they are a bargain compared to Palo Alto. Ventura is within 40min of UCSB (Santa Barbara is too expensive) and Boulder is obviously a college town.
We're keeping our servers in a Bay Area datacenter, but there really is no reason to stay here since our company is profitable and cash-flow positive (an algorithmic hedge fund specializing in OTC energy derivatives).
I've never been to Fort Collins. How does it compare with Boulder?
There is no reason to be in Silicon Valley if your company is profitable, cash-flow positive, and self-financing. If not, then Silicon Valley is a superb place to raise capital; however, be prepared to pay dearly for it (both in equity and in cost of doing business).
I lived in Boulder from 2002 to 2005. I spent 2 months in Boulder this summer trying to figure out if it's the place to be. I love it. I love the quality of life. I love the relaxed atmosphere, the perfect weather & proximity to skiing. TechStars is there, Boulder OpenCoffee Club is active and there is some VC, as far as I can tell. There's a decent pool of relatively cheap talent in the Denver/Boulder area, CU has a reasonably well regarded engineering school, Sun and IBM have campuses there. StartupWeekend was born there.
I couldn't find the energy. The pace is an opiate. I couldn't find the noise. I couldn't find the 20-somethings actively changing things in tech; it seems like if you have any drive there, you leave. The vibe is bohemian (it's Boulder), and part of me would love to, as pg commented, move 10,000 geeks there and give a $500m endowment to CU to try to architect a new SV in the Rockies, but it's missing something. It seems like the scales are tipped 75/25 between play/work.
Please prove me wrong. I'd be there next week if I thought the startup infrastructure (developers, investors, etc) was active enough.
As a Colorado resident, let me say that I'm pretty sure you'd be very happy in Boulder. According to USNEWS, CU-Boulder is #40 SoE. The other 4 criteria you have describe Boulder very accurately.
As for Fort Collins, I haven't been there much, but it is definitely geographically much more "out there" than Boulder. I think FC is about 60 miles north of Denver, while Boulder is about 25 miles northwest. The 25 miles between Denver and Boulder are pretty built up, at least by Colorado standards, while the drive to Fort Collins from Denver is pretty desolate.
Boulder is a bit more expensive than Fort Collins, but coming from the Bay Area, I'm not sure you'd notice much. It's all mighty cheap on the Front Range compared to anywhere near coastal CA cities.
Thought about Research Triangle Park in North Carolina? Got Duke University, UNC Chapel Hill, and NC State close by. Close to the beach, the mountains. Weather is great, though it does get pretty muggy in the summer. And the cost of living is reasonable. And it has a strong entrepreneurial community (cednc.org). It's certainly not a huge city, but it's got a lot going for it...though, it would mean moving to the east coast.
The numbers are a year old but Seattle was #3 and NYC was #4. Although Tacoma is grouped in with Seattle, I'm not sure how meaningful that is -- it's kind of like grouping Oakland with Mountain View.
Chicago's the best. You can live within walking distance of world-class restaurants, great music venues, convenient public transportation and the most breathtaking architecture in America -- all for a fraction of the cost of living you'd find in San Francisco, New York, Boston or DC.
Then there's the demographic breakdown. If I'm building a Web application that I intend to market to normal people -- i.e., NOT the types of people who read 96 RSS feeds a day and obsess over TechCrunch -- I'd rather live in a place where my friends are, well, diverse. Chicago has a strong economy with no clear dominating industry. There's strength in diversity.
Not that there isn't a tech scene here. The Tech Cocktail events (semi-regular gatherings of 500+ local tech people) have been well-attended, and the Chicago Python Users Group is a great bunch of people. During a recent Chicago visit, a Bay Area resident told me he was astounded by how much more active the Chicago Python group was than the Bay Area one.
I have very little experience raising startup money, so I can't comment about the availability of VC or angel funding in Chicago. But are you really going to move somewhere just to get funding? What does it say about the quality of your idea if you feel like it will only succeed if you live in a certain part of the U.S.?
I'm originally from Chicago. Chicago is great in some ways, but the attitudes of most business people (including those in "tech") are straight out of the 1950s.
What's the story with Chicago. You'd think with 37signals, feedburner and ... I can't think of a prominent 3rd, you'd get a local startup community slightly more active than TechCocktail...
Chicago is just getting close to reaching critical mass. The startups that succeeded here before did little to foster community. The startups here now are coming around to the idea of a start up community. It should be interesting to see how it plays out. The other problem here is that a bunch of the good hackers go to places like Citadel rather than do a startup.
Sounds like we should get a Chicago news.yc meetup going. I'm thinking something more frequent than Tech Cocktail, is there a Chicago OpenCoffee Club yet? I know someone's working on a StartupWeekend here: http://startupweekendchicago.wetpaint.com/
A news.yc meetup here would be great. OpenCoffee Club here has been ruined by MidPhase but theres no reason we can't set up a weekly or monthly meeting time at a coffee shop where news.ycers can come and go, with some way to identify ourselves like a post-it note on your laptop or something. Anyone up for it?
Campfire set up for organizing and just general ChiTown talk. http://ycombinator.campfirenow.com if you want an invite mail cubend#gmail.com Works well as a message board or a chatroom. I'll be in there off and on all week
Keith does a good job to develop community here though it seems beta is a bit stagnant. I believe he's still working on JobCoin as well as a pretty successful facebook app
No, not NYC... most hackers are paid too well by i-banks and hedge funds to risk joining a startup, and those startup founders who do succeed don't stay here to become angels (as they do in SV and other startup hubs).
Austin is like the only city in 750 miles with a substantial high-tech background and a creative-class culture, isn't it?
I've spent time in Dallas (home of Texas Instruments) and while it is a nice working-class metroplex, Austin seems to have far more of the character of a startup hub. Same thing with St. Louis, I understand.
On the other hand, Lawrence, Kansas has the character but not the high-tech (and it's kinda little).
Dallas has a substantial high-tech background and has an interesting creative class, but there's not much intersection between the two. It also doesn't help much that the business attitudes in Dallas are very traditional and "corporate" (not sure how else to explain it). It's a shame, too, because there are 2-3 decent universities here, and various swarms of talent, but absolutely zero community.
Plano and Richardson probably fare better than most places with respect to interesting new companies and tech startups, but they've got a long way to go. I'd probably bet on Plano, if I had to choose. They've got some cultural outlets, an interesting historic downtown, a handful of technology companies, and it's a nice place to live with decent local governments, and it's nearby UT-Dallas, which is the best technology school in the Dallas Metro area (although not flagship like UT and TAMU).
Funny you should mention Lawrence and Austin in the same post. As a current resident of Lawrence, I can attest that this would be a great town to start a startup in, but there seems a definite lack of interest from the CS grads. Everyone seems bent on a big paycheck at Sprint or Cerner or Garmin.
I actually like Austin because it's like a bigger Lawrence, but never actually lived there.
All I really wish is for a place with a bunch of nerds and some fiber-to-the-home. Sadly, AT&T owns us here and something that fast will probably never happen.
Austin also has Univ. of Texas - ranked seventh in CS research. The startup I'm involved with is planning on opening up offices there when it's time to grow.
University of Texas, National Instruments, AMD, Dell are some of the big contributors of talent. Tech stuff is growing here, and there are unfortunately some growing pains as a result. The startup culture is still not what you'd see in silicon valley, but I'd say its improving.
Incidentally, there's been a growing trend of Californians moving to Austin.
Lots of Big Co's have offices here such as Google, Yahoo, BBC, Skype, etc
Lots of great startups: Last.fm, Moo, Crowdstorm, Mind Candy, Gottabet, etc
Some great universities: Imperial, RCA, near to Oxford & Cambridge
Good VCs: Index Ventures, Accel, Atlas plus Seedcamp
Plenty of events: Ranging from weekly openCoffee's to big barcamps and Hackday and conferences like Future of Web Apps. Last nights Facebook Developer Garage pulled in 200 or so.
If you don't feel that the Bay Area offers any advantage to your startup, you could probably be based almost anywhere.