The Age Old Question: East vs West

As many of you know, I am an east coast guy (although I would leave you all for a job in the bay area .. sorry) and I am always looking for other’s insights into the differences between the startup scene between the east and west coasts.  The other day, I came across another great piece written by Tim Marman, co-founder of Notches,  on CenterNetworks called “Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Start a Tech Company in Silicon Valley“. 

Tim brought up many great points to include:

Money

The more relevant piece is that there is more early stage capital available. The area is stock full of entrepreneurs with previous successes willing to pump that money into potentially new successes. But there’s also a dark side to this. First, Silicon Valley is one of the most expensive places around  - and if you factor in the need for a car (or two, if you’re a married couple and work in different place) and so on, it can even be more expensive than New York (which is usually one of the biggest knocks on our beloved city). Contrast this to raising a small friends and family round in Austin, Pittsburgh, or Colorado – you may have less available cash, but talent and office space (by far the two biggest drains) are a small fraction of what they are in NYC or Silicon Valley.

Talent

Again, though, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t great technical talent elsewhere. The cities I mentioned before - Pittsburgh, Austin, Boulder - all have great engineering programs producing local, young talent.

There has been a lot of talk about talent.  What I think is interesting as noted in another one of my posts is the fact that talent is really scarce in the valley.  Not only that, but the talent there is a little jaded as well.  Everyone is out for the quick hit, come on and get your options and hope they make it big.  Not that we all don’t want to make it big, sometimes you need talent to be with you for the long haul, and I think that you find that more outside the valley.

Tim makes some other great observations but the one I thought was most important was to “Avoid the Echo Chamber”

It’s really no secret that the tech community – and Silicon Valley especially, it seems – are huge echo chambers.

I think this is a really important point and a trap that many of us may fall into.  As we have seen in the local DC area, we have fallen into a dual ecosystem noted in a recent Washington Post article.  We tend to circulate inside our own ecosystem without venturing out to get a broader view of the scene as a whole.  Peter Corbett of iStragegyLabs is looking to help mitigate this with the Twin Tech event coming up this week in DC.  We need to remember that a better gauge of our ideas can be gotten outside the chamber we have created.