Does anyone care about living in a city that's just plain nice to live in? Everyone's so concerned about whether a city is conducive to start-ups they miss out on evaluating quality of life from a personal perspective.
I choose to live in San Diego because I love to live in San Diego, for innumerable personal reasons, not because it's "startupy". Stocktwits moved to Coronado island near San Diego not because there's a thriving start-up scene here, but because it's just a damn nice place to live and work. Developers who can live anywhere should want to live in great places for personal reasons.
For whatever it's worth, I've done a significant amount of traveling around the United States (mostly on three JetBlue flying passes) and in general find cities like Boston to be overrated in terms of quality of life, especially when factoring in the enormous cost of living.
No doubt these are all personal value judgments. I just wonder why people optimize so little on the simple personal quality of life vector and so much on whether there's a bunch of "startupy people" there.
I'll respond. I lived in the Bay Area for 10 years, had a very successful exit, and packed it up to move to San Diego. Started another startup there and met my co-founder there--but recently went to Austin.
I missed the energy of the Bay Area, frankly. San Diego is sleepy. But the last thing I wanted to do was go back to the Bay Area and get sucked into the vortex again. Austin seemed like a happy medium.
Since moving to Austin, I can safely say that I expect my company's revenues to more than double this year from what we were doing in San Diego. We work with many local businesses, and we're booming right now. In fact, since we moved from San Diego, we've grown from 7 to 9 people, hired another full-time developer, etc.
Things are just way more exciting here. (Not to mention that I'll save nearly $40,000 this year on taxes. And groceries/housing/gas are way cheaper.) Though I'll always have a place in my heart for San Diego, it's just not a great place to do a startup. Austin is my home for the foreseeable future, and I'm happier here than I ever was there, despite the amazing weather in SD.
I choose to live in San Diego because I love to live in San Diego, for innumerable personal reasons, not because it's "startupy". Stocktwits moved to Coronado island near San Diego not because there's a thriving start-up scene here, but because it's just a damn nice place to live and work. Developers who can live anywhere should want to live in great places for personal reasons.
For whatever it's worth, I've done a significant amount of traveling around the United States (mostly on three JetBlue flying passes) and in general find cities like Boston to be overrated in terms of quality of life, especially when factoring in the enormous cost of living.
No doubt these are all personal value judgments. I just wonder why people optimize so little on the simple personal quality of life vector and so much on whether there's a bunch of "startupy people" there.