I'm surprised it took this long. Boston area has been great for hardware startups, but the software scene is (IMO) a far distant 2nd to California. Have contemplated moving west a few times myself.
That's good really. The speaker lists always seem better for the California one, and the space is more conducive.
Out of curiosity, from what you can tell, has the economy affected the gap between the two locales at all? Did the already timid Boston investors just give up entirely? Or has it been pretty proportional?
Hard to say, because the number of deals with Boston investors has always been so small as to be statistically insignificant.
Boston VCs may actually be more interested in YC alumni lately, but I think that's because they only recently discovered YC.
With angels it's even harder to tell, because the Boston angel community is even weaker than the VCs. If I recall correctly, only one YC alum has been talking to a Boston angel lately, and he backed out of the deal in a pretty lame way. But with only one data point it's hard to say whether it's Boston, or the economy, or just that guy.
I agree this move is better for the statups. I also agree that Palo Alto is better for kids than Cambridge. I think Arlington is slightly better than Palo Alto though.
And let me congratulate you again on the upcoming addition. Kids are great.
I agree with Arlington being slightly better than Palo Alto. In fact, you could say that I'm in the process of doubling down that particular gamble! Given that my brother's raising his kid in there and I'm here, I feel like I have a semi-informed opinion.
But I'm not sure that we'd have much luck convincing the expecting couple.
Number 1, it's a small town-- embedded in suburbia that arrived later, but large parts of it are much as they were before. Cambridge is too urban. If you let your kid ride his bike in the street in front of your house, he'd last about 10 minutes. The other option in Boston is suburbs like Lexington and Concord, but though luxurious they have the usual suburban problems (not walkable, deadly dull).
Not to second-guess your choice... but what happened to Arlington, MA in this analysis? ;)
I liked Arlington when I lived there: Short bus ride to Cambridge, walk to the Red Line in good weather, bike path, wide streets, walkable, not too urban, not too suburban, not too expensive...
But Palo Alto has most of that plus startups and sun, so it certainly makes sense.
Perhaps not so crazy. Last year I discovered two other Ruby programmers (one at another startup, one at a more established firm) among the parents in my son's kindergarten class.
And this was a reasonably sized class of ~20 kids.
I get together with friends every once in a while to hang out and play board games (not trivial pursuit etc, but good Euro games like those found on boardgamegeek.com) and would enjoy starting a hacking group. Would there be others in the Arlington area who would be interested in joining?
I work in Arlington, and live just one town over. Yup, Ruby. An Arlington meetup might be fun, I never seem to be able to make the Boston Ruby events in Cambridge.
I thought I was the only startup hacker / YC news reader in Winchester! We just moved here and despite the homogeneity, it's a great town that is walkable and has train service.
Does everyone get soft when they spend time out west? I've lost half my family to that coast and they all complain about the sort of weather that is optimal for sledding.
I lived in Boston pretty much my whole life until September. It was 70 degrees here in Palo Alto yesterday. I was playing basketball outside in shorts and a tshirt. I don't miss the cold at all. Not even a bit. It's like a disease. I'm glad I got it cured.
My experience with Northern California is that it rains pretty well every day from December to March. Not that those few days when it doesn't aren't glorious, but people oversell the lack of winter. I think the best part of the climate is the fact that it's not insanely hot the rest of the year.
I was curious, so I checked. At worst (Jan, Feb) it rains about as much in other places in the US. It just seems horribly rainy because the weather the rest of the year is so sunny.
A raincloud must have followed you around! Even though that is the heart of the 'rainy season', in SF, about half those days have no measurable rain, and even those with rain are often just a few hundredths of an inch.
As a matter of fact, it was. I did say "my experience." I arrived in SF in October 2005, left in Dec. 2007. Rainclouds seem to have been following me around forever.
Early 2006 was extremely wet. I remember getting caught in some crazy downpours. There were a number of floods down in Santa Cruz county that took out roads and caused mudslides. In The City, March 2006 was a record setting rainfall.
I still remember thinking - wow, they oversold me on the climate. And then it stopped raining at the end of March. For 8 months. Plus it seemed like the thermometer was pinned at 72 degrees every day.
I live in Southern New England. We get more than our share of rain in the Winter. We also get temperatures rising just above freezing each day so that snow melts and ice forms each evening - wonderful for commutes. At present, my snow pile is level with our 6 foot fence. I have no place to put new snow fall. Only having rain through the Winter, with temperatures well above freezing, would be a blessing.
From someone who was only able to handle Boston's climate until he graduated from college, we have seasons on the West coast too. We just don't experience them all in one day as often. :-D
In all seriousness, there is seasonal variation both in temperature (which the East coast also has) and in precipitation (which the East coast doesn't have), but they tend not to vary so severely, and there also tends to be less intra-seasonal variance, either. You won't find Seattle going from 80 degrees and muggy to 30 degrees and snowing over the course of 12 hours -- this happened while I was in Boston in April of a year that hopefully someone else here can fill in.
It might be a bit soft, but I think of it as removing weather from the list of things that distract you from more important work.
Within a season. The east coast has four seasons; California has two: a 9-month warm, dry season and a 3-month cool, wet one. Seeing rain during the dry season is always a surprise, and people complain how weird the weather is. (Of course it does happen a few times, but always accompanied by wailing and gnashing of teeth.) During the winter, light rain a few times a week is permissible. And it's still not actually cold.
When I moved out east this year I was shocked that nobody here seems to know what the weather's like on the west coast. I suppose that's because it's never covered in the national news.
There's more to CA than the coast and the valleys. There's also mountains.
If you want snow, the Sierras, which are two hours away from the SF Bay Area, get 20-40 FEET a year, with a 10+ foot snow pack. http://www.eldoradocountyweather.com/donner.html isn't even the place that gets the most snow.
The variation I was referring to was precipitation amount. The monthly average precipitation graph for Seattle looks very much like a sine wave. The graph for most Eastern Seaboard cities look much more like a constant function.
Wow - did you grow up on a diet of seal blubber? I'm from Ottawa, currently living in SV. I only miss the snow once in a while - more now that I have kids though.
California still has seasons I'd say. Here in Hawaii it is extremely easy to lose sense of time; you blink and pow! three years have been passed.
But once you learn to see changes in subtle things such as the color tone of Diamond Head (it's greener in winter), and also not to forget checking calenders, you can even work here.
I think year round warmth makes you soft. I used to live in south Florida. I moved there in the winter and was wearing shorts when it was in the 60s while everyone else was wearing jackets. I laughed at a friend of mine for saying it was cold. The next winter, I got cold when it was in the 60s and my friend got to laugh at me.
Lexington/Bedford/Concord are reasonably walkable if you live in a house close to the downtown area (which admittedly can be hard to find & rather expensive). I used to walk to the library, post office, bank, & 2 supermarkets in Bedford, which is the least walkable of the three. Lexington & Concord have downtown areas that are just as walkable as Mountain View or Palo Alto.
The food sucks in suburban Massachusetts though. There're like no decent restaurants in any of those town centers, and you've got a point about them being dull. Some decent places in Cambridge, but then you're back to being too urban.
The one thing I really like about the Boston suburbs is the abundance of greenery. A lot of houses are built on an acre or more, with buffer forests because the streets never run straight in Massachusetts. AFAICT these just don't exist in Silicon Valley until you get out to the foothills, and those communities don't really have downtown areas at all.
I need to speak up for my local restaurants in the areas you just mentioned....Great spots in Arlington where I live, not as many options as the squares in Cambridge but there's some great eats.
Yeah, Arlington has some good ones, as does Newton & Waltham. It's really the Bedford/Burlington/Lexington/Concord/Carlisle/Lincoln area that has a dearth of good restaurants. The only one I can think of that we regularly eat at is Luigi's in Bedford. Other than that, we usually go over to Billerica or Arlington or Littleton (there are some good ones in the Littleton/Acton/Westford area) to eat.
As a Concord resident, it seems like a great place to raise kids (fantastic schools, accessible town, etc), but it certainly doesn't provide the opportunities that Palo Alto does.
I think I would have liked growing up around the bay area better than any other place I've lived. Skate parks are everywhere (I would have killed for a decent skate park when I was a kid), there's an ocean an hour drive away, mountains not much further, a big and really interesting city is an hour train ride away, the weather is nice enough to go outside almost year round (it's maybe a little chilly for me now, since I spent 10+ years in Texas, but I would have loved it when I was a kid growing up on the east coast), there's a reasonable music and arts scene (mainly in the city, but near enough to feel it and take part), the small towns around here are extremely walkable/bikeable, and there's good mass transit for the places you can't get on foot or bike. Palo Alto is not a suburban wasteland, and yet, there are lots of places where it's quiet and low traffic.
Cambridge itself isn't famous for great schools, but right around there (Newton, Lexington, etc) have the best schools in the country by most measures.
When you include private schools, though, I don't know how things stack.
That's an interesting thought. I would have never applied to YC if YC were always in Boston, so there must be someone out there who would never apply if it's always in California. Does that mean that, right now, a technically savvy angel out in Boston could start snatching up some of the MIT and Harvard alumni startups that YC ordinarily would have first dibs on? I dunno, but I guess if I were an investor in Boston, I'd be thinking about how to put myself in that position.
I don't know about never apply to California, but I think that the sudden lack of seed funders on the East Coast leaves a pretty severe gap. My cofounder and I are talking about this right now: California is pretty tough for him, and this coming in January means that there's less time to really discuss this. The fact that there's no seed funder over on this side means that it's going to be tough to figure out if things don't work - one-man start-ups just aren't a good idea.
For the better or worse? (I know I've seen you identify your startup in the past, but I don't recall it right now, so I don't know whether you're doing well or have gone back to the drawing board.)
As someone who has happily chosen to raise her children in Cambridge, we all do what we think is best for our kids. Suburbia is not for us; Huron Village is about as suburban as I can stand. :)
When we were expecting out first baby, everyone we met and talked to advised us to get as much sleep as possible, because it will be a bit difficult to get a good night sleep for the first few weeks/months after the baby arrives. I won't advise that to you guys, because I couldn't really understand how sleeping longer for a few weeks/months now will help you sleep less for a few weeks/months later on.
We're applying this summer, and while we're on the East Coast we were wondering whether Boston's not being a start-up town was good or not. Guess now we don't have to worry about that.
Edit: any info on when exactly the application round opens?
So What ever happened to Paul's article that Cambridge is a hot spot for start ups? I guess this means that there is a spot for someone else to take yc's spot in the Boston area. Anyone know of replacements?
Wow, congratulations on the baby. Ours has been a huge change in our lives, but is really a source of joy (and worry:-) Any ideas about a name, or will it only be revealed at the last moment?
congrats to both of you, really exciting news. love that the reasons all make sense but really it was all about where you want to live and raise kids. despite it all this seems like the best way to make decisions: "whats best for us?"
