YC Interviews in NYC (opens in new tab)

Once you get into YC, you can take your time and it is easier to make a case at the embassy.

First of all, the US visa spaces are fully booked. The next open interview slots are somewhere in April so instead of founders trying to prepare for their YC interview, they are spending an enormous amount of time trying to get an earlier slot for a US visa interview.

After managing to get a slot it is another many days of preparing and hoping not to be rejected.

It costs at least $200 per interview in a country where the minimum wage is hoping to be increased to $80/month later this year.

All this is happening as their contemporaries from US and Europe only have to book a flight in 5 mins and return back to preparing for their YC interview and building their startup.

The world is flat indeed!

Visas for “I just wanna go to USA for a meeting” are harder if you aren’t from a visa waiver country.

(funnilly if you are from visa waiver land, getting visa after acceptance is more work than for the interview because you actually need one)

I know multiple people, directly and indirectly, who have been caught by this. Knowledge of this problem contributed to my desire to move from New York to California. Most of the stories of squashed startups will never be heard because they never got anywhere. But it limits how dynamic New York's startup ecosystem can become.

This is not to say that there won't be successful startups. Just fewer than they would have been. And people who you'd want to be able to start them, are shut out.

Like this snippet:

> How many times have you read about startup founders who continued to live inexpensively as their companies took off? Who continued to dress in jeans and t-shirts, to drive the old car they had in grad school, and so on?

Maybe it was doable in 2008, but the idea living "inexpensively" anywhere near SV just is laughable. Nobody is going to save more on clothing and cars than you will lose on rent. Even living in Brooklyn would get you significant savings over most places equally close to SFO.

Another interesting factoid he called out also has me wondering about the long-term implications of SV becoming the main magnet for startups:

> The power of an important new technology does eventually convert to money. So by caring more about money and less about power than Silicon Valley, New York is recognizing the same thing, but slower. And in fact it has been losing to Silicon Valley at its own game: the ratio of New York to California residents in the Forbes 400 has decreased from 1.45 (81:56) when the list was first published in 1982 to .83 (73:88) in 2007.

Seems to me like the trend of the extremely wealthy concentrating in California may not necessarily be a positive thing for creating an environment that can sustain ambitious people who need a place they can live cheaply while building things. Though I would be very curious to see what those numbers are looking at today.

All that said, his analysis of why he liked SV seems like it made sense at the time. It just clearly couldn't scale.

This does make me more confident about my decision to move back to Raleigh though. The "eavesdropping" thing he mentions is actually pretty great there, Durham and Raleigh have a very diverse and well-educated populace. People who don't think there are ambitious people around those parts must not run in the same circles as I do. I know more people building their own companies or side projects or just learning and building things for fun there than I could find in Seattle. It's hard to get funding there for sure - not so many super rich people around to hit up and perhaps outsiders misinterpret the more practical aims of local ambition as lack of ambition altogether. But while SV and NY and LA may send the strongest messages about power, money, and fame, I feel better than ever about being in the "Esse Quam Videri"[1] corner of the world instead.

[1] State motto of NC, translates to "To be, rather than to seem".

>A friend who moved to Silicon Valley in the late 90s said the worst thing about living there was the low quality of the eavesdropping. At the time I thought she was being deliberately eccentric. Sure, it can be interesting to eavesdrop on people, but is good quality eavesdropping so important that it would affect where you chose to live? Now I understand what she meant. The conversations you overhear tell you what sort of people you're among.

Good luck, and keep up the good work :-)