The internet is what it is, but you can never match the face-to-face relationship with an online approach.
I totally understand that this is a dream-like situation: You make a good amount of money, doing what you like in a remote island where the sun shines and the food is always tasty (yes I'm from Greece...) but if your business can't be done 100% online, which is almost never the case, then you need offices in a big city. Then you need to visit and control these offices, etc.
A representative sampling of locations of the "head office" from small software businesses that I'm socially close to: Ogaki, Philadelphia, "way in the boonies in West Virginia", "way in the boonies in Idaho", "way in the boonies in Florida", Nuremberg, a small town in Italy whose name I am blanking on, etc etc.
There exist plenty of happy software companies in the big metropolitan areas -- and God bless them -- but they aren't the whole of the solution space.
[+] Why? Interesting question. Some days I think this is just a pure coincidence and some days I think that the low implied burn rate for the founders and generally low opportunity costs makes it easier for the business to hit both pro-forma profitability and "successfully outcompetes best available alternatives on the local labor market" profitability. Bootstrapped businesses can, of course, pay for an apartment in the Mission and exceed a Google PM's salary in Mountain View, but those are much harder bars to hit than "beats the snot out of any job available in Ogaki."
I've always thought that when I was ready to bootstrap my own startup, I'd do it from a rural farm property. You can fly to meet whomever you need to face to face for networking, and with extremely low costs of living, your run rate is close (but not quite) to zero.
Thanks for confirming my thought!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna
I suppose that compared to Tokyo, most anything could be considered a small town, but in Italy, Bologna isn't.
Quibbling about details aside, I think your point is a good one, although I also believe there are definitely two sides to it. The case made in this book is convincing that cities are a lot better for the sort of "spontaneous idea contamination" that can lead to big things:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Geography-Jobs-Enrico-Moretti/dp/0...
Things get even more complicated when families come into the picture: a beach town in Morocco is not my own idea of the place I'd like to live with mine, although I certainly wouldn't mind an extended vacation there.
There are a lot of things I don't care for about my hometown in Oregon (THE WEATHER!), but I do find that I'm pretty partial to the mid-sized (which for me is something like 100K-400K, depending on various factors) university town like that where I grew up. I like being able to chat with people about programming over drinks from time to time, or talk about business, or have a variety of local businesses. On the other hand, with a family and not wanting to work for a BigCo, I'm not really interested in big cities any more.
So I would argue that this is already pretty central
I think it is a business by itself: you pay for your exotic startup location. What we just read is a travel agency that focuses on startups.
I agree with atmosx, that towns are better suited for startups. When we worked on our startup many years ago, one of the largest obstacles for investors was the location: a mid size sleepy town, away from where the money is. One reason for it was of course, that investors back then didn't get what internet means (they still don't). The other reason is, they want control. If their investment is out of reach, there will be no investment.
Uhh, funny idea: take their cash and disappear to a moroccan beach. Sounds certainly nice, but looks so bad.
You can have a much shorter commute. Lower cost of living. And some really nice community aspects.
I've never understood why the likes of Facebook or other large tech companies wouldn't build infrastructure in the some of the smaller cities as opposed to already over-crowded and much more expensive cities.
Intel and Motorolla built out in Chandler, AZ which brought in a lot of technology companies and built the city to what it is today. It makes perfect sense for a large company to do the same someplace with a limited market where they can build out a community.
Yet the competition space for very young rich urban american white kids making products for very young rich urban american white kids is hyper crowded, and in "rural fishing communities" the marketplace is apparently nearly empty, so the odds of a big success appear much better.
There's a fad now of "home automation" as defined by a small ARM box with a thermometer and a microphone for $100 that does pretty much the same as the 20 competitors... you have a less than 1 in 20 chance of being the top dog alpha winner. On the other hand AFAIK there is no competition for "www.rate.your.diesel.fishing.boat.mechanic.com" social network shopping for diesel fuel filter group buy advice or whatever. And that idea only took ten seconds, I'm sure actually trying would result in better ideas.
Your odds of competing are higher if you stay in the city and follow (key word, "follow") the pack. Which is awesome if your goal is playing king of the hill and the sheer thrill of competition. On the other hand, if you want to make fat stacks of cash, you want the best odds of winning, not the best odds of being involved in an epic competition.
Yes I can stop work, and "go surfing" (in the right season), I can even stop working and visit the local town pier and see those quaint "fisherman" struggling to make a living -because let's be honest, not everyone can be a tech-ninja startup founder.
If I wanted I could even crank the heat in my car, squint and make believe that it's actually a warm exotic beach in Europe but hey, at some point I gotta go back to the office, fire up that computer and get back to hacking.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter where you are. If you need to "break out of the box" and travel a bit, go for it. But simply moving operations to somewhere foreign will not be the deciding factor in your success.
I think that it matters, instead. Unless you are one of those people who are oblivious to their surroundings.
You are not going to code 24/7. And when you will have done your share of coding for the day, or even if you would just like to take a break, then being in a nice place will help you to recharge yourself.
Also, if all your company is doing is "hacking code", then I doubt your company will be around for very long.
All that being said, I do agree with the sentiment, and I think that the benefits of high-cost locales are probably not worth the increased cost of living. I definitely appreciate my Midwest mortgage payment.
For me, in the UK, being able to go and sit outside for half-an-hour makes a lot of difference to my mood and thence my ability to focus and get stuff done. There's only really a couple of months in the year that's possible. Mind you I love snow too, and a fresh bright snowy day is a great break as well. Instead we seem to have at least 6 months of dreariness and dreich.
I've been in the mountains of Vietnam for the last year and rent has been between $50 and $125 per month, which has made it possible for me to be unemployed for a long time and write v1.0 of my startup's app.
I think that Southeast Asia is a pretty ideal location if you want to go the bootstrapping route - the people are super nice and friendly and everything is unbelievably cheap. You really can get a lot done.
The serious downside is that you are not really connected to the tech scene - you can't really meet that many hackers (i.e. potential cofounders) and of course there is zero funding. And when you talk to tech folks stateside you feel pretty disconnected when you in a different part of the world.
Nevertheless I think it's a viable way to go solo.
Check out http://www.tropicalmba.com as a good starting point to learn about this "scene".
As another point, after coming out to Asia while working a remote programming gig for a US company I discovered that I love the severe time zone difference. I have 1 Skype meeting per day and exactly 0 disturbances for the rest of my workday. Really plays well into the "Maker's Schedule" as described by pg: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
It doesn't sound like a good option though if you want to actually build a startup: writing a lot of code, meeting with clients, hiring great people, etc.
It is (or was) a 'small fishing village' that retains a fascinating history.
1.5 hours from London, and 1 hour from Brighton, 1/3 the cost of flats and working space, good connection speeds, good coffee. If you come down to check it out, look me up and I'll buy you a pint.
--EDIT-- Some nice tempting rental listings for you :) http://www.hastingsobserver.co.uk/property/search?listingSta...
But certainly pretty, peaceful, cheap property, great scenery and fairly convenient for the Cairngorms for climbing/skiing:
http://www.portknockiewebsite.co.uk/
For a bit of history, here is a page describing the loss of my great-grandfathers boat the Evangeline with all hands:
http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/pirie/history/PFWv1-o/ui26.htm
[I traced my ancestry recently and its a bit of a shock to realise that most of my male ancestors for about 300 years had a connection of one kind or another with the fishing industry].
While the housing is cheap by London standards, it's still the south east and it's possible to get cheaper and better in the north, west, or Scotland.
"Hey, guess what, you have to move to $middleofnowhere."
"Hey, guess what, I quit."
Exactly how the conversation would go if it ever happened to me. What would happen in such a situation is the good employees would quit because they wouldn't want to compromise their salary, marketability, and ability to take a new job, while the dead weight would go with it because it's still easier than finding a new job if they can build up enough job security in their current one.
Also interesting that someone thinks you should do it... who just happens to own office space in said location.
Cities work because there is the infrastructure and the talent pool. Going to the middle of nowhere might save a pittance on salary, but when people inevitably quit, good luck replacing them without spending even more on moving other people there.
The only place where I worked on the last 8 years that I couldn't work remotely is not the kind of place that I would work anymore.
For me these days, if a company doesn't have some remote policy in place (I mean... not full remote, nor once per week, but the option to, sporadically, work from home on a sick day or to be able to do some coding/admin stuff on the road) it automatically flares a red flag as a place that would not be a magical place where I could do the best that I can.
If the place doesn't have the remote-some-times flexibility it's probably a place with bad management practices and an out-dated culture.
Same thing regarding talent pool... Why on earth do you need to smell the emanating creative fumes of your employees every day from across the hall? :P
" the good employees would quit because they wouldn't want to compromise their salary, marketability, and ability to take a new job, "
The good candidates wouldn't touch us with a 10ft pole, the ambitious graduates were getting out of the farmland and over to the cities. So we generally had a great intern pool (lots of sharp people in financially strapped situations not wanting to move) and second to third rate hires. Not bad hires, but... not close to best in class. So while I can perfectly understand bootstrapping or running a (very) small business in the boondocks (many many reasons to do so), I can not advise locating an office there. Nor can I advise any enterprising and ambitious student to move to the boondocks for a job. Networking matters.
Look at the entire business model of Silicon Valley -- the vast majority of hires are fresh graduates. Party because of ageism, but also because fresh graduates are the ones who are willing to uproot their lives and move to some place with a not particularly compelling quality of life, with enormous costs of living, just to get a job. The reality is that the Valley isn't necessarily drawing the best of the best from across the continent: They're drawing the ones who are willing to move, which overwhelmingly means people just starting their adult lives.
So if someone wants to hire new graduates, being in a more remote location might be completely tenable, if not optimal, to their strategy. It is a filter.
And then there are remote workers. I live on a sprawling property in the rural extents of the exurbs of Toronto. If I worked a traditional SD job it would be a terrible commute, but I do the vast majority of my work completely remotely, with redundant high speed connections and some fat computing hardware. There is absolutely nothing that being in the center of it offers me. On the flip side I often have peers and clients to my property for BBQs and a good time.
Of course you are offering extras like being networked in with the other residents, and you are marketing to Europeans so it's not crazy to charge this amount, but it would be nice if you could have some more details and evidence on what you are offering.
There was a surf hostel that we also stayed in but it was more expensive (15 euros a night) for bunk beds but it had internet, good bathrooms and showers, breakfast included.
Morocco's a bargainers paradise. If you haggle you can get the prices down. It's the offseason now. Out of all the places we visited (Taghazout, Sidi Ifni, Mirleft, Agadir, Ouarzazate, Tinghir, Boulemane, Merzouga, Chefchaouen, Marrakesh), for a total of 2 people, we would average around 20 euros a night, sometimes paying 10 euros and sometimes 30. Of course, we weren't looking for all the bells and whistles, just a clean bed for the night. Sometimes we got just that, sometimes we got a luxury suite for 20 euros cause it's the offseason. The big cities were indeed surprisingly more expensive. But nothing about Morocco is sketchy -- the hasslers are annoying but I never once felt threatened (it was also always the 2 of us). The coast is beautiful and you should explore beyond Taghazout -- Essaouira and Sidi Ifni if you can.
IE, imagine a couple with small kids from London comings for an interview to a nice location in Crete. Instead of a tiny London 2 bedroom, they can move into a nice cottage. They can save hours a day in commutes and get more cash into savings. That will appeal to some employees (or their wives/husbands). You can't say Crete is objectively better or worse than the London buzz. But, it is different in a way that will inevitably appeal to some.
The problem is that it's hard not to adjust your salary expectations (as an employer) to local salaries and that just isn't compatible with relocation hiring. People don't relocate for a lower salary, even if cost of living is lower. I think the EU has a lot of these possibilities that are still under appreciated.
If you think your main win/lose parameter is the quality of people you can hire, you should think creatively about how to win here. It's hard to win competing head-to-head.
I realize you probably weren't thinking of a European capital when you wrote it, but it does ring true that there are people for whom location is more important than maximum compensation.
I think it really depends on who you are, not where you are.
It's a half hour drive from there to Silicon Valley. 45 minutes to San Francisco. There's bus service to both places. 10 minutes to Half Moon Bay with supermarkets and hardware stores.
"Getting far away from your family, your friends, [...] Living close to the beach, and surfing or doing yoga, also helps decompressing after work, and avoiding burnout, and therefore staying productive"
1) Traditionally, HN has been about startups: what works, what doesn't work
2) This entire comment thread is reading like a tourism forum
At some point, maybe 2-4 years ago, HN sublty starting moving from a board about how to make your startup to folks trying to pitch other folks on stuff to buy for your startup. It's the old thing about during the gold rush the gold miners didn't make all the money -- the guys selling pickaxes did.
I don't say that to discount these folks. Hell if I know. Probably best place in the world for a startup. It's just every now and then HN gets especially bad about this. And it needs to be pointed out.
The only good thing is that we have decent broadband.
They are now a massive company with 39 US Offices and 4 international offices. I've never been sure if the lesson is that you can start a company in the middle of nowhere, or if you need to have local offices to serve your customers. The headquarters is still in Hailey, ID, in the middle of nowhere, but they clearly thought they needed offices elsewhere to add ~1 additional office per year of the company.
I can appreciate, number 1, the safety (as I had all my gear stolen in Morocco a few years ago, passport included), and living with other tech heads, but in the end I just need a decent internet connection, a kitchen, and location in some interesting part of the world; the rest are nice-to-haves.
Airbnb et al have totally destroyed the bargain rental market. From India, to Morocco, to Argentina, etc. formerly dirt cheap destinations now fetch luxury prices with often very modest accomodations in return.
Best bet for the travelling coder is probably to just do a week rental via hose-you-inc and then search locally for rentals closer to market value (i.e. not 2-5X what the locals are paying).
Now, it's a fantastic market for sellers, more power to them, if I had a place to sublet I'd be more than happy to fetch top dollar for some vanilla 1 bedroom apartment with a blender, hot plate, and clean sheets ;-)
2cents
Sure the subway can suck but in New York City I have access to surfing, beaches, more yoga studios (and dance, and martial arts, among a million other classes in languages, the culinary arts, and virtually any other topic you could choose) than anyone could possibly count, restaurants, museums, concerts, sporting events, scuba diving, sky diving, and anything else you could ever ask for. (And even the things you'd never think to ask for). I mean the list just goes on and on and on. Of course this is predicated on the assumption that you will take advantage of it (and have the money, interest, time, and energy to do so).
However, that being said, the idea of waking up in my hut, and walking outside, doing a little yoga on the beach, and then setting up for a cup of coffee with some locals and hacking away in the sun does sound undeniably attractive.
I'd kill for some more sun in my workplace. And just whose idea were these damned open offices anyways? I do enjoy the social interactions and yet there is always that nipping feeling that I'm interrupting someone else's zone while I do so, much as, often, people interrupt mine when they do.
I can't get fast internet, power/internet goes down when it gets a bit windy or starts raining; and it rains quite a lot, making you really unproductive. Let's not talk about 3G/4G, we are lucky to have 3G on a good day.
If I wanted to go to some conference or meetup I'd have to drive at least 4-5 hours since there's nothing here, and we don't have train or anything.
Talking about leisure time, I like surfing, but that's only viable during the Summer, there's not much else to do here other than hanging out with other people; we are lucky to have a cinema, but some movies don't even make it here (I'm still waiting to watch Interstellar).
This would be the perfect place for a lonely writer working on a novel, but definitely not for people like us, who need to be always connected and making the best use of technology possible.
Disclaimer: I've never lived in a city, maybe I'll end up hating it, who knows?
You can find loneliness anywhere.
Being "always connected," I'm beginning to realize, is not always the optimal state. You lose the ability to focus, to consider the future, and form thoughts of your own. As Douglas Rushkoff suggests: we all live in the present.
For better or worse this is the way things work... but I think it's rather amazing that we have the option to work on a terrace in a medina in some North African city if we want to. And yet so few of us, at the forefront of the technology that enables this lifestyle, take advantage of it -- even for temporary periods. There's something to be said about taking a few months away from the Valley to think for a while.
My internet was even more limited (EDGE), power went out sometimes (two power bricks were enough for my mac air, though, and the cell towers never went out, so I could make it through even a multi-day outage without losing internet!), and comfy fast wifi in a coffee shop was 40 minutes away (I'd schedule voice or video meetings on days I liked to go into town to buy things or eat at good restaurants).
And surfing fast, big, tropical beach and point breaks ... well.
I bought a house down there; I'm back in the states right now, because I came back and got married to a girl from my hometown. But we're heading to Ecuador again as soon as we can. :)
But a startup? Hmm.
I think I'd have been a good startup employee, but contracting was a better fit anyway since I really appreciated multi-month blocks without work.
My internet was even more limited (EDGE), power went out sometimes (two power bricks were enough for my mac air, though, and the cell towers never went out, so I could make it through even a multi-day outage without losing internet!), and comfy fast wifi in a coffee shop was 40 minutes away (I'd schedule voice or video meetings on days I liked to go into town to buy things or eat at good restaurants).
And surfing fast, big, tropical beach and point breaks ... well. It was rainy during nearly half of the year, but I didn't even need a wetsuit, and during the good season, it put a smil
I bought a house down there; I'm back in the states right now, because I came back and got married to a girl from my hometown. But we're heading to Ecuador again as soon as we can. :)
But a startup? Hmm.
I think I'd have been a good startup employee, but contracting was a better fit anyway since I really appreciated multi-month blocks without work.
I'm asking because I've been contracting in London for a couple years and I'm considering doing half the year here, then half the year something like what you describe. But I'd have to move the wife and (soon) kid twice a year. She says she's fine with that.
Don't get me wrong on this but even the argumentation is clearly wrong here:
> work in places so magical they could be on the cover of travel magazines
> under an umbrella on a beach in Senegal, in cafes in old Arab medinas, and more
> Adventurous Startups.
and then
> YOU’LL BE MORE FOCUSED
I've tried this myself and my experience was that working abroad is totally doable but by no means did I achieve focusing more on my work.
Instead I would pick any chance meeting new people and discover the new environment.
Also: In my opinion everything comes down to networking, which is why a lonely beach in Marocco might not be the right place to start this...
and it doesn't seem that cheap either tbh. not forgetting remoteness is a massive problem, i worked somewhere remote, it was awful. they had surfing. i moved back to the city after 6 months, i've never been happier.
that said, i hope it works for you, i wish i could live at the beach in a warm country
The white on yellow background isn't the best choice of colours.
Having been to Essaouira, I can only imagine Taghazout more relaxing.
http://www.thebluehouse.io/month-long-program/
http://www.thebluehouse.io/projects/
http://www.thebluehouse.io/#surrounded-with-the-best (scroll up)
You don't need ready access to endless city noise, light pollution, or urban gang violence to launch a successful startup or attract talent to it.
jupiter, pine island, hudson beach..
pretty much take your pick along the coast, avoiding the major metro areas like Tampa/StPete/Clearwater/Miami/Jacksonville (all are more city than "town").
United Nations peacekeeping mission is still ongoing: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:United_Nations_peacek... (blue region in north-west of Africa)
At the time, I had it all. Consulting firm was paying half the bills and the scalable, bootstrapped and profitable media business had hit north of six million visitors the month before the big move.
New location: Maldives. Sun, sand and surf. Want to see dolphins? Top five in the world. Coral reefs? Some of the best. That underwater restaurant Tom Cruise stayed at on his honeymoon at Conrad Hilton, when it was the world's first? It's an amazing place, quite special - I hit it up in 2008 the year before we moved there.
Unlike a lot of folks that move to random locations, or say Costa Rica, the first time I moved overseas with a startup (left the US to join a Costa Rican one), the Maldives trip was my second time.
A few exceptions about my move: * Father-in-law was Vice President, of the country at the time (I left before he became president) * Then president was family by marriage; personally, I thought the guy was a sh!tty father when we went to the first daughter's birthday. Imho, both parents, regardless of how busy, should make time. Eg, when it was my older son's b-day, only the first lady showed. She was cool. The president was a bit uptight. Long story.
Pros about moving to Maldives: * Any foreigner can get the "local," discount, like teachers, for example * The islands are amazing. Seriously. Try lounging on the beach where Madonna stayed...the resort owners is nice and well, the beach spectacular. They also have the largest array of solar panels privately owned in their region. * Fish is plentiful, fresh, and some of the very best tuna in the world. There are some amazing dishes.
Cons: * Everything is imported and subject to a 100% tax * Capital island is 1 square mile...most densely populated city in the world per square meter * Internet situation is abysmal.
I lack credibility here, as I have zero background in networking, but suffice to say after meeting multiple ministers of telecommunications, pitching the government to try to fix the situation AND lobbying after my father-in-law, at the time, was President of the Country...well, I know why in my home country, "Net neutrality," makes people confused.
This article is too light, too shallow on details for those of us who've done the globe trotting thing and worked in multiple countries overseas.
Hahaha, come on man, I'm pretty sure that if you're part of the ruling social class of any given country your life is defeinitely going to be much more enjoyable than if you aren't.
YOU'LL GENTRIFICATE THE TOWN
A win for everybody...kind of.
