Why Startup Hubs Work. October 2011 If you look at a list of US cities sorted by population, the number of successful startups per capita varies by orders of magnitude.
Somehow it's as if most places were sprayed with startupicide. I wondered about this for years. I could see the average town was like a roach motel for startup ambitions: smart, ambitious people went in, but no startups came out. But I was never able to figure out exactly what happened inside the motel—exactly what was killing all the potential startups. [1] A couple weeks ago I finally figured it out. Startups in other places are just doing what startups naturally do: fail. Environment I think there are two components to the antidote: being in a place where startups are the cool thing to do, and chance meetings with people who can help you. The first component is particularly helpful in the first stage of a startup's life, when you go from merely having an interest in starting a company to actually doing it. Chance Numbers Notes. CrunchFund? No Matter What You Call It, It's Business as Usual in SV. - Kara Swisher - Media.
Of course I have something to say about the news yesterday that AOL would be a key investor in a new early-stage venture fund being started by TechCrunch’s perpetually petulant editor Michael Arrington — with a big, fat and decidedly greasy assist from a panoply of Silicon Valley’s most powerful VC firms and angel investors.
Arrington has previously called me “chief whiner” — oooh, buuuurn, although fair enough, since I have compared him to an egomaniac turtle named Yertle in the past — about my nagging him over the importance of upholding standards of fairness and ethics in journalism. So as not to let him down, let me begin the whining. First, my initial reaction when I first heard about the deal: Ugh. Sigh. Hopelessly corrupt. I was upset. And so it goes in Silicon Valley. And now, inevitably, money. There is certainly precedent for VCs blogging, including Fred Wilson, Brad Feld and Ben Horowitz. O joyous day! After pausing for a moment so that Thomas Jefferson and Edward R. What Happens At Y Combinator. What Happens At Y Combinator Paul Graham updated Oct 2013 Y Combinator runs two three-month funding cycles a year, one from January through March and one from June through August.
We ask the founders of each startup we fund to move to the Bay Area for the duration of their cycle, during which we work intensively with them to get the company into the best shape possible. Each cycle culminates in an event called Demo Day, at which the startups present to an audience that now includes most of the world's top startup investors. Dinners During each cycle we host a dinner once a week at Y Combinator and invite some eminent person from the startup world to speak. People start to show up for dinners around 6 pm. The time before dinner is a chance for founders to talk to one another and to us in an unstructured way. The speaker usually shows up before 7 and talks informally with the founders before dinner. One founder wrote: Office Hours Half of YC is events in which all the startups participate. So You're Moving to San Francisco. Writing about a place is difficult.
You can spend months, years, even a lifetime in a city and still not really know it. More challenging still, everyone experiences a place differently. Two people who’ve grown up in the same place might fundamentally disagree on what the most scenic landmarks are, if the locals are friendly, the best places to eat, and so on. I’ve been in San Francisco for over a couple of years now. I’d hardly say I know the place exhaustively, but I know it well enough to have a moderately informed opinion.
This is not intended as a persuasive piece, and is particularly not intended for native San Franciscans. So. First, The Conclusion I’m going to skip right to the heart of what I want to say about this city: if you’ve never lived in a major city before, you’ll probably like San Francisco. If you’re moving from, say, a New York or a Chicago or a London, you may end up loving San Francisco for its climate, its diversity, its food, or above all, its unique mindset. SAN FRANCISCO EVENTS.