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Sergey Brin: Don't Come To Silicon Valley To Start a Business (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Business Insider report:If you're itching to start a company out of a garage, then you shouldn't pick up and move to Silicon Valley, according to Google cofounder Sergey Brin. It's easier to start a company outside the Valley than in it, he said onstage at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit. "I know that sort of contradicts what everyone here has been saying," he said with a laugh. "During the boom cycles, the expectations around the costs -- real estate, salaries -- the expectations people and employees have ... it can be hard to make a scrappy initial business that's self-sustaining," he said. "Whereas in other parts of the world you might have an easier time for that."But he adds that Silicon Valley is good for scaling that opportunity.
It's a good place to run your business if your business happens to have a lot of money. You can use that money to make even more money, if you're good at that sort of thing. You can also burn through a tremendous amount of cash without anything to show for it.
"Do the riskiest part of starting a business somewhere else. Then, when it reaches maximum future potential, bring it to Silicon Valley so we can buy it out from under you for a song and make a ton of money."
'nuff said
"But he adds that Silicon Valley is good for for scaling that opportunity."
The importance of Silicon Valley has waned as the Internet has become integrated into our daily lives. You could do this stuff from ANYWHERE -- your living room, a houseboat in Thailand, anywhere with cheap living costs and a stable government. But they don't want you to know that, because it's only "trade and capital" that should move freely.
But warehouse rents were too high and labor too expensive. I move it to Georgia where the dirt is cheap and the labor cheaper. Soon I'll be moving half our ops to China. How businesses keep any jobs at all in NYC is beyond me.
When you're starting a business, you really need to live in an area where it's cheap. Silicon Valley is anything but cheap now.
Great to see all the people saying how stupid his advice is. People who have never started a business on here auto dismissing advice from a billionaire (who made his money by innovation rather than sitting on real estate).
I move it to Georgia where the dirt is cheap and the labor cheaper.
That's because we have so much of the damn red clay we can't hardly give it away.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
"Labor too expensive."
Maybe if you tried starting a business in a locale where the average price of a house isn't over a million dollars you'd have better luck.
They added a Pittsburgh regional HQ not that long ago for better access to Carnegie Mellon. WAY cheaper there. Uber is also setting up shop in pittsburgh.
When we discuss stuff like this we need to consider that the Web 2.0 bubble has already burst. It wasn't a spectacular burst like the initial .com crash, but the burst has still happened.
We've seen IPOs dry up.
We're seeing little to no growth for the major incumbents, even if they haven't completely flamed out yet.
People are tiring of Facebook, Twitter, and nonsense "social media" (with is mainly about subjecting users to ads).
LinkedIn, one of the Web 2.0 darlings, was just bought out by Microsoft.
The Ruby on Rails fad died off some time ago. The JavaScript fad is dying off now. Now we're seeing the Rust fad start, but compared to its predecessors it's a total joke.
Average users are getting fed up with the Hipster-oriented design we've been forced to ensure for years now. Software products that were one really usable have become damn near impossible to use (Google Maps, Windows, GNOME, Firefox, among others).
Slashdot was nearly destroyed by the Slashdot Beta, but luckily it was spared in the end.
The mobile device market has peaked.
Beyond Web 2.0, we aren't seeing any traction.
IoT isn't taking off like it was expected to. Average people have come to realize that these devices can be very obtrusive. Most normal people don't want some device videoing and recording them while they urinate or defecate. They don't want their penis measurements sent to "the cloud".
VR isn't taking off as expected. The development is going way slower, and people aren't impressed by the results so far. It's a long way off.
Drones were only ever a niche interest. Average people don't care about them, and business uses are facing many hurdles.
The Web 2.0 bubble has burst. There is no bubble coming after it. San Francisco is looking to be in a very bad situation, even if the people there don't realize it yet.
payroll's a bitch when your employees have to be millionaires to afford their very own hovel.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I am sure there is space at the incubator.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
Why not lead by example by moving Google away from the bay area
But Google is not a startup, they have more money than they need. Do you have any idea how high real estate rents in the bay area have impacted startup costs?
Holy fuck are you dumb? Serge says moving TO the valley is a great place to scale the opportunity. As in, if your business is booming outside of the valley, move into the valley to make it even bigger.
How businesses keep any jobs at all in NYC is beyond me.
Wall St privilege. The finance industry (especially HFT) loves centralization, and the amount of money being handled is so extreme that the trickle-down is enough to sustain much of the city. That's why they were the first to enact a BitLicense.
It sounds like Sergey Brin is tired of having to wait in long lines at the In-and-Out Burger.
You are welcome on my lawn.
There are many places around the country (or the world) that have good talent and moderate to cheap living expenses. Those are the best places to get a tech business off the ground. You will probably have more trouble finding funding for your idea, but startup costs are much lower than in Silicon Valley. I am trying to start up my own business and it is a lot of trouble to find investors. It can be depressing to read about guys with great connections in SV who get $20 million in funding for some idea with a potential of about 10% of what you think your idea will do; yet you can't seem to get even seed funding of much smaller amounts. It drives you insane when someone gets $100 million in funding for a really bad idea that you know will crash and burn in just a year or two.
He doesn't want to have to compete with new startups for employees.
Why not lead by example by moving Google away from the bay area
I'm sure many of the employees will move, but the majority probably wouldn't. Forcing them to either retain a significant and expensive presence there, or lose the people who know how to keep the company going.
Similarly, opening up sites elsewhere makes a lot of sense if you can divide up the work and minimize communication. No one likes having half their team split geographically (particularly across many time zones).
The healthcare situation in this country is so fucked up.
At least when you are paying everybody as little as possible to get off the ground, they will have good healthcare.
Absolute statements are never true
There's no need to be in a particular physical location anymore, since we've given up on the physical world to "generate wealth". Now with 3D printing dead, there's nothing much left to pump and dump.
Hyperloops, maybe?
http://www.t3.com/features/state-of-play-3d-printing
Start your company anywhere... but if you want VC money, get your ass to Sand Hill Road because VCs can't see past the end of their own driveway.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
WTF? I guess you haven't read about the BitLicense and the amount of companies that don't operate in NY as a result of it.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
The handful of companies I've worked at I've met one or two competent programmers. The rest spent their days on StackOverflow.
Go back to Russia pinko commie Serge
Atlanta is the new hotspot for tech startups. I am in the process of moving my company out of the DC area to Atlanta to take advantage of the lower cost of, well, everything. Relocating was a huge decision but my employees are behind it 100% since they'll be walking away with plenty of cash from selling their homes in DC and buying homes in Atlanta.
Georgia Tech is right there to provide excellent young talent, and Atlanta is so educationally diverse I can find good people in just about any field I might need.
We're in agreement. I'm saying that entrenched firms don't want to compete worldwide, that's why they've forced out the bitcoin businesses.
Worked and lived in Mountain View in the late 1980's; visited the peninsula many times since then.
Got out when I realized that I would not be able to afford a house unless I hit the startup lottery.
Also, realized I did not want to rear children in either side of Palo Alto (east or west).
Still, having some direct experience of Silicon Valley has been useful ever since; it helped me get every job I've had since that time.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Web 3.0 is about the merger of browsers and apps with advantages of both and no longer see the distintion between the two. Apps were a temporary aberration to wall of pieces of the internet often for financial gain. No longer will there be the tyranny of of app store censors.
That's very odd to hear him talk about "self-sustaining" in Silicon Valley. I didn't think that *any* businesses started in that neck of the woods were "self-sustaining". I got the impression that everybody starts a company with somebody else's money and then sells it before they burn through all of the cash. Are there are Silicon Valley startups that have been self-sustaining in the past few decades (other than traditional businesses, of course, that actually have to ear a profit to stay alive).
I don't respond to AC's.
Like I'd take advice from some nobody named "Sergey".
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
So like India for example.
High-Tech rednecks are a lot less expensive to hire than Hipsters and Yuppies.
Heck I can get a website cobbled together for a case of beer and one visit to a strip club.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
You are far less likely to get VC funding if you are not physically in the Bay Area.
Yes, it is cheaper and easier to start a business outside of the Bay Area. But if you want the VC funding, you better be there. Then you can move your operations out...
Google needs scaling?
You don't want to eat it with the scales still on, do you? Yuck.
I think Detroit oughta become a tech boomtown. empty buildings, cheap real estate, a city in need of jobs and tax revenue.
Unless you want to go to another US city that isn't as insanely expensive, but has a strong infrastructure for software, like Boston, Denver, Omaha, Atlanta...