skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You won't be too far from what I expect will be the startup location of the next decade: Bratislava, Slovakia.

Why?

-- Pro government business.

-- Massive investment in infrastructure from european businesses moving manufacturing there

-- highly educated and motivated workforce

-- low costs

-- relatively centrally located, and close to Austria, Lichtenstein, and Switzerland banking centers.

-- Low tax rates and regulation rates.

I'm sure some of the other eastern european countries are contenders, and might be better... but innovation is going to start concentrating in eastern europe, as they join the EU, the entrepreneurs will move to get less burdensome regulation while staying in the EU.

The US will probably retain some advantages, but we're making it harder and harder for people to come to the US to live and work.
I know, just trying to spread the word...
I doubt it. Most evidence from people of various ages seems to indicate that your all-nighter capacity (a proxy for general age-variant startup capacity) only seriously falls off after late-30's early-40's, not early-30s.

By the way, the light-gray-on-white font in the comment field bugs me.
You shouldn't be asking. Suppose YC had an official "don't trust nobody over 30" policy. Would that stop you?

Build it on the nights and weekends. If you need to keep your day job, do so. If you've never run a business before, start at least a small one. You don't have to go whole hog in a bet the farm type situation... if your wife stays at home, a small home base business might just be the ticket (software or not...) The reason I advise this is a business, any business, will put you thru the business school of hard knocks... and it might be easier to learn those lessons on a venture that has a lower risk of failure rate.

Despite the admonition against single founder businesses, there's nothing to stop you from building something on your own. Don't wait for a co founder to show up (or build the lower risk business while you're waiting.)

I think finding a cofounder is like finding a wife- you can't order one thru the mail.

Your deterimination is a bigger factor than any of the pluses or negative you listed (well, and you can program.)

For what its worth, I'm 38, have been working for startups since 1991, started my first company (and online service that was also a franchise) in 1994, and sold it in 1997. That was my MBA. And for a programmer, dealmaking may seem weird or too "social"... but doing it helps you develop a taste for it, and doing it in any form makes it easier.

So you absolutely, positively should start a business, any business. I think you might be too late for YC this summer, so finish the year with a working prototype of a product... I'm sure that helps in your application for the next round of YC. But if not that, start something.
"Is it too late guys?"

That's not a very "founder-y" type question. If you're relying on external approval and motivation you're going to have a hard time shouldering a startup. Fierce determination means not letting anything (including age or "rules") stop you. Joe Kraus is fond of saying: "The beginning of the discussion is when someone says 'no' -- that's where the fun begins."

Why don't you save up, build your startup prototype, get users loving it, and THEN give YC or a VC a call. There's nothing like hard evidence you have a clue to get someone's attention.

I'll be a bit harsh and suggest you might just be searching for an excuse why you can't do it.

By the way: PG and co. were around 30 when they did Viaweb.
John Battelle's Searchblog: A Few Questions For Joe Kraus
Gee, hope not. It's 4:13 am and I'm just finishing up for the day. I'm 45 and my team is applying. I've worked for a ton of startups and have started a couple of my own. Both my parents had great capacity to outlast their age-peers and function without sleep, so I think there's a genetic aspect to this ability. I don't believe that the ability to stay up late should be the main criterion for choosing worthy startup material. It's a marathon, not a sprint.
I'm located in Munich, Germany working on a search application using Common Lisp.
I recall reading something (weak I know) about cell regeneration in young people being so much higher that they actually require more sleep.

I'm curious: Do you even require the massive doses of caffeine?
And paying attention to Y Combinator.
One of the best programmers I've ever met dropped out of high school (I believe he eventually got a GED). Now he's Director (but never stopped programming) of an entire department with a handful of CS PhDs under him.

Do you do background checks for criminal history or education? Are there any fixed requirements like this?

(Sorry for not asking all of this in my first post)
Point about cell regeneration is interesting. Do you recall the age group in question?
Offline access to web apps - the real benefits
I said it was weak :-) I'll admit I have nothing to cite and recall little beyond the basic concept. Could be total bull, but certainly makes sense to someone who doesn't know much about the science behind the idea.

My totally useless guess is that as a baby you'd need the most sleep, and around early 20's things would start reversing the other direction. That seems like a pattern in other body functions.

Anyone less ignorant have some real information?
Network is not the network in computer scince it is the people who connects and share the knowledge or atleast assert your idea. It is not possible to all that they just talk to everybody or they are very few frens but they are brilliant in creating the products, for such people VC funding and getting into their network is more usefull. And doing so you can get the pulse/need of the people and your ideas sharpens and you know you need to close the doors.
Google didn't take time doing anything. They spent millions on building out datacenters and on bandwidth.

The big thing that separates them from the Netscape story is that they're apparently smarter and managed to create a financially successful company. Its quite conceivable that lesser men would have given us Netscape #2.

"You cannot predict the future- you cannot predict the level of success you will have in advance."

But being forced to try things more quickly than you might otherwise may help you discover problems and their solutions before others do, like a fast forward button. If you have a company that can genuinely absorb capital it seems to work just fine.

"...prefer a 100% chance of $1 million to a 20% chance of $10 million, while the VCs can afford to be "rational" and prefer the latter"

In that scenario there's still great motivation for the founders to work hard. In the scenario you presented (no money left for founders) that is not the case.

Why didn't you just post a link to VC Squeeze essay if that's all you wanted to say? You're saying some different things and saying other things differently.
Was that the textbook implementation before he did it? I mean, it's been 30 years...

And even if that was the standard design, was there something uniquely impressive about his execution? i.e. different architecture, unusually limited hardware resources, etc. Remember, ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is everything.

And just the fact that he stumbled onto the textbook design without knowing what he was doing, that's somewhat impressive too.

I'm not totally trying to defend Woz -- he has tended to make some exaggerations lately -- I just figure we should be asking the right questions...
Popuri: Lots of Stats For Any Site
Ringside Startup (Launching a startup with donations)
Ustream.tv: A network of justin.tv knockoffs without the tech
ConceptShare | Web-Based Idea and Design Sharing and Collaboration
Some positions can't involve non-a people. You couldn't hire someone with world-conquering drive to be your 1000th recruiter at Podunksville University, Delaware.
Sorry about that. It should be fixed now.
I'm only thinking in terms of what's possible. Can I build something like that without continuations? What's what I'm wondering.
Oh, I'm commenting on how it's interesting that he stumbled onto the standard architecture independently, managing to reinvent 15 years or so of theory (at the time) on his own. Not trying to trivialize his accomplishment at all.
Another TechCrunch Hit for Justin: Build Your Own Justin.tv With Ustream
Something went wrong, the URL is now:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/25/lots-of-stats-for-any-site/

I'm thinking Arrington back-dated that post for some reason?
"No intelligent investor would create a situation in which the founders had no incentive to succeed. They want founder's interests to be aligned with theirs."

That's not necessarily true. VCs want management's interests to be aligned with theirs. However, there's no particular reason for them to care whether management consists of founders or VC cronies, and most would probably prefer the cronies.

I've worked for startups where VCs liked the technology, liked the market positioning, but weren't particularly fond of the founding team. So they invest their money, and at the first sign of trouble, force the founders out. They ended up losing the auction for the company's IP (one of the founders bid on it through an employee proxy and took it to China), but that's not to say they didn't try...

I suspect this happens more often than entrepreneurs would like to think. It's the same VC that was featured on an essay here by a certain prominent Lisp hacker...
Greylock did almost exactly the same thing to a company I once worked at.
RWW refers to Read/WriteWeb (Richard's blog). I haven't read the article BitGeek is referring to but I am guessing, like most posts on R/WW, it was written by a guest author.
There's also something wrong with the actual site, popuri.us. It's dying from the TechCrunch effect.
Is it a good idea to send in multiple submissions?
Ruthless enough for a startup? "...these startups did things that I probably would not have been willing to do."
Why ASAP? I am thinking of relocating from Chicago to either Portland, San Francisco, or Seattle. I had been leaning towards Portland, for no particular reason. I'd love to hear your thoughts on why you want to leave Portland.
why is this so surprising? and why considered ruthless?

it's not random that the richest companies in the world are those involved in telecommunications and transportation. People live to communicate.
Perhaps the curiosity is about the "dirty tricks" department.

Companies here in Italy are all about dirty tricks, for instance - I don't think anyone would believe an entrepreneur here if he said he was completely clean. That's why a lot of the country voted for Berlusconi even if he was accused of various nefarious dealings.

Sorry, that's going rapidly off topic... perhaps what's most interesting to people is wondering how much they have to be ready to do to make a go of things.

For instance, PG talks about adding fake workstations in their offices, in his founders at work interview. That's pretty innocuous, and certainly not illegal. Some of the things mentioned in this link though, are of dubious morality, and I can understand not wanting to go that far to win.
What is it about youtube's one-click emailing feature that put it in the same list as myspace spamming 10M addresses?
even campionato sufferred from this 'dirty tricks'! I wasn't really surprised when I heard about it..everybody knew it I guess...

..i mean all these are common secrets nobody wants to talk about..

maybe in his examples these 'dirty secrets' are more obvious but come on everybody knows that they occur and what triggers the boost of the acceptance of technology...

...kissing for instance in cinema movies was unacceptable 4-5 decades ago...in 10 years what may come us a surpise today that may have caused torrent or youtube's broad initial use, as the writer implies, will be so innocent unfortunately or not, that people will be surprised to hear that it actually helped these services to take off..

i suppose this is more like a society problem or truth that is in the nature of humans.

even the "reason" for Trojan war was a beautiful woman. But today, now that barriers and nations are a reality, wars for dominance had to move into a new field, and hopefully or not, internet came along...

this web 2.0 startup wave, is more a part of a new revolution, thats why is not a bubble...
Very nice post. After attending startup school I found myself wanting to move for the first time since living in Austin. Then I thought about how much cheaper I could live in Austin while working on the startup. Of your reasons _to_ move to the Bay Area, I am most attracted to 2 and 6. I think there is probably a right time to make the move though.
Do you mean sending in the same application with updates? Or are you talking about sending in two separate ideas on different accounts?

I'm assuming that if they like your initial idea that they would keep tabs on the newer updated versions of your application.

If you have other ideas I'd say that it could only benefit you to send in more than one.
Failure To Launch: Why Every Startup Should Have A Blog
They should get some big players to wear cameras around. Have a featured promotion like 'The Day in the Life of..' to boost their traffic. I'd love to see a day in the life of a semi-popular person(All I can think of is a musician). Okay, this is probably an obvious idea.
An Alternative to Basecamp?
Do you need to worry about IP issues with respect to people testing your service and giving you suggestions? They might be doing so while at work for example.
If the testing and suggestions are extensive, their employer might argue that they have some claim to the IP for your startup.
How not to give your software away for free.
Wasn't there someone in the back with a professional looking camera?
"Facebook is all about innovation, I think they purposefully avoid old ideas."

Are they, really?

The only new idea I've seen come out of FaceBook is tagging photos by drawing boxes around the people. Other than that, they're your basic database-backed social networking app. There's very little new there: LiveJournal/Flickr/Friendster/MySpace did it all before.

Google innovates. Thinkature innovates. Justin.tv (much as I think their community is heading for disaster) innovates. FaceBook seems to have positioning going for them, but they do fairly little technical stuff that can't be done by a hobbyist programmer in college. Which seems to be what most of their hires are...
No, 3 separate applications on separate accounts.

I'm already in the launching phase of one of my ideas. While developing it I discovered 2 more ideas & found people who believe in them. We spent last weekend writing the 3 more applications and are working on mockups.

One the one hand I want to keep my focus, but on the other hand I believe each of these three are valuable.
How to Improve It? Ask Those Who Use It
It's interesting that you can take a look at their code to see how they pull of the synchro. Startup founders, start your photocopiers!
Seattle, baby.

Well... near Seattle, baby.
If your entire app relies on the api of a another company you should expect trouble. Not only can they cut you off at any point as has happened to statsaholic but you'll be less reliable. You'll be affected by your own downtime as well as the api providers. I saw this happen the other day when last.fm released a new beta that included flickr integration. At the exact time that they made the announcement the flickr search servers went down for a few hours. Luckily they'd designed the pages to degrade gracefully and still work without flickr being up.

Luckily if your a small startup you can adapt quickly and find another way :)
I'm in London, Ontario. I'd be interested to hear what you're up to. Drop me a line: mdnaish at Google mail.
Xobni raises $4.26M to let you improve your email habits
Congratulations to Xobni and Y Combinator!! Great job guys :)
"Impossible is Nothing"
how about the reddit founders? they say uva is the mit of the south, but even mit isn't an ivy.
The Death of YouTube?
Justin.tv is going to be a network. So this isn't a network of knockoffs, just a knockoff.
It's great to hear about that also. Very encouraging to hear that there are successful start ups beginning to gain traction out of the US.
I didn't see the speech, but my guess is that this has something to do with invention verse innovation.

Invention means to create new technology. Innovation means to recombine old technologies for a new purpose.

Technology companies invent. Technical companies innovate.

Advice: Don't be a technology company. Profits are a function of how much people want your product, not how much you spend on R&D. If you can make something people want for zero R&D, versus making something people want that requires a huge investment, the intelligent choice should be obvious.

This is the premise of Seth Godin's book Free Prize Inside. That is, you could spend 50 million dollars inventing a new cereal that will double sales if it succeeds (but will most likely fail), or you could double sales just by putting a free prize inside.
Well, you can always fly to conferences and network there.

As for 6 - Thinking back to something Paul Graham said about how the number 6 startup hub should really not even be considered to be in the same league as the number 1 or 2, I wonder if there might be a non-geographic effect to be gained by all the startups who are NOT in the Valley joining virtual forces to be a counterweight to the SF-club.

I think there are likely alot of us, and the bar for our success is certainly lower than it is if you live in the SF-area.

Weird that there aren't any pure Startup conferences, at least that I know of. They all seem to be organized by the funders or by people who are out to make a buck on the conference itself. A conference organized by startups with their interests in mind i.e. no $1500 presentation fees, would potentially still attract investors/press/etc. without having to have the impreteur of some internet celebrity organizing it. Its almost like the word 'startup' itself has enough celebrity around it now to pull its own weight.

We should have it in some decidely non-startup hub, like Hartford CT or something...
This is exactly why we nagged them incessantly to launch. Other people had to be working on it. But if you launch first, the latecomers are described as "justin.tv." People need a name to talk about something, and if you're doing something there's no name for, they just use the name of whoever was first.
Perhaps the lesson from this blog is that if you want to be a successful startup, you can't get on a moralistic high horse and tell people what they're allowed to see, say, or do.

This dude's definitions of "ruthless" stretch credulity. HotOrNot is ruthless because they allow people to engage in the very-human activity of scoping? Skype is ruthless because they take advantage of the net to remove a market? YouTube is ruthless because they trade in "soft porn"? (And the fact he calls YouTube content soft porn tells me he probably doesn't get cable.)

The sites that didn't apply some arbitrary filter of self righteousness to their content succeeded. Surprise! That's not ruthlessness, it's glorious, beautiful freedom. The fact that jokers like this continue to lament the passing of censor bureaus and Manuals of Acceptable Content should only reinforce how precious and incredible the net is.
Funny. I wouldn't include any of those on my list of innovative companies. So maybe technology is just an irrelevant term anyway. Let's say "technically innovative" instead.
If we didn't allow people with criminal records, we would have had to exclude one of our own partners.
As a bay-area resident who moved here from Canada a few years back, I'd like to give my own view - my numbers correspond to your numbered points..

11. As you get closer to larger companies, people on the road tend to be more rude. I'm thinking of the San Jose/Milpitas area. I think most of those workers are unhappy to be treading off to their anonymous jobs :)

10. Disagree. If you live on the 101, I could see how you would feel that way, but try to drive around los gatos or saratoga and say that. No urban sprawl. Plus, 'quality of life' is such a nebulous term....for me, quality of life is improved just by the energy of this place and the diverse types of people it attracts.

9. I don't know anyone on prozac, and I'm not sure what that has to do with population density...

Speaking of population density/sprawl, I met this nice lady very recently who had just relocated from Paris. Having been lucky enough to visit there myself, I had to tell her how beautiful I thought her city was. She said that she was happy to leave, as the bay area was a "lot greener" (her words) and better for children.

8. You point should show anyone why the bay area is a great place. Where else would you know 70 founders?? And getting an edge on your competition doesn't necessarily involve secrecy....

7. Totally agree about having to find a home, etc. But the regulations are pretty minor from a biz standpoint relative to the benefits of doing business here.

6. Would you rather be a big fish in a small pond? If your startup has potential, you should not only be able to compete with other startups to hire, you will be able to pick from among the best people in the world.

5. Second order problems. Instead of looking at expenses, you should be looking at the place that allows your startup to have the most room to grow. If your primary concern is the cost of living, move to Thailand. Gorgeous beaches, your dollar goes incredibly far, and oh, the closest thing to a technology company there is the guy selling electronic keychains on the street...

4. I've been in the valley since 2000 - it's much easier to find a place here now than it was back then. And salaries aren't that much higher here than they are in other tech centers in the USA or even Canada.

3. Disagree. Since when is having more options a negative thing? If you don't need VC money, don't spend your time chasing it. But if you do, you'll have a much better chance getting it here.

Face it - if you need VC money, the treadmill exists regardless of which city your business is situated in - you'll just have an easier time getting on the treadmill if you're in the bay area.

2. Can't disagree with that...commutes certainly suck, and they're longer here than most places.

1. Agreed...which is why holding onto a stock for 1yr is good, but that's a different conversation...
It's so sad. Until everyone learns the benefit of others using their APIs we're doomed to constant reinvention of the wheel.
I'm starting to feel that the elusive, intangible rtm is but a legendary myth, like the griffin or the free lunch.
Congratz cuys! Looking forward to the launch party!
Heysan.com - Slideshow for your Phone Pics
after I saw this on Verizons TOS I checked out Sprint and didn't see any of the same restrictions, although I can totally see them harassing you for it.
Hey Larry. Thanks for posting this. I could hear everything Paul said and that is good enough for me.

Do you have videos from any of the other lectures? If you do please post them, I am sure I (and everyone else who wasn't there) would be very appreciative
Small Business Week April 2007
Not if you don't credit them as part of the development. If I worked for BigCo.A and sent in customer feedback to SmallCo.B's new web startup, A has no claim in IP. If I'm just leaking inside info from A to B, that's another set of issues altogether.
And, it forces your not-quite-ready competitors to launch their not-quite-ready products on YOUR schedule.
Flagr.com - Bookmark the Real World
Shoutfit.com - Friends and Trends
Thinkature.com -- Your complete online working space
is Ted and Payperpost winning in the biggest drama of 2.0
7 Pithy Insights On How Not To Give Your Software Away For Free
Boston, MA
The Science and Art of Computation (why we need a new computing field to educate future entrepreneurs)
I am in Kansas City. Yes, ideally cofounders should live close by. But cant we work remotely?