Techies, VCs, and the press are always swooning over the glory of the Bay area. This is where all the excitement, the money, and the people are, they say. And that’s true to the extent that your great big idea fits the current cultural mold of that environment.
If you’re looking to build the next web 2.0 social media eyeball-collecting application, don’t want to worry about boring details like revenues, and hope to either flip to Google for an early $20 million or get that Facebook billion-dollar valuation, the Bay area is exactly where you want to be. No where else do you have the connections, the people, and the atmosphere available to make that dream happen.
But this strain of startups is a highly inbred line that holds more risks than most people realize. It’s not that they never work financially, enough people are sipping Margaritas on sunny beaches from towering buyouts to prove the contrary. And it’s not that they don’t work socially — I personally enjoy YouTube as much as the next guy. It’s that the Bay area pipeline for building web businesses isn’t optimized to carry much else than these stereotypes.Other people’s money
If your idea for a web business is more along the lines of the mundane “product * price = profit” (3P) variety, I think the culture of San Francisco and that famous 20-mile radius around Stanford is anything but helpful. I might even go as far as say it’s downright harmful.
The flush availability of other people’s money is simply too tempting. When you’re not spending your own money, it’s easy to splash on a big open office on day one, a staff of 10+ in no time, and have few worries about paying the bills on the 1st of the month. It takes away much of the urgency to make money that I think is critical to build sustainable businesses. It gives you too many resources to be satisfied building simple tools for niche markets. Everything becomes about catching that huge wave.
Fighting for talent
And besides the simple temptation of having a few million dollars in the bank account — even though they’re not really yours and probably never will be — it breeds an asset bubble for everything else. When tons of half-baked startups out there have a million-dollar bank roll, they’re going to be looking pretty sharp when shopping for talent.
If you’re a programmer or designer working in this area, you probably have more than a few friends or acquaintances who got filthy rich simply being on the ground floor of Google or YouTube or some other company that either made them a millionaire through acquisition or IPO. Are you really going to be interested working for a company that simply aims to make a few measly millions for the first couple of years? Why settle for something that’ll take 5, 7, 10 years to mature when you can instead just hop from company to company every 6-18 months in search of that lottery ticket.
So while there is undoubtedly legions of good people available, you’re unlikely to be able to hire or retain them in an environment where every business magazine cover of is telling people that the next billionaire is even younger than the previous. No wonder people feel stressed out to make it huge before they’re 30 and will jump at any opportunity that looks like this might be it.
But where else?
If San Francisco, the Bay area, and Sillicon Valley aren’t good places to start a web business of the 3P variety, where is? Well, I’d say just about any place but. Basecamp came from Chicago/Copenhagen, FogBugz from New York, Campaign Monitor from Australia, Shopify from Ottawa, Freshbooks from Toronto, and there are tons of other applications of the same ilk that come from all over the world.
So stop worrying to much about where you are and start worrying about how you’re going to make your business succeed the old fashion way: Through having a better product than the competition that people are willing to pay for.
P.S.: None of this means that it’s impossible to build a web business in San Francisco that makes money by selling a product. There are plenty of examples of that too. Like TypePad or FaxItNice. This is an argument that the area is overrated as a great place for starting a company.
译文:
你真想在旧金山落脚吗？
技术人员、风投资金、还有各路媒体一直都为旧金山的海滩区所陶醉，说那里够刺激，有人才又有资金。这话也没错，你的奇思妙想的确符合那环境中的文化氛围。
如果你打算要设计下一个能吸引大众眼球的web2.0媒体程序，又不想操心收益等等的无聊细节，而且希望能像Google一下赚取两千万或像Facebook有十几亿的品牌价值的话，海滩区就是你的天堂。其它地方都没有这里的企业联系、人力资源和文化氛围能让你梦想成真。
然而，这过多的新企业本身就隐藏了大部分人所未知的风险。倒不是说创业者他们没有考虑到财务工作，不少人靠大宗收购赚钱并阳光海滩上享受玛格丽塔酒就证明了这一点；也不是说他们没做好交际工作——我自己就跟他们一样喜欢上YouTube。只是因为他们在海滩区建立网络公司的渠道，也不外乎下面几招套路。
用别人的钱
如果你的网络公司计划只沿袭了陈规旧套，像那老掉牙的“产品*价格=收益”理论，那我觉得旧金山的文化底蕴和著名的斯坦福大学周边20英里的设施对你都没用，我甚至会说它们非常有害。
不过能挥霍别人的钱实在太诱人了。要是你用的不是自己的钱，很容易首天就可大手大脚地开张一家公司，随时能拥有十几人的团队，并且用不着担心每月第一天要交这费那费。但这就失去了获利的那一份紧迫感，而我认为这紧迫感是企业长久不衰的关键。人们有太多的资源以至于只为特定市场设计了一些小程序就沾沾自喜，似乎人人都围着那浪潮团团转。
争夺人才
最明显不过的诱惑就是你有几百万美元的银行账户——就算它们实际上不是你的，而且很可能永远都不属于你。但除此之外，还有无数原因能引起资产泡沫。那一大堆羽翼未丰的新企业就因为都拥有几百万的银行储备，招聘人才时他们也会显得十分尖酸刻薄。
如果你是这一带的一个程序员或一个设计师，你很可能会有好几个非常有钱的朋友或老相识，他们就呆在Google或YouTube或其它公司的底层，靠收购或买首发股票就成了百万富翁。你会真的有兴趣在一家头几年目标只是赚那几百万零头的公司工作吗？当你可以每6到18个月就能跳到另一家高薪公司的时候，为什么还满足于一些需要5年、7年甚至10年才成熟的行业呢？
所以确实有大批优秀人才可以利用时，环境就决定了你很难聘请到或者留住他们。在那里，每本商业杂志的封面都标榜着下一位亿万富翁要比上一个更年轻。所以难怪人们会感觉到要30岁前出人头地的压力，而且一有似乎不错的机会就立刻跳槽。
何处安身？
如果洛杉矶、海滩区和硅谷都不是建立3P网络公司的好去处，哪里才是呢？其实，我觉得哪里都比这里要好。Basecamp就来自芝加哥和哥本哈根，FogBugz来自纽约，Campaign Monitor来自澳大利亚，Shopify来自渥太华，Freshbooks来自多伦多，另外还有非常多此类程序公司遍布在世界各地。
所以与其担心你在何地，还不如担心你如何让你的企业能按老路子取得成功：靠打造比对手更优质的产品，生产消费者更乐意支付的产品。
附：本文不意味着在旧金山不可能建立一家靠卖产品赚钱的网络公司。成功的例子也有很多，如TypePad或FaxItNice。本文旨在论述人们对该地区的创业环境评价过高。