Terrible weather, flat terrain, socially conservative populace, lower probabilities of meeting important or rich people to create network. These qualities don't seem like they would appeal for those with money or in tech/science oriented fields.
It's a great place to start a family. Housing is a lot cheaper, and the people are hard workers.
There's a lot of really smart people in the Midwest who will dedicate themselves to your cause because they have a family to take care of. The midwest will probably never be competitive for top AI talent, but it already has some of the hardest working, and most loyal talent.
Most companies don't need genius, they just need someone with a lot of grit. The Midwest has vast swaths of folks with grit.
That same level-headedness and sense of responsibility can be a liability when it comes to startups. Most successful startups are insane when people first start working on them; if they weren't, someone would already have done them, and the market opportunity would be filled. (I had a Boston-based mentor who's already had two successful exits tell me once, "The only startups I've ever seen succeed are the ones where some engineer figured they could do something thought to be impossible.")
It's very hard to justify devoting years of your life to working on something believed to be impossible or a waste of time if you have a family to support, and a deep-seated belief in using your time productively.
So I might phrase it as "the Midwest is a great place for a startup to grow in" because what you said about families and startups is very true. When a company is ready for steady loyal employees, they can come to the Midwest and find them. As many companies are starting to do.
Large Midwestern cities like Minneapolis and Chicago are quite liberal and have a lot of rich people who could fund startups. We actually do have a lot of tech in these places, but generally only because large companies are in these places and they need a lot of engineering.
The startup culture is not here of course, but the reasons are not the ones you list.
They are, and I'm sure they are great places to live. But the person I responded to was hoping Midwest can compete with NYC/SF/SEA/DC/etc, so I offered the reasons why I think there's a structural reason that you don't see that headline, and not just because some VC fund hasn't offered money to people in the midwest. It's because the people the VC funds want to invest in also want to live in the cities with high rents.
Cost of land and rent prices. If we're talking about the people who work at startups, whose labor is among the most in demand in the world, they can basically choose to live wherever they want to. I know some of it is due to most employers being in urban areas etc etc, but I also think a lot of it is people wanting to be in those areas.
It's more complicated than that. I'd replace "usually" with "sometimes", but you also have the issue of what the overall state looks like. So you can have a "liberal and progressive" city in the middle of a fairly red state, and you end up with a liberal mayor but a conservative governor and legislature, which are constantly stymying your city's attempts to do progressive things. See WI for example.
the biggest Midwestern state by population is Illinois, which is blue, it is where both Lincoln and Obama came from. So, saying "Midwest is conservative", while the biggest state in the Midwest is actually liberal is kinda silly.
not all, but 65% of the voters are blue. I mean, it doesn't get any more blue. Every blue or red state is like that, no state 100% homogeneous. for the purpose of this discussion Illinois is no less blue than any other blue state, so political conservatism has nothing to do with the startup situation.
No, it’s not. Minnesota is blue. Wisconsin is purple. Illinois is a solidly blue state and the biggest in the Midwest. Iowa is purple. Look at this map and tell me again Midwest is politically conservative ? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states#/...
Trump carried WAY more counties in 2016 despite losing the popular vote. That alone should tell you the map isn't a good representation of overall sentiment. Plus, Trump v. Hillary isn't necessarily a good proxy for "conservative v. liberal."
Considering the Cali coast has the highest cost of living, doesn't that mean it is where many people want to be?
Boston/NYC have the benefits of being in very highly populated areas with very old institutions, especially with reputations like MIT/Harvard/Columbia/etc and there's already a lot of money floating around, so that makes up for the weather part a little. It's not just one factor, it's a combination of all of these that unfortunately make some places more desirable to live in than others. And who knows, may be it will change in the future.
> Considering the Cali coast has the highest cost of living, doesn't that mean it is where many people want to be?
CA has more natural boundaries that spike the cost of living higher. For example, pretty much the entire LA area (except around Palmdale) consists of a bunch of small valleys nestled between mountains. Not only do they have the west coast in the way, but they've got mountains blocking them from expanding in every other direction.
And you can say the same thing about the Bay Area, too. If expansion isn't blocked by water, it's blocked by mountains.
NYC's COL is also in large part due to natural boundaries, but it's not as bad as CA. Manhattan is a tiny island. Long Island is also, well, an island. The Bronx and Westchester are a peninsula. But there's at least some room to expand. The Hudson Valley opens up when you get north of White Plains, and Jersey has plenty of room to sprawl. So the COL isn't nearly as bad as SF. What really keeps it as high as it is, though, is culture: Manhattan is the center of the world, and that's exactly how New Yorkers like it. There's a massive stigma to setting up shop in places like Morristown or Ossining. So instead everyone either pays $$$$$ to live near work in Manhattan or they pay $$$$ live in the suburbs but not so far out in the suburbs that they can't commute to Manhattan every day.
In the midwest and the southwest, on the other hand, there's no stigma to setting up shop in suburban edge cities. So you have metro areas like Dallas where there are large tech hubs in suburbs like Plano and Richardson, and some companies now are setting up shop in the exurbs.
>There's a massive stigma to setting up shop in places like Morristown or Ossining.
Morristown isn't some haven for bumpkins, it's a major stop on the Morristown Line with a lot of wealthy people. Maybe there's a sigma for setting up a tech shop, but it's not some backwater where nobody wants to live.
The problem isn't that nobody wants to live there; it's that nobody wants to work there.
It's a bedroom community for people who commute to Manhattan. A very nice, wealthy bedroom community, but still a bedroom community. The NY metro area has yet to embrace edge cities, and if it ever does (I'm not holding my breath) the COL will become much less of an issue.
Silicon Valley is pretty awesome as far as weather goes - it will be straight 70 degrees and sunny from March till November, and rarely gets below 50. Summers are a bit more mild than in SoCal, air pollution is less of a problem, and the fire danger has been less in recent years. There is more rain and lower temperatures in the winter, but not really enough to be annoying, and it means you might actually see running water that's not channeled by concrete in the South Bay.
Another thing that works against Midwest is that when the world things of "America", Midwest is not what comes to mind. To build a large competitive tech hub, you need to be able to attract huge numbers of Indian and Chinese developers are you scale your company to 10,000 engineers. However, most Asians (and even Europeans) prefer to stay on the coast due to the storied past, Silicon Valley name recognition, socially liberal policies, huge diversity, access to ethnic food etc.
> However, most Asians (and even Europeans) prefer to stay on the coast due to the storied past, Silicon Valley name recognition, socially liberal policies, huge diversity, access to ethnic food etc.
Tell that to the huge Asian population in Dallas. It's not quite the Midwest, but it's still the Great Plains and the culture is similar.
The Indian and Chinese food here is second to none, and we're one of the most diverse metro areas in the country. Also, while Asians may prefer the Democrats' stances on immigration, they are often deeply socially conservative, just as much as any white Southern Baptist, and they tend to form extremely conservative ethnic enclaves.
There are plenty of hiking trails throughout the midwest, and Arkansas has some of the finest rock climbing in the nation. Plenty of climbing in other Midwestern states as well. Snow skiing, not so much.
The hiking in the midwest is hardly comparable to the hiking in the rockies and west coast. It's hardly even comparable to the hiking on the east coast.
There's some good rock climbing sure, but there's no alpine climbing.
I didn't mean that it's inherently negative, I meant given the option, more people will choose mountainous/hilly terrain over flat terrain. Either for aesthetics, or hiking, or skiing, or whatever. My only proof is that property values are higher in those areas.
