[Founder’s Real Talk #4] East Coast vs West Coast

Earlier this month, I traveled around the east coast for 2 weeks — from DC to Charlottesville, VA, then to Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, NC. To my surprise, distributed work has given me a very interesting perspective on the comparison between east coast and west coast now.

The most immediate observation is how much greener and more humid the east coast is. California has gotten drastically dryer over the past few years — it went from one wildfire several years to several wildfires within one year. East coast has a lot more wide-leaf trees, and the grass is definitely greener. You can feel the humidity and the season — it feels like summer vs the other 3, instead of the dry season vs the wet.

Another pleasant surprise is people over there definitely don’t talk about tech that much. In the bay area, it’s becoming inevitable that people you meet are somehow related to tech — work for large tech, doing a startup, VC investor, or at least did some angel deals. People all talk about the same thing, and you know you are in a bubble. However, during my trip, I met people who work for other industries, who served in the public sector, who do professional services with non-tech clients, and who are not the cut-throat parents. We talked about monetary policy, what it was like to run elections, history of some places and companies, growing up in a rural and diverse family. I feel like those are some the most interesting conversations I’ve had over the past few years.

Entrepreneurship is booming. Both Charlottesville and Raleigh have very cool co-working spaces and entrepreneurship programs — both have pools of very talents students from UVA, Duke, UNC etc., and spillover money from hedge funds, and other industries that benefited from tech (e.g. data science, machine learning) — UVA even has a new data science school. I’ve met during the trip some really talented people genuinely interested by the idea of the their entrepreneurship direction, instead of just looking for another product, engineering, or something job because all their friends are doing it.

Admittedly I’m looking at this through the lense of distributed work and being an entrepreneur, so the cost of labor hiring and freedom of choosing my location are definitely skewing my judgement too. I’m currently not hiring from the bay area because talents here are so expensive and I can find similar talents (skill-wise) elsewhere in regions beyond just the global hub cities, which brings me true global sensibility.

Distributed work definitely brings benefits to these areas on the east coast — areas that are not New York, Boston, or Miami — the traditional tech/finance hub cities. Cost of living is low and quality of life is good. For families, there are great school districts where you don’t have to suffer the cut-throat competition and your kids and grow more organically. There are also great hospital and healthcare resources.

What can you miss out from the bay area? There are indeed some of the world’s best restaurants here. Plus, close to Napa and Sonoma are key to us wine-lovers. Sand Hilll road or South Park is no longer just 40-mins away, so it creates so friction in fundraising. Of course the list goes on, but how many of these things really aren’t replaceable?

We shall see when I’ll feel the trigger to move somewhere else.