Derman

Turn on, tune in, drop by the office

1. By Emma Hogan, www.1843magazine.com
2. View Original August 1st, 2017

Every three days Nathan (not his real name), a 27-year-old venture capitalist in San Francisco, ingests 15 micrograms of lysergic acid diethylamide (commonly known as LSD or acid). The microdose of the psychedelic drug – which generally requires at least 100 micrograms to cause a high – gives him the gentlest of buzzes. It makes him feel far more productive, he says, but nobody else in the office knows that he is doing it. “I view it as my little treat. My secret vitamin,” he says. “It’s like taking spinach and you’re Popeye.”
Nathan first started microdosing in 2014, when he was working for a startup in Silicon Valley. He would cut up a tab of LSD into small slices and place one of these on his tongue each time he dropped. His job involved pitching to investors. “So much of fundraising is storytelling, being persuasive, having enough conviction. Microdosing is pretty fantastic for being a volume knob for that, for amplifying that.” He partly credits the angel investment he secured during this period to his successful experiment in self-medication.
Of all the drugs available, psychedelics have long been considered among the most powerful and dangerous. When Richard Nixon launched the “war on drugs” in the 1970s, the authorities claimed LSD caused people to jump out of windows and fried users’ brains. When Ronald Reagan was the governor of California, which in 1966 was one of the first states to criminalise the drug, he argued that “anyone that would engage or indulge in [LSD] is just a plain fool”.
Yet attitudes towards psychedelics appear to be changing. According to a 2013 paper from two Norwegian researchers that used data from 2010, Americans aged between 30 and 34 – not the original flower children but the next generation – were the most likely to have tried LSD. An ongoing survey of middle-school and high-school students shows that drug use has fallen across the board among the young (as in most of the rich world). Yet, LSD use has recently risen a little, and the perceived risks of the drug fallen, among 13- to 17-year-olds.
As with many social changes, from transportation to food delivery to dating, Silicon Valley has blazed a trail with microdosing. It may yet influence the way that America, and eventually the West, view psychedelic substances.

LSD’s effects were discovered by accident. In April 1943 Albert Hoffmann, a Swiss scientist, mistakenly ingested a small amount of the chemical, which he had synthesised a few years earlier though never tested. Three days later he took 250 micrograms of the drug on purpose and had a thoroughly bad trip, but woke up the next day with a “sensation of well-being and renewed life”. Over the next decade, LSD was used recreationally by a select group of people, such as the writer Aldous Huxley. But not until it was mass produced in San Francisco in the 1960s did it fill the sails of the hippy movement and inspire the catchphrase “turn on, tune in and drop out”.
From the start, a small but significant crossover existed between those who were experimenting with drugs and the burgeoning tech community in San Francisco. “There were a group of engineers who believed there was a causal connection between creativity and LSD,” recalls John Markoff, whose 2005 book, “What the Dormouse Said”, traces the development of the personal-computer industry through 1960s counterculture. At one research centre in Menlo Park over 350 people – particularly scientists, engineers and architects – took part in experiments with psychedelics to see how the drugs affected their work. Tim Scully, a mathematician who, with the chemist Nick Sand, produced 3.6m tabs of LSD in the 1960s, worked at a computer company after being released from his ten-year prison sentence for supplying drugs. “Working in tech, it was more of a plus than a minus that I worked with LSD,” he says. No one would turn up to work stoned or high but “people in technology, a lot of them, understood that psychedelics are an extremely good way of teaching you how to think outside the box.”
San Francisco appears to be at the epicentre of the new trend, just as it was during the original craze five decades ago. Tim Ferriss, an angel investor and author, claimed in 2015 in an interview with CNN that “the billionaires I know, almost without exception, use hallucinogens on a regular basis.” Few billionaires are as open about their usage as Ferriss suggests. Steve Jobs was an exception: he spoke frequently about how “taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life”. In Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography, the Apple CEO is quoted as joking that Microsoft would be a more original company if Bill Gates, its founder, had experienced psychedelics.
As Silicon Valley is a place full of people whose most fervent desire is to be Steve Jobs, individuals are gradually opening up about their usage – or talking about trying LSD for the first time. According to Chris Kantrowitz, the CEO of Gobbler, a cloud-storage company, and the head of a new fund investing in psychedelic research, people were refusing to talk about psychedelics as recently as three years ago. “It was very hush hush, even if they did it.” Now, in some circles, it seems hard to find someone who has never tried it.
LSD works by interacting with serotonin, the chemical in the brain that modulates mood, dreaming and consciousness. Once the drug enters the brain (no mean feat), it hijacks the serotonin 2A receptor, explains Robin Carhart-Harris, a scientist at Imperial College London who is among those mapping out the effects of psychedelics using brain-scanning technology. The 2A receptor is most heavily expressed in the cortex, the part of the brain in which consciousness could be said to reside. One of the first effects of psychedelics such as LSD is to “dissolve a sense of self,” says Carhart-Harris. This is why those who have taken the drug sometimes describe the experience as mystical or spiritual.
The drug also seems to connect previously isolated parts of the brain. Scans from Carhart-Harris’s research, conducted with the Beckley Foundation in Oxford, show a riot of colour in the volunteers’ brains, compared with those who have taken a placebo. The volunteers who had taken LSD did not just process those images they had actually seen in their visual cortexes; instead many other parts of the brain started processing visions, as though the subject was seeing things with their eyes shut. “The brain becomes more globally interconnected,” says Carhart-Harris. The drug, by acting on the serotonin receptor, seems to increase the excitability of the cortex; the result is that the brain becomes far “more open”.

All lit up These four cross-sections of a brain show that, under LSD

Photo by: row two

In an intensely competitive culture such as Silicon Valley, where everyone is striving to be as creative as possible, the ability for LSD to open up minds is particularly attractive. People are looking to “body hack”, says Kantrowitz: “How do we become better humans, how do we change the world?” One CEO of a small startup describes how, on an away-day with his company, everyone took magic mushrooms. It allowed them to “drop the barriers that would typically exist in an office”, have “heart to hearts”, and helped build the “culture” of the company. (He denied himself the pleasure of partaking so that he could make sure everyone else had a good time.) Eric Weinstein, the managing director of Thiel Capital, told Rolling Stone magazine last year that he wants to try and get as many people to talk openly about how they “directed their own intellectual evolution with the use of psychedelics as self-hacking tools”.
Young developers and engineers, most of them male, seem to be particularly keen on his form of bio-hacking. Alex (also not his real name), a 27-year-old data scientist who takes acid four or five times a year, feels psychedelics give him a “wider perspective” on his life. Drugs are a way to take a break, he says, particularly in a culture where people are “super hyper focused” on their work. A typical pursuit among many millennial workers, along with going to drug-fuelled music festivals or the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, is for a group of friends to rent a place in the countryside, take LSD or magic mushrooms and go for a hike (some call it a “hike-a-delic”). “I would be much more wary of telling co-workers I had done coke the night before than saying I had done acid on the weekend,” says Mike (yet another pseudonym), a 25-year-old researcher at the University of California in San Francisco, who also takes LSD regularly. It is seen as something “worthwhile, wholesome, like yoga or wholegrain”.
The quest for spiritual enlightenment – as with much else in San Francisco – is fuelled by the desire to increase productivity. Microdosing is one such product of this calculus. Interest in the topic first started to take off around 2011, when Jim Fadiman, a psychologist who took part in the experiments in Menlo Park in the 1960s, published a book on psychedelics and launched a website on the topic. “Microdosing is popular among the technologically aware, physically healthy set,” says Fadiman. “Because they are interested in science, nutrition and their own brain chemistry.” Microdoses, he claims, can also decrease social awkwardness. “I meet a lot of these people. They are not the most adept social class in the world.” Paul Austin has also written a book on microdosing and lectures on the subject across Europe and America. Many of the people he speaks to are engineers, business owners, writers and “digital nomads” looking for ways to outrun automation in the “new economy”. Drugs that “make you think differently” are one route to survival, he says.
Although data on the number of people microdosing are non-existent, since drug surveys do not ask about it, a group on Reddit now has 16,000 members, up from a couple of thousand a year ago. People post about their experiences, and most of them follow Fadiman’s suggestion of taking up to ten micrograms every three days or so. “My math is slightly better, I swear. Or maybe it’s just my confidence, either way, I am more aware, creative and have amazing ideas,” says one user, answering an inquiry about whether there is correlation between intelligence and microdosing. “I feel less ADHD, greater focus,” says another user. He can identify “no bad habits [except] maybe I speak my mind more and offend people because I am very smart and often put people down with condescending remarks by accident.”
Microdosing is the logical conclusion of several trends, thinks Rick Doblin, the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a research and lobby group. For a start, many of those who took acid in the 1960s are still around, having turned into well-preserved baby-boomers. “Now, at the end of their lives, they can say that these drugs were valuable. They are not all on a commune, growing soybeans, dropping out,” he says.
Another reason for the trend is that, although there have been no scientific studies on microdosing, research on psychedelics has suggested that they may, in certain settings, have therapeutic uses. The increasing use of marijuana for medical use, and its legalisation in many states, has also led to people looking at drugs more favourably. “There’s no longer this intense fervour about drugs being dreadful,” says Doblin. Last year a study of 51 terminally ill cancer patients carried out by scientists at Johns Hopkins University appeared to suggest that a single, large dose of psilocybin – another psychedelic and the active ingredient in magic mushrooms – reduced anxiety and depression in most participants. This helps encourage those who may normally be wary of taking drugs to experiment with them, or to take them in lower, less terrifying doses. Ayelet Waldman, a writer who microdosed for a month on LSD and wrote a book documenting her experiences, makes much of the fact she is a mother, a professional and used to work with drug offenders. She is not your typical felon. (Indeed, she gave up the drug after that month, in order to stop breaking the law. But “there is no doubt in my mind that if it were legal I would be doing it,” she says.)
The availability of legal substitutes for LSD in certain parts of the world has also made microdosing far easier. Erica Avey, who works for Clue, a Berlin-based app which tracks women’s menstrual cycles, started microdosing in April with 1P-LSD, a related drug, which is still legal in Germany. Although she took it to balance her moods, she quickly found that it also helped her with her work. It made her “sharper, more aware of what my body needs and what I need,” she says. She now gets to work earlier in the morning, at 8am, when she is most productive, and leaves in the afternoon when she has a slump in energy. “At work I am more socially present. You are not really caught up in the past and the future. For meetings it’s great,” she enthuses.
LSD is not thought to be addictive. Although people who use it regularly build up a tolerance, there is not the same “reward” that users of heroin and alcohol, two deeply addictive drugs, seek through increasing their dosages. “They are not moreish drugs,” says Carhart-Harris. The buzz of psychedelics is more abstract than other drugs, such as cocaine, which tend to make people feel good about themselves. Those who have good experiences with hallucinogens report an enhanced connection to the world (they take up veganism; they feel more warmly towards their families). Most people who microdose insist that, although they make a habit of taking it, they do not feel dependent. “With coffee you need a cup to feel normal,” says Avey. “I would never need LSD to feel normal.” She may quit later this year, having reaped enough beneficial effects. Many talk of a sense in which the dose, even though it is almost imperceptibly small, seems to stay with them. Often they feel best on the second or third day after ingestion. “I’ve definitely experienced the same levels of creativity without taking it…you retain it,” says Nathan.
The effects of microdosing depend on the environment and the work one is doing. It will not automatically improve matters. Since moving to an office with less natural light, Nathan has not found LSD as effective, although he still takes it every three days or so. Similarly, Avey doubts it would be as useful if she did not have a job she liked and a “cool work environment” (with an in-house therapist and yoga classes). Carhart-Harris raises the potential issue of “containment”. Whereas beneficial effects of psychedelics can be seen in thera­peutic environments, the spaces in which people microdose are much more diverse. A crowded subway car or an irritating meeting can become more unbearable; not every effect will be a positive one.

Currently the lack of medical research on microdosing means that it has been touted as a panacea for everything from depression and menstrual pain to migraines and impotence. The only problem that people do not try to solve through microdosing is anxiety. Since these drugs tend to heighten people’s perceptions, they are likely to exacerbate anxiety. Without more research, it is hard to know whether such a small amount of a psychedelic works merely as a placebo, and whether there are any long-term detrimental consequences, such as addiction.
There is still an understandable fear of LSD, and it is unlikely to migrate from Silicon Valley to America’s more conservative regions anytime soon. But in a country which is awash with drugs, microdosing with an illicit substance may not seem so outlandish, particularly among the middle-classes. Already many Americans are happy to medicalise productivity. In 2011 3.5m children were prescribed drugs to treat attention disorders, up from 2.5m in 2003, and these drugs are widely used off prescription to enhance performance at work. By one estimate, 12% of the population takes an antidepressant. Americans also try to eliminate pain, mental or otherwise, by other means; the opioid epidemic has partly been caused by massive over-prescription of painkillers. Compared with these, LSD – which is almost impossible to overdose on – may no longer seem so threatening. It may help people tune in, but it no longer has the reputation of making them drop out.
This article has been amended to add a credit to the Beckley Foundation in Oxford

To Come Up with a Good Idea, Start by Imagining the Worst Idea Possible

1. By Ayse Birsel, hbr.org
2. View Original
3. August 16th, 2017

There are many creative tools a designer uses to think differently, but none is more counter-intuitive than “wrong thinking,” also called reverse thinking. Wrong thinking is when you intentionally think of the worst idea possible — the exact opposite of the accepted or logical solution, ideas that can get you laughed at or even fired — and work back from those to find new ways of solving old problems.
For example, one of the most important discoveries in the sequencing of the human genome came from Fred Sanger who reversed his process to achieve a breakthrough. As explained by Siddharta Mukerjee in his book The Gene, Sanger “turned his own strategy upside down and tried to buildDNA, rather than break it down.” His wrong thinking led to his second Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1980 for contributions in genetic sequencing.
The great Argentinian chef Francois Mallmann, featured on Netflix’s documentary series Chef’s Table, left the comfort of his restaurants to cook in the wild in Patagonia, with no kitchen or sous chefs, traveling with a group of young novices who have little or no experience. He calls it “gypsy chefs,” a team that roams. His wrong thinking about what a chef does and how he does it has allowed Mallmann to create incredibly unique culinary experiences that could never happen in a traditional restaurant setting.
During my “Design the Work You Love” workshop, Mickey McManus, AutoDesk research fellow and Chairman of Maya Design, shared an experiment in reverse thinking that captured my imagination. McManus essentially switched roles with his intern Lisa Rotzinger — Lisa became the boss, and Mickey an “exit-level intern.” As Mickey explained it, “Our role as a leader is to be the superhero, fly in and save the day. But the best thing you can do is serve other people. I thought, what if my role is that of the sidekick, getting obstacles out of their way and letting the superhero learn to fly.” When Lisa started at Autodesk, McManus gave her a sticky note with topics for her to research: Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning, and Generative Design. He told her that her task is to “discover things I don’t know” and left her to be her own boss for two weeks while he traveled. When he returned, her findings turned out to be much more provocative than either had expected. They applied her discoveries to an Autodesk research project called Primordial, and at McManus’s urging, it was Lisa who presented the project to 400 top executives and clients.
McManus’s reframing of leadership — the leader as the sidekick, the intern as the superhero — embodies three powerful principles that enable innovation and discovery.
1. Be the beginner. A favorite koan from the zen master Shunryu Suzuki says, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” Being the beginner shifts our perspective and, as the koan states, opens up our mind to possibilities. As a beginner, you listen more. You’re more inquisitive and interested in learning from everyone, including people who are younger or have less experience. We give ourselves permission to learn constantly. As Mickey found out, this humility pays off.
Lisa’s provocative insights, enabled by her newcomer’s perspective, opened up McManus’s mind to new ideas. He was inspired. McManus calls his new position the “exit-level intern,” rather than an entry-level one, someone who is there to learn like a novice even though they might have the most experience. To recognize how innovative this approach is, just imagine telling your intern or most junior employee that come Monday, you are their intern.
2. Grant agency. Listening to people, rather than telling them what you think they need to do, gives others agency to investigate, apply their ideas, draw their own conclusions. What are the obstacles standing in the way of your team? Having a bird’s eye view (or in this case, a sidekick’s view) gives you the advantage of seeing roadblocks or challenges, while putting team members in the superhero role makes them agents to solve their own problems.
Dara Dotz is removing obstacles to rapid recovery in humanitarian disasters with her NGO, Field Ready. Rather than relying on slow, expensive supply chains to import disaster relief, Field Ready empowers people in disaster-struck areas with the technology and expertise to make life-saving and life-sustaining supplies onsite. To help disaster victims realize their own recovery, Field Ready teams begin by listening. Suddenly the victim is the superhero and the designers and engineers are the sidekick, collaborating together to find the best solutions. Empowering your team with agency allows everyone to offer solutions and innovate, just as McManus did with Lisa by listening to her findings, encouraging her involvement in the work and, eventually, giving her the spotlight to do the final presentation.
3. Do away with hierarchy. The superhero-sidekick relationship Mickey set up with Lisa eliminated expected hierarchy. He had her sit next to the CEO, and enabled her to wander around and ask questions to everyone, including the CEO and the CTO. He asked her to teach him stuff, and had her give the big presentation at the end of the project. Mickey said, “Lisa nailed the presentation — 23-years-old, and she gave a presentation to 400 top executives, including our most important customers, that was riveting to watch.” When we allow those at the lowest rung of the career ladder to take on the superhero role, and step back ourselves to learn from them, the best ideas can rise to the top.
Lisa stayed for an extra semester of internship at Autodesk before going back to school. She has since graduated and is joining Autodesk full-time as a strategist. Mickey continues to be a superhero who acts as the sidekick, acknowledging what he doesn’t know and always learning along the way. Remember, the key to wrong thinking is coming up with a seemingly bad idea to challenge the status quo, pushing ourselves to imagine new and disruptive ideas, beyond our own preconceptions. When we give ourselves permission to have bad ideas, we often come up with the best ones.

1. Not every business has to be a startup! By J. Westenberg, medium.com
2. View Original
3. August 16th, 2017

I know. It’s a cool word. Startup. It sounds like adventure, freedom, saying fuck you to the man and about a billion dollars. I work in a startup, and I’m an entrepreneur, but I want to make one thing clear. Not everything has to be a Goddamn startup.
I’ve seen ’em all. I’ve seen folks with T-shirt “startups” and with website design service “startups” and with any business under the sun — most of which could be easily classified as small businesses.
There’s that Blackberry campaign from a year or two back, for their Leap smartphone, proudly proclaiming “YOU are a startup.”
It’s a way to make them sound more exciting, more accessible, and somehow cooler.
But it’s also a sign that you’re not really about it. To quote a solid entrepreneur I’ve gotten to know lately, you’re all hat and no cattle. Because you’re hung up on the terminology more than you are on the hard work, and the actual processes of starting and running a business.
You know what a startup is? No? Me neither. There’s a lot of different ideas. Is it a concept in search of a business model? I’m not entirely sure. It’s like porn — I can’t describe it but I know it when I see it.
It’s something to do with scaleability, growth and technology. But whatever definition you go with, fuck conforming to it.
If there’s just one single thing that I could teach anyone, that I could teach you, right now, it’s that you don’t have to conform to everyone else’s ideas of what makes a business viable and worth doing. All you have to do is build something that you give a shit about, with an accompanying business model, and then find customers.
I recently had a few drinks with a founder who kept asking me, “What’s your startup?” When I tried to explain that I’ve founded a successful blog and I’m the principle of a niche creative firm and I’m an exec for a tech platform, he told me that I’m not really an entrepreneur.
It wasn’t worth arguing with him about it. I couldn’t see any way that I’d be able to get the idea across. If you’ve already bought into (and sold out for) the concept of startups as the sole valuation for business or creativity, I’m not wasting my breath.
At the end of the day, startups are great. But they are businesses. They’re businesses, and that’s what you’re really founding when you design that product or come up with that idea.
You can run your business smart, you can run it lean, you can be agile, you can do it however you like, but you don’t have to found a startup to be an entrepreneur. All you have to do is build.

1500+ startups graduate Y Combinator’s first online Startup School
Posted Jun 16, 2017 by Josh Constine (@joshconstine)

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Today is the world’s biggest startup demo day ever, but it’s not happening in Silicon Valley. It’s happening all over the world as 1,584 companies complete Y Combinator’s online Startup School Founders Track program. 797 of them have posted demo videos anyone can watch.

That’s out of 2,820 startups accepted from the 13,321 companies that applied to Y Combinator’s 10-week program of one-on-one mentorship from past YC startup founders, virtual office hours with a group of fellow students, and an online lecture series.

Next time we could do 10,000 startups

— Y Combinator President Sam Altman

The leading accelerator typically teaches two batches of about 100 startups per year through an in-person program where YC partners and guest speakers teach them how to grow faster. The startups get $120,000 in funding, education, and connections in exchange for 7% of their equity.
But Altman says YC was looking for a way “to advise not just a few hundreds companies a year but a few thousand.” Its first attempt at scaling was the YC Fellowship, where a few dozen startups even more nascent than its typical admits were given remote guidance for a 1.5% equity stake. Here are our picks of the top companies from last year’s YC Fellowship.
Yet YC decided to shut down the Fellowship, because Altman says it “was not going to be the thing that added another zero to what we were doing.” So after the success of Altman’s Stanford online class, YC took its teachings and molded them into a massive open online course (MOOC) called Startup School. It features founders like Facebook’s Dustin Moskovitz and Slack’s Stewart Butterfield on how to build a startup, and Sequoia and Khosla VCs on how to raise money, plus sessions on recruiting, diversity, and PR.
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By democratizing startup knowledge, YC hoped to spur economic activity around the globe while promoting and preparing companies for its more formalized accelerator program. The problem with MOOCs is that there’s often no accountability or support network to keep students engaged.
The solution was the Startup School Founders Track. Founders would apply, and if admitted, be assigned a YC alumni as their mentor and a set of 20 other startups as their peer group. YC invests no cash and takes no equity in the companies, which don’t have to pay anything to participate.

The 10-week program required them to watch the lectures, attend 9 of 10 online group office hours with their peers, and submit updates on their growth and metrics at least 9 of the 10 weeks. There were also individual mentor-on-startup feedback sessions and support via email available.
“The amazing thing is that it worked at all” Altman tells me of the 7,746 founders who went through the program . In-person dinners were replaced by rapid-fire Slack rooms where the peer groups stepped up to help each other out. And while it didn’t invest in the startups, Altman says YC helped some arrange deals for free hosting credits and other resources.

YC alumni run online office hours with Founders Track startups
In the end, 1,584 startups passed the course. They encompass every vertical you can imagine, from drones and alternative energy to augmented reality and biotech. You can watch their demo video presentations here. Though not as polished as the slide decks you’d see at the main YC Demo Day at Mountain View’s Computer History Museum, the videos still feature plenty of pithy buzz phrases  and up-and-to-the-right growth charts.
“One big and obvious but important difference is how much more internationally focused this is” Altman said. Expanding beyond the U.S. has been top-of-mind for Y Combinator lately. It did Startup School events around the world last year, which translated into YC’s winter 2017 batch being its most geographically diverse set of companies yet, hailing from 22 countries.

The 1500+ Founders Track graduate companies won’t get full access to YC’s alumni network and software like those in the main accelerator do. Altman says “We didn’t call it ‘YC Startup School’ intentionally. That’s in part because calling it the ‘YC Fellowship’ led to some confusion, and the accelerator doesn’t want to dilute its elite alumni graph with startups who weren’t screened as vigorously.
Still, turning Startup School into a full-fledged online accelerator massively expands YC’s footprint, creating a funnel for its core program while freely dispensing powerful entrepreneurship knowledge. “If this keeps working I think we can have a significant impact on the financial outcomes of the world” Altman concludes. “Next time we could do 10,000.”

https://blog.hubstaff.com/best-cities-for-startups/
10 Best Cities For Startups You’ll Want to Be Based In
 August 14, 2017Dave Nevogt

When you hear the word ‘startup,’ your first thought is probably ‘San Francisco.’ While the Bay Area is undoubtedly the center of the startup boom in the U.S., the landscape is changing. So, why would you want to base your remote company elsewhere?
Budding companies and job seekers alike are starting to avoid San Francisco because of factors such as the high living costs and the lowering quality of life. Instead, business founders are opting for cities that offer diversity and new opportunities, yet don’t suffocate startups with inflated pricing and overcrowding. While the location is not that important for determining, say, distributed teams’ salaries, owners of remote companies also choose the city to launch their business carefully.
Cost of living, availability of talent, and access to industry information and strategic connections are just some of the factors that you’d want to evaluate. As the hub of your activity, the place you’re based in should meet both your personal and business needs.
We have to admit that not every city is as exciting as San Francisco. Yet a number of places across the country offer beneficial conditions for basing your remote company without sacrificing a rich cultural life and plenty of networking possibilities. Here’s a list of ten great cities you can launch your business in.
Seattle
Seattle is well-known among corporate pioneers such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Starbucks, all of which launched their business there. The West Coast city is renowned for its creative people, as well as its spirit of innovation and change.

While there are no special tax incentives for new businesses, the living costs in Seattle are significantly lower than in the Bay Area, so you can keep your overhead expenses under control. The city boasts an impressive mentoring network, as well as private investment options, as well as startup incubators and accelerators such as 9Mile Labs and SURF Incubator.
Seattle is renowned for its creative people, as well as its spirit of innovation and change.

With more than 30 co-working spaces in the Emerald City, you won’t be short of options for meeting interesting new people or organizing your monthly remote team get-together. Seattle is also historically known for its bustling music and arts scene, which you can enjoy when you base your remote business there.
Portland, Oregon
Portland, another West Coast entrepreneurial hub, is already known for its thriving small businesses and its passion for green living. It’s one of the best places in the country for launching tech and non-tech startups alike. A number of founders have already relocated from the Bay Area to enjoy the opportunities of the new entrepreneurial territory.

Portland is among the top cities in the U.S. in terms of resources available to small businesses. Its living costs are comparatively low, making it a suitable base for newly founded companies. It was ranked fifth in terms of established small businesses in 2015. For every 100,000 Portland area residents, there are 1,113 budding companies. One of the main propellers of startup activity are the Portland Incubator Experiment and the Portland Seed Fund, which have provided the basis for more than 60 companies already.
In Portland, you can be sure that your remote team meetup will be a great experience.
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Besides its business benefits, the City of Roses is famous for its culture and events scene. Let’s not forget Portland’s numerous microbreweries and micro-distilleries. You can be sure that your remote team meetup or industry convention will be a great experience.
Austin
Austin ranks as the fourth most affordable city in the U.S. to launch a tech startup in terms of rent and wages. Its business climate is friendly to small businesses, with Texas having no individual or corporate income taxes. A tech startup scene has already sprung in the city, so you won’t be alone when you launch your company.

If you’re looking for local talent for your team, you can also count on young graduates from the University of Texas, which is based in town. Austin has great incubators and accelerators so you can get mentorship from professionals, as well as great networking opportunities. The city is the home of the SXSW conference as well, which attracts thousands of entrepreneurs every year.
Looking for local talent? You can count on graduates from the University of Texas.
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Austin is often called the live music capital of the world because of its abundance of music venues, as well as festivals. It’s known for its alternative culture and a lively university scene – a place you won’t get tired of living in.
Dallas
Another city in Texas certainly belongs on this list – Dallas. It ranks as the sixth most affordable place to launch a tech startup in the country according to a CBRE report. It’s also the hometown of 25 billionaires, a number of Fortune 500 companies, and 50+ higher education institutions.

In the last few years, Dallas has grown into an unexpected entrepreneurial hub. With great networking events such as the Dallas Open Coffee Club and Dallas New Tech, integrating into the local startup community is easy. The ecosystem is still rather small, which means you can make a difference in its development.
With events like the Dallas Open Coffee Club, integrating into the community is easy.
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With its arts district, numerous museums, and a vibrant music scene, the city has a lot to offer in terms of lifestyle too. And let’s not forget the State Fair of Texas, which takes place in Dallas, is the biggest one in the country, so entertainment is certainly abundant.
Denver
Denver boasts a great business climate, and its central-west location makes it a convenient hub for companies of all industries and sizes. It has been a favorite startup location since 2010, when it ranked fourth in the U.S. In fact, it has been on the list ever since 1990, when it took the ninth position.

Denver is especially attractive for overworked employees and startup founders looking for a change of scenery. Many of them have escaped the craziness of the Bay Area and want to focus at one thing at a time. This means you can get access to an impressive talent pool. There are also quite a few incubators and accelerators in Colorado, many of which are based in Denver and in the startup hot spot — Boulder.
Denver makes the list due to access to an impressive talent pool in the metro area and outer cities.
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The Queen City of the West offers enviable living conditions, with affordable rental costs and a laid-back atmosphere around town. Denver’s proximity to the Rocky Mountains makes it a great place to be based in if you enjoy hiking and weekends in the nature.
San Diego
Despite its proximity to the Bay Area, San Diego is the tenth cheapest city to start a tech company in the U.S. according to CBRE. For every 100,000 citizens, there are 155 startups. Besides its affordability, the ‘Silicon Beach’ city attracts a ton of investments. In 2015, they amounted to $1.28 billion.

With its low startup costs, San Diego is a great choice for launching a remote company. The startup ecosystem is thriving, with plenty of incubators, accelerators, and coworking spaces, providing you with much needed mentorship and contacts. Local talent is also abundant and not as difficult to hire as in San Francisco.
Events like the San Diego Startup Week will surely keep you busy.

San Diego’s craft breweries are on the rise, and events like the San Diego Startup Week will surely keep you busy. The city also hosts various exhibitions and live music events, festivals, and theater plays. With its great weather, San Diego offers entrepreneurs great quality of life on top of the business opportunities.
Boston
In 2016, the 1776 startup incubator from Washington, D.C. named Boston the top city to launch a startup. The rating was based on factors such as access to funding, availability of skilled employees, ecosystem connectivity, and population density and lifestyle.

Top universities are based in the Boston area, including MIT, Harvard, and University of Massachusetts. This means there are plenty of young professionals in the city who can feed into your talent pool. The startup scene is also promising. You can apply for tens of Boston accelerators and incubators, which help with mentoring and networking opportunities.
The living costs in Boston are more affordable, plus the conditions offer a higher quality of life.
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The living costs in Boston are more affordable, plus the conditions offer a higher quality of life for entrepreneurs than the Bay Area. The city is known for its love of good food and beer, as well as thrilling sports events.
Chicago
With one of the strongest startup ecosystems in the U.S., Chicago is a great alternative to San Francisco for launching your business. In 2015, the city had 105 entries on the Inc 5000 list of fast-developing companies.

Between 2011 and 2015, 40,000 new tech jobs were created in the Windy City. Diverse industries have chosen Chicago as their base, from airplane builders to shared vehicle services. The startup community is close and supportive, with a number of quality incubators and accelerators contributing to its development. The city is also rich in co-working spaces, so you’ll never get lonely if you’re the only person on your remote team who’s based in Chicago.
In 2015, Chicago had 105 entries on the Inc 5000 list of fast-developing companies.
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Beyond the Chicago-style hot dog, the city can offer you a lot in terms of arts, culture and music. As the birthplace of blues, jazz and hip hop stars, it’s never short of great live events. Chicago is also the center of improvisational comedy, which was born as a genre there. If you’re organizing a team building get-together, your remote teammates will surely stay entertained.
Raleigh
The capital of North Carolina ranks as the second cheapest city to base a tech startup according to the 2015 CBRE report. Raleigh-Durham was on founders’ lists already in 2010 because of its numerous accelerators and incubators, as well as its closely-knit startup community.

The Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill area is known as the Research Triangle Park, with a number of technological hubs based there. It’s one of the largest research parks worldwide and has its roots in the three top universities located in each of the cities: Duke University, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Basing your remote company there means you can get access to some of the smartest people in the country – be it for mentorship or partnerships.
Basing your company in Raleigh means getting access to some of the smartest people in the country.
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Besides the affordable living costs, which means better conditions for less, Raleigh is situated less than an hour away from the Wrightsville and Carolina beaches – and a couple of hours from the Smoky Mountains and a number of great hike trails.
New York City
While the living costs are not much lower in NYC than in the Bay Area, the Big Apple still has a strong attracting force for startup founders. New York is a place where things just happen, so there will always be a ton of networking opportunities, interesting events, and potential hires.

The startup ecosystem has developed greatly in the last couple of years. Today you can count on tens of great incubators and accelerators based in the city. They can provide you with support when you launch your business, as well as with useful connections that can help its development. Plus, your remote colleagues will always be glad to make a trip to NYC and spend some time together with the team.
Your remote colleagues will always be glad to make a trip to NYC and see the sights.
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The city can offer you much more than that, especially if you’re a cosmopolitan person (and can handle the stress of living in a metropolis). The place overflows with artistic, musical, and cultural events organized by people from every point of the world. You just have to embrace the chaos that goes along with the thrill.
Which is your city of choice?
How did you decide where to base your business? What were the factors that brought you to your current city? Your insights are priceless for all the follow remote company founders out there. Thank you for sharing them!
WRITTEN BY

Dave Nevogt
Dave Nevogt is the co-founder of Hubstaff and focuses on growth. Dave has founded several multi-million dollar businesses and lives in Indianapolis. He writes a blog series that teaches everything his team does to grow Hubstaff and free training on how to build a remote team