I completely feel your pain. I moved up to San Francisco the previous June with the grand vision of building out my team, raising a round of investment and building my PaaS for hosting node.js apps (NodeSocket) to something really special. I left a cushy director level job in San Diego and left a core group of good friends as well. I simply packed up everything in my car and made the drive up. The first couple of months I stayed on friends couches and did AirBnB, essentially living out of my suitcase, and hacking all day and night.
The trough of sorrow is deep, with extreme peaks and valleys. One day I was talking with Sequoia Capital and first tier angel investors flying high and optimistic, the next day, they are all passing, and I realized that I have burned through my entire savings.
The thing about startups is they are born easy, but die a very long and drawn-out death. I recently just came to terms, and announced that NodeSocket is shutting down (http://blog.nodesocket.com/shutting-down) to pursue a new opportunity Commando.io (http://commando.io).
Keep with it, take some time off from startups and entrepreneurship. Doing a startup is the hardest thing most people will ever do.
Why move to San Francisco? One of the benefits of living in this day and age is that you can start a business from pretty much anywhere in the world. Sure, it is presumably easier to acquire VC, talent and deal with general logistics if you're located in the valley but still... It's pretty obvious that leaving your job, friends, moving to a different city and living off your savings is a high risk move vs staying where you are and working from there. Not knocking you or anything (I don't know your entire story), I'm just saying.
If I were to start a company now, I'd probably stay right where I am and keep my job until I saw a level of success with my new project.
I think he answered the question- he was looking for funding. You can do a great many things remotely these days, but investors want face to face meetings, so you have to go to tech hubs to get them.
The connections, venture capital money, talent, and general startup/technology environment aside, San Francisco is an amazing city. By the far the best place I have lived. I don't regret moving one bit.
Physical, our own colo-space thusfar. Though moving large chunks/features to AWS & distributing things more heavily moving forward: isn't all that cost-effective to build out our own CDN vs piggy-backing.
I completely feel your pain. I moved up to San Francisco the previous June with the grand vision of building out my team, raising a round of investment and building my PaaS for hosting node.js apps (NodeSocket) to something really special. I left a cushy director level job in San Diego and left a core group of good friends as well. I simply packed up everything in my car and made the drive up. The first couple of months I stayed on friends couches and did AirBnB, essentially living out of my suitcase, and hacking all day and night.
The trough of sorrow is deep, with extreme peaks and valleys. One day I was talking with Sequoia Capital and first tier angel investors flying high and optimistic, the next day, they are all passing, and I realized that I have burned through my entire savings.
The thing about startups is they are born easy, but die a very long and drawn-out death. I recently just came to terms, and announced that NodeSocket is shutting down (http://blog.nodesocket.com/shutting-down) to pursue a new opportunity Commando.io (http://commando.io).
Keep with it, take some time off from startups and entrepreneurship. Doing a startup is the hardest thing most people will ever do.