Closer To The Ideal

Zed Shaw is moving to San Francisco. He wrote the following comparison of entrepreneurs in San Francisco and New York City:

To give a great example of what it’s like in NYC, I received this email from someone when I posted I was looking for work in SF

I have an idea for a business involving level 2 stock quote analysis that will be able to ask arbitrary questions of the NYSE data stream using indexed log files in Hadoop as well as a backup idea to cannibalize the enterprise search market by doing what they do for cheaper money using this technology and lucene. In both cases, I’ll need a badass coder to help me with the application and deployment parts, ideally using a dynamic JVM language. … I have personal funds to work for 6 months so I’m planning on doing this for 2-3, presenting a prototype to some financial people and ideally getting funding and connections to sell it in one fell swoop. Just registering the idea. Real-time analysis of a whole bunch of email could be an option as well, if you had a business idea.

Yes, I actually did receive this in response to my blog post. This is actually a very common pitch and style for the NYC entrepreneur. This cocky, muscular, alpha-male-wannabe “my dick is bigger than yours come work for me and make me rich” is tiring and the main reason I’m leaving. If NYC entrepreneurs want to know why they can’t find “techies” (another way of saying “fucking nerd”), all you have to do is read the above.

By comparison the companies that contacted me from San Francisco were all incredibly polite, professional, and told me exactly why I should work for them. Each one immediately pointed me to their existing technology. Each one told me their funding levels. Each one had their business model thought out to some degree. There wasn’t a single company that I thought didn’t get the business, or was trying to screw me.

When it comes down to it, the primary difference between the companies who contacted me in SF vs. NYC is this:

* NYC prospects were looking for a badass/ninja/rockstar beta-male “techie” employee to make them rich creating lame applications for giant Finance/Fashion/Marketing companies.

* SF prospects were looking for a partner to get rich with them creating great products for customers.

Now obviously the SF companies are all really looking for an employee to make them rich. The difference is in their approach and how they don’t say it so blatantly or in such a gigantic douchebag way. Their touch was lighter, more collaborative, and definitely not with the attitude of me being some “beta-male” to their “alpha”. That lack of cocky dickwad douchebag in the SF technology scene will be refreshing and interesting.

There is some truth to his account of entrepreneurs in New York City, though I also ran into a lot of the same attitude in Virginia. I’ve run into a lot of clients who have the attitude “I am a genius, I just need some coder to bring my ideas to life.” Invitations to real collaboration are rare. My sense is that a lot of the entrepreneurs that I’ve dealt with on the east coast are at the unconscious incompetence level of learning. They simply do not know how little they know, nor do they know enough to appreciate how much I know.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 12:28 am and is filed under business, dealing with clients, entrepreneurs, freelancing, lying, management, personal effectiveness, social aggression, social class, startups. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.