Also, though SV has the most investors, Boston probably has the highest volume of hackers flowing out of its universities.

Robert is a professor at MIT and is not moving in the immediate future.

I wondered if there was some default text in the set process buyers go through when they create a listing. Perhaps default text that started with "We would like to speak...".

Because all the blurbs start out like that, I found it hard to skim over the list (hence the blurry comment).

Honestly even if your name was David Heinemeier Hansson and you were in my startup and I found you sitting on your rear end and doing nothing because you had a personal conflict with somebody in the company ... well maybe if you were David I'd toss the other guy out. But anything short of that I'd have to have a serious pow-wow with both sides and lay the smack-down; too much money at stake these days and too much much-needed world changing to let shyness and immaturity get in the way.

So it seems like the idea was not THAT great, or the programmers not too mature, or the leadership completely lacking the ability to establish a vision strong enough and roadmap clear enough to get people to redirect their focus from the obstacles to the opportunity at hand.

So idea guys, programmers, lack of leadership - clearly all "people problems" .... how then do you make the leap in logic that the general idea itself was "stupid even to try."

That's like saying, "Should architects get together with masons to figure out how to build houses more efficiently? Well, we tried that once and the foreman and the architect got into an arguement, so it was stupid even to try."

No, it wasn't stupid to try. The outcome was stupid and that was because the trial components were stupid. Doesn't mean the experiment design was stupid.

On the other hand, what is the implication of your argument, that only programmers can have ideas worth executing and that the rest of the world just sits on its collective rear end and wait until some programmer somewhere thinks up solutions to all the world's ills?

That's what they did, it's just that they "tossed the other guy out" by not getting together in the first place. That's much less messy than a nasty breakup/firing later on.

ONE THE ONE HAND, in my experience drama seems to go hand in hand with lack of strong leadership and ability to light a fire under people's rear ends by painting an inspiring "end result of our hard work" mural. It's like that show on National Geographic Channel, "The Dog Whisperer." Strong presence and ability to focus the group, no problems. Lack of strong presence and ability to manage group focus ... dog pack gets nervous and soon all anxiety gets released by individuals blowing up at each other for the most ridiculous slights, real or (in most cases) perceived. Same thing in monkeys.

I'm not saying people are dogs or monkeys but we are mammals and that aspect of individual/group dynamic behavior seems to have been ingrained in our genetics as a result of who knows how many years.

Strong leaders with big visions and the ability to communicate clear plans to people so well that people think it was their own idea can crush petty squabling instantly; I've seen it too many times to not believe it's a repeatable skill and obviously one of value (who knows where that startup you mention might have went if the participants learned to grow up and work together?).

"Personality conflicts are not something you can work around by force of will."

I think it depends on the individual maturity and the power of the idea and the money at hand to figure out if you can work around pesonality conflicts at will.

Don't tell me if you didn't get along with someone but I came and told you, "If you guys can shutup and work together and finish this feature by the end of the week, Google will buy us for $10,000,000,000" that you wouldn't immediately shutup and make friends and get to work.

Of course you would - so it's a question of mental attitude, not operational impossibility.

What's more important, your ego or the company. I'd hope ALL founders would say, "The company, because if the company takes off I benefit more than being right and makign the company flop."

Honestly I'd rather work hard with someone I couldn't stand personality wise and score and then spend the rest of my life upgrading my "WhySo-And-So-Is-Stupid" blog than arguing and cancelling the startup.

Anything else is amateurish and childish. I mean if your coworker fed kittens to Rottweilers or something horrible like that, well that's one thing. But unless it was something like that,please. Grow up. There are millions of smart programmers all over the world who'd cut a leg off for an opportunity to work in a possibly very successful startup where the biggest issue is "I don't like the guy sitting on the other side of the room."

As for your assertion that "If you don't like the people you're workign with, you're not going to be doing your best work."

I disagree. Maybe YOU're not going to be doing your best work but I've been in a startup situation where I loved eveyrbody and I met some unbelievably talented technical guy who wanted me to jump ship and join him instead. He was a certified genius but possibly one of the rudest pricks you can imagine. Every day long after I stopped communicating with him, for like 3 months, he would send me long emails along the lines of, "Let me tell you why you're messing up and what you're doing wrong and what opportunities you're missing and how you can improve this and you should stop that because that feature is stupid." and so on.

Funny how easy it is to confuse "I like my cofounders and they like me" with "we're making incredible progress ridiculously fast."

At first I thought it was a no-brainer to pass on working with genius guy because he was such a jerk I thought it would be impossible to come to work with him every day, even if he personally wanted to invest the first million out of his first pocket.

"No thanks, I have VC interest, I have a team that I get along with, stop emailing me please."

As I've grown older I've come to realize that that guy was like the character "Mickey" in Rocky: He's nasty, he's mean, he's rude, he's abrasive, he makes you hate to go to the gym and get in shape for the big fight. But a few months with him will leave you much better off than hanging out with people who like you so much that it's all easy breezy.

You might disagree, but I personally respond best to jerks ticking me off and tend to relax and get a false sense of security when I spend too much time with yes-people who I get along with really well.

In ANY creative process there has to be a balance between "flow" and "tension" ... too much tension and the venture cracks ... too much flow and not enough tension and soon you're drifting off in many directions and not getting anything done.

I don't know if startup situations tend to attract manic-depressive types or if they make normal people tend to act manic depressive, but I'm sure I don't have to tell you that many startups have manic-depressive atmospheres.

One day you're going to sneak up like a ninja, crush everyone before they wake up and run off with all the loot while you're playing Queen's "We are the Champion" or House of Pain's "Who's the Man?" in your head.

Next day, you realize you've made a HUGE mistake in quitting your job and you suddenly come to the stark conclusion that you're all doomed, completely DOOMED and what were you thinking?

Then there's a breakthrough and you renounce your humility and realize you're "this close" to taking over the world again. Then tomorrow you're at the pit of despair again. Day after that you're making plans to dynamite your URL on the moon's surface. And so on.

Until that twilight period gets stabilized, which may take weeks or months or close to a year or in some case more than a year, you'd be surprised how useful hostility and anger and resentment can become if you can direct that properly. Sometimes it's all you have when things are bleakest and you need something to keep the fire going.

So to synthesise our arguments, you need people to get along well ... but never too well. All creative acts attract "artist types" and artist types thrive when they have a "I'll show you, I'll show you all!" attitude, not when it's like, "Hey, massage my feet? Sure!"

Need breakfast fuel gotta go.

1. Smokers don't switch brands easily, its more than just choice or taste, bodies get used to a certain cigarette. I wouldn't' just buy your cigarettes because they contribute to a good cause. All cigs are not the same. If I wanted to contribute to cancer I have other ways of doing it.

2. Most smokers actually don't believe that they will get cancer from smoking. 'It can't happen to me' syndrome.

3.The population of smokers is getting younger. An ever larger chunk comes from teenagers and folks in their early 20's who do not want to spend more for cigarettes, additionally, what they smoke is also a function of what their friends smoke.

4. Cigarettes are getting increasingly expensive because of higher government taxes in most nations among other reasons.

5. No tobacco corporation publicly admits that tobacco causes cancer. No one will sell you tobacco to make these cigs,

And in any case I doubt the number would increase. The power of hubs is self-perpetuating. So no matter how many startups originated in St. Louis, there wouldn't be a lot there when a given new one started, because many of the previous ones would have already moved.

(Suppose it happened that 50% of the next generation of big movie stars were from St. Louis. That would not make St. Louis a rival to Hollywood.)

If the trend if that many more small startups with bold ideas start to win, other VCs have to become more bold, and so the difference between, for example, the Valley with their aggressive VCs and other areas would diminish.

If there are 'only' 5-6 startup hubs today, not too long ago there was only one. Since the other 4-5 hubs managed to grow in spite of SV's existence (and dominance), I do expect this number to increase further, by one order of magnitude at least.

I don't think the star-system is necessarily a relevant analogy because it is focusing on individuals, who as actors, actually have quite a few more options than just Hollywood. Rather, what would happen if 50% of the next generation of movie producers and production companies were from St. Louis (or Bollywood)? Or, for a different scenario, 50% of the next generation of SFX and post-production companies? Do they all have to move to Hollywood? Can some of them move back? For some types of companies, It's actually demonstrable that they don't all make the move, and a rash of soundstages and post-production facilities are sprouting up in secondary hubs across the US because Hollywood is too expensive and crowded.

Your empirical argument is well taken. By no means was I arguing that SV would become irrelevant to the current industry because of growth per-se, but you're assuming that startups are (and will remain) an 'industry', and second, that they will remain the same industry.

Economists like to divide all spending into two categories: consumption and investment. Consumption is spending for things you'd like to have now, that'll give you an immediate benefit. Investment is spending for tomorrow, in the hopes that you will gain more benefits later.

Technology organizations face the same tradeoff, but with time rather than money. Developers can work on features that immediately benefit users and pad the bottom line (consumption). Or they can work on refactoring, infrastructure and tools that will make it easier to add features in the future (investment). There's always a tradeoff. If you spend too much time on investment, you're customers will wonder why you haven't done anything for them recently and stop giving you money. If you spend too much time on consumption, you'll wonder why it suddenly starts taking 10 times as long to implement each feature, why the system is grinding to a halt, and why your developers have no clue what's causing your latest dozen bugs.

In my experience, the best developers spend 80-90% of their time on investment and 10-20% on consumption. They'll apparently do nothing for 3 months and then crank out an app in a week (for an extreme example, check out PG's On Lisp: he writes a whole book on building up tools, and then in the very last chapter, he's like "Oh, by the way, here's a Prolog interpreter. In 50 lines. Done"). The worst programmers reverse that - they'll spend 80-90% of their time implementing your feature requests and only 10-20% cleaning things up, moving common code into functions, etc.

So here's your problem: under U.S. law, all "investment" that an employee creates is owned by their employer. Meanwhile, their salary is dependent upon how good you think they are, which depends upon how much they've done to improve the bottom line. In other words, they have every incentive to "consume" (push out quick features for the boss) and no incentive to "invest" (clean up code, setup infrastructure, build tools). The only way to rectify this is to make them part of the company's capital structure, so that they are effectively part-owners of the code they build.

You might think that you know better and can compensate people based on how well they actually do, but in practice it's virtually impossible. Ask yourself: how would you feel if your development team did nothing for 3 months. Because that's what it'll look like if they're doing their jobs properly. You say that you've got a terrific programmer who's working for no equity, but you're seeing him at his best. It's easy to crank out impressive stuff on a small green-field project; it's much harder to keep it working as the project grows. The choices he makes now will determine the future development of your software, even if you fire him and get someone else later.

Don't do this to your startup. If you're a tech company, spend your equity getting a top-notch tech person, then give him the discretion he needs to do things right. Otherwise (assuming you've gotten all the marketing/PR/idea stuff right), I can predict the path your startup will take. You'll get lots of buzz and lots of users, and they'll love you for cranking out features quickly. You'll dominate the market. Then, about 1-2 years in, you'll hit a brick wall, and every feature you add will result in lots of mysterious bugs. Fixing these will result in dozens of new bugs, and you won't be able to add any new features at all. Competitors will arise and start catching up to you. You'll fire your tech team, thinking that they must be incompetent. You'll start a rewrite-from-scratch project, which you'll abandon when your investors come calling. Then you go out of business.

They leave as soon as something better comes along. Giving them equity [with vesting] prevents that from happening. If the person is okay with just a salary, he'll go work at Microsoft or Google and additionally collect the "intangible" benefit of job security.