Ask HN: Cheap places to live with a good intellectual atmosphere?

Re:Ask HN: Cheap places to live with a good intellectual atm... by arijo on Monday October 08, 2018 @06:50AM (#18166209)

The tech scene in Lisbon and Porto IS happening - just take a look at companies like Farfetch, Outsystems, Talkdesk, Feedzai, Unbabel and many other smaller startups w/their HQ based in Portugal. I myself work at a Porto based startup (Bottlebooks) w/American and Slovak founders. Portugal has everything going for it to be the California of Europe - highly educated (and english speaking) youth and a will to conquer the world. We welcome any foreigner willing to work hard and contribute to a creating a great place to live :)

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Re:Ask HN: Cheap places to live with a good intellectual atm... by jayalpha on Monday October 08, 2018 @08:37AM (#18166854)

California or Florida of Europe?

* highly educated

Universities are not very good.

* and english speaking

Don't they speak Portuguese?

*youth and a will to conquer the world.

Unlikely. And Silicon Valley is not about guys with laptops creating some websites. It is all about high tech, top universities, supply chains and synergy effects. You may be able to to a technology heavy start-up in the UK, Germany, China, Japan, Korea but in Portugal this is difficult. You lack the industrial supply chain of customized high tech products. Just working on your laptop you can also do in Kenya (which actually is quite innovative in IT).

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Re:Ask HN: Cheap places to live with a good intellectual atm... by goliatone on Monday October 08, 2018 @11:08AM (#18168120)

You left out the most important reason most “next SV” will have a hard time getting there: VC money. Maybe Lisbon can be a different kind of tech hub, not necessarily a copy/version of SV.

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Re:Ask HN: Cheap places to live with a good intellectual atm... by arijo on Monday October 08, 2018 @02:39PM (#18170082)

Go away troll - Portugal has been growing strong in terms of its people's education and consequent modernisation for the last 20 years and there's nothing you can do about it, so if you've got nothing useful to say: get out of the way and let the Portuguese people show the world how a great country is re-built from the destruction created by more than 50 years of fascist dictatorship.

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Re:Ask HN: Cheap places to live with a good intellectual atm... by jayalpha on Monday October 08, 2018 @03:14PM (#18170385)

By the way, maybe you are the troll. Read up how SV became SV https://siliconcowboy.wordpress.com/2010/07/11/the-secret-mi...

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Re:Ask HN: Cheap places to live with a good intellectual atm... by jayalpha on Monday October 08, 2018 @03:12PM (#18170371)

I am not trolling. I love portugal. But it is not a tech hub and I don't see it being one. IT? Maybe. But for high-tech you need the supply chains. If I call a random B2B supplier and ask "Can you do X?" they often answer: "X? we can do better!" And this is where opportunities open.

Portugal is a nice place. Nice people. But too little high tech, too much debt, demography problems etc.

" destruction created by more than 50 years of fascist dictatorship." Not aware how much damage this created. The Portuguese empire was not important before the dictatorship anymore, so not sure how much time you really lost.

But PT has many good things. I wish RE was cheaper in Lisbon and I would buy immediately.

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