Re:Chicago startup companies to watch in 2022
by throwaway894345 on Monday June 27, 2022 @12:57PM
(#31897346)
> We're the best city in the world from April to early June, for sure.
Lol if you hate the sun and love the mud, then yeah that time of year is fine.
> Then we're too humid to sustain human life until the end of August. Then we're the best city in the world again until early December.
Agreed, although I don't mind December if only because things still feel festive in the city, and we don't get properly cold until January anyway. I don't mind bundling up for ~30° days when the city is at its most charming. But when decorations come down after the new year, temperatures plummet, the city becomes collectively depressed, etc then it's a pretty miserable place to live (though surely there are worse places).
Re:Chicago startup companies to watch in 2022
by tptacek on Monday June 27, 2022 @01:08PM
(#31897507)
Deep winter in Chicago is pretty miserable. I grew up with it and value the changing of the seasons (California has only two seasons: yellow season and wet grey season), but not wanting to gut out February here is a perfectly cromulent reason to avoid the place. If you don't have a pretty healthy social system with indoor stuff to do during the weekend, it can feel a little like living through 2020 did, but for a couple months every year. I'm happy to hang out with the whiskey list at Delilahs, seeing a concert or two, and snagging tables at Publican, Juno, and Duck Inn during those months, but if that's not your thing, I can see how this place would get bleak.
I don't think startup-friendliness has all that much to do with city greatness, or vice versa. San Francisco is smaller than Columbus, Ohio, both by population and by square mileage. Columbus isn't even in the conversation! It's just a network effect thing: SFBA was the right place at the right time, got a critical mass, and it became a received truth that if you're thinking about funding a company, that company should in SFBA, so it can interact with and recruit from other successful companies.
If you're not looking to get funded, being in Chicago can be a big advantage. It was for Matasano, the company I co-ran for a decade in the '00s. The cost of living is low, every major city has a reservoir of talent that's going to stick around for reasons other than career development (family connections, just loving the city, &c), and, maybe most importantly, a diversity of real businesses that aren't part of the tech ecosystem, which is a customer base you need to learn how to support either way.