The internet is what it is, but you can never match the face-to-face relationship with an online approach.

I totally understand that this is a dream-like situation: You make a good amount of money, doing what you like in a remote island where the sun shines and the food is always tasty (yes I'm from Greece...) but if your business can't be done 100% online, which is almost never the case, then you need offices in a big city. Then you need to visit and control these offices, etc.

Yes I can stop work, and "go surfing" (in the right season), I can even stop working and visit the local town pier and see those quaint "fisherman" struggling to make a living -because let's be honest, not everyone can be a tech-ninja startup founder.

If I wanted I could even crank the heat in my car, squint and make believe that it's actually a warm exotic beach in Europe but hey, at some point I gotta go back to the office, fire up that computer and get back to hacking.

At the end of the day it doesn't matter where you are. If you need to "break out of the box" and travel a bit, go for it. But simply moving operations to somewhere foreign will not be the deciding factor in your success.

I've been in the mountains of Vietnam for the last year and rent has been between $50 and $125 per month, which has made it possible for me to be unemployed for a long time and write v1.0 of my startup's app.

I think that Southeast Asia is a pretty ideal location if you want to go the bootstrapping route - the people are super nice and friendly and everything is unbelievably cheap. You really can get a lot done.

The serious downside is that you are not really connected to the tech scene - you can't really meet that many hackers (i.e. potential cofounders) and of course there is zero funding. And when you talk to tech folks stateside you feel pretty disconnected when you in a different part of the world.

Nevertheless I think it's a viable way to go solo.

It doesn't sound like a good option though if you want to actually build a startup: writing a lot of code, meeting with clients, hiring great people, etc.

It is (or was) a 'small fishing village' that retains a fascinating history.

1.5 hours from London, and 1 hour from Brighton, 1/3 the cost of flats and working space, good connection speeds, good coffee. If you come down to check it out, look me up and I'll buy you a pint.

--EDIT-- Some nice tempting rental listings for you :) http://www.hastingsobserver.co.uk/property/search?listingSta...

"Hey, guess what, you have to move to $middleofnowhere."

"Hey, guess what, I quit."

Exactly how the conversation would go if it ever happened to me. What would happen in such a situation is the good employees would quit because they wouldn't want to compromise their salary, marketability, and ability to take a new job, while the dead weight would go with it because it's still easier than finding a new job if they can build up enough job security in their current one.

Also interesting that someone thinks you should do it... who just happens to own office space in said location.

Cities work because there is the infrastructure and the talent pool. Going to the middle of nowhere might save a pittance on salary, but when people inevitably quit, good luck replacing them without spending even more on moving other people there.

Of course you are offering extras like being networked in with the other residents, and you are marketing to Europeans so it's not crazy to charge this amount, but it would be nice if you could have some more details and evidence on what you are offering.

IE, imagine a couple with small kids from London comings for an interview to a nice location in Crete. Instead of a tiny London 2 bedroom, they can move into a nice cottage. They can save hours a day in commutes and get more cash into savings. That will appeal to some employees (or their wives/husbands). You can't say Crete is objectively better or worse than the London buzz. But, it is different in a way that will inevitably appeal to some.

The problem is that it's hard not to adjust your salary expectations (as an employer) to local salaries and that just isn't compatible with relocation hiring. People don't relocate for a lower salary, even if cost of living is lower. I think the EU has a lot of these possibilities that are still under appreciated.

If you think your main win/lose parameter is the quality of people you can hire, you should think creatively about how to win here. It's hard to win competing head-to-head.

I think it really depends on who you are, not where you are.

It's a half hour drive from there to Silicon Valley. 45 minutes to San Francisco. There's bus service to both places. 10 minutes to Half Moon Bay with supermarkets and hardware stores.

"Getting far away from your family, your friends, [...] Living close to the beach, and surfing or doing yoga, also helps decompressing after work, and avoiding burnout, and therefore staying productive"

1) Traditionally, HN has been about startups: what works, what doesn't work

2) This entire comment thread is reading like a tourism forum

At some point, maybe 2-4 years ago, HN sublty starting moving from a board about how to make your startup to folks trying to pitch other folks on stuff to buy for your startup. It's the old thing about during the gold rush the gold miners didn't make all the money -- the guys selling pickaxes did.

I don't say that to discount these folks. Hell if I know. Probably best place in the world for a startup. It's just every now and then HN gets especially bad about this. And it needs to be pointed out.

The only good thing is that we have decent broadband.

They are now a massive company with 39 US Offices and 4 international offices. I've never been sure if the lesson is that you can start a company in the middle of nowhere, or if you need to have local offices to serve your customers. The headquarters is still in Hailey, ID, in the middle of nowhere, but they clearly thought they needed offices elsewhere to add ~1 additional office per year of the company.

I can appreciate, number 1, the safety (as I had all my gear stolen in Morocco a few years ago, passport included), and living with other tech heads, but in the end I just need a decent internet connection, a kitchen, and location in some interesting part of the world; the rest are nice-to-haves.

Airbnb et al have totally destroyed the bargain rental market. From India, to Morocco, to Argentina, etc. formerly dirt cheap destinations now fetch luxury prices with often very modest accomodations in return.

Best bet for the travelling coder is probably to just do a week rental via hose-you-inc and then search locally for rentals closer to market value (i.e. not 2-5X what the locals are paying).

Now, it's a fantastic market for sellers, more power to them, if I had a place to sublet I'd be more than happy to fetch top dollar for some vanilla 1 bedroom apartment with a blender, hot plate, and clean sheets ;-)

2cents

Sure the subway can suck but in New York City I have access to surfing, beaches, more yoga studios (and dance, and martial arts, among a million other classes in languages, the culinary arts, and virtually any other topic you could choose) than anyone could possibly count, restaurants, museums, concerts, sporting events, scuba diving, sky diving, and anything else you could ever ask for. (And even the things you'd never think to ask for). I mean the list just goes on and on and on. Of course this is predicated on the assumption that you will take advantage of it (and have the money, interest, time, and energy to do so).

However, that being said, the idea of waking up in my hut, and walking outside, doing a little yoga on the beach, and then setting up for a cup of coffee with some locals and hacking away in the sun does sound undeniably attractive.

I'd kill for some more sun in my workplace. And just whose idea were these damned open offices anyways? I do enjoy the social interactions and yet there is always that nipping feeling that I'm interrupting someone else's zone while I do so, much as, often, people interrupt mine when they do.

I can't get fast internet, power/internet goes down when it gets a bit windy or starts raining; and it rains quite a lot, making you really unproductive. Let's not talk about 3G/4G, we are lucky to have 3G on a good day.

If I wanted to go to some conference or meetup I'd have to drive at least 4-5 hours since there's nothing here, and we don't have train or anything.

Talking about leisure time, I like surfing, but that's only viable during the Summer, there's not much else to do here other than hanging out with other people; we are lucky to have a cinema, but some movies don't even make it here (I'm still waiting to watch Interstellar).

This would be the perfect place for a lonely writer working on a novel, but definitely not for people like us, who need to be always connected and making the best use of technology possible.

Disclaimer: I've never lived in a city, maybe I'll end up hating it, who knows?

But certainly pretty, peaceful, cheap property, great scenery and fairly convenient for the Cairngorms for climbing/skiing:

http://www.portknockiewebsite.co.uk/

For a bit of history, here is a page describing the loss of my great-grandfathers boat the Evangeline with all hands:

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/pirie/history/PFWv1-o/ui26.htm

[I traced my ancestry recently and its a bit of a shock to realise that most of my male ancestors for about 300 years had a connection of one kind or another with the fishing industry].

While the housing is cheap by London standards, it's still the south east and it's possible to get cheaper and better in the north, west, or Scotland.

The only place where I worked on the last 8 years that I couldn't work remotely is not the kind of place that I would work anymore.

For me these days, if a company doesn't have some remote policy in place (I mean... not full remote, nor once per week, but the option to, sporadically, work from home on a sick day or to be able to do some coding/admin stuff on the road) it automatically flares a red flag as a place that would not be a magical place where I could do the best that I can.

If the place doesn't have the remote-some-times flexibility it's probably a place with bad management practices and an out-dated culture.

Same thing regarding talent pool... Why on earth do you need to smell the emanating creative fumes of your employees every day from across the hall? :P

" the good employees would quit because they wouldn't want to compromise their salary, marketability, and ability to take a new job, "

The good candidates wouldn't touch us with a 10ft pole, the ambitious graduates were getting out of the farmland and over to the cities. So we generally had a great intern pool (lots of sharp people in financially strapped situations not wanting to move) and second to third rate hires. Not bad hires, but... not close to best in class. So while I can perfectly understand bootstrapping or running a (very) small business in the boondocks (many many reasons to do so), I can not advise locating an office there. Nor can I advise any enterprising and ambitious student to move to the boondocks for a job. Networking matters.

Look at the entire business model of Silicon Valley -- the vast majority of hires are fresh graduates. Party because of ageism, but also because fresh graduates are the ones who are willing to uproot their lives and move to some place with a not particularly compelling quality of life, with enormous costs of living, just to get a job. The reality is that the Valley isn't necessarily drawing the best of the best from across the continent: They're drawing the ones who are willing to move, which overwhelmingly means people just starting their adult lives.

So if someone wants to hire new graduates, being in a more remote location might be completely tenable, if not optimal, to their strategy. It is a filter.

And then there are remote workers. I live on a sprawling property in the rural extents of the exurbs of Toronto. If I worked a traditional SD job it would be a terrible commute, but I do the vast majority of my work completely remotely, with redundant high speed connections and some fat computing hardware. There is absolutely nothing that being in the center of it offers me. On the flip side I often have peers and clients to my property for BBQs and a good time.

There was a surf hostel that we also stayed in but it was more expensive (15 euros a night) for bunk beds but it had internet, good bathrooms and showers, breakfast included.

Morocco's a bargainers paradise. If you haggle you can get the prices down. It's the offseason now. Out of all the places we visited (Taghazout, Sidi Ifni, Mirleft, Agadir, Ouarzazate, Tinghir, Boulemane, Merzouga, Chefchaouen, Marrakesh), for a total of 2 people, we would average around 20 euros a night, sometimes paying 10 euros and sometimes 30. Of course, we weren't looking for all the bells and whistles, just a clean bed for the night. Sometimes we got just that, sometimes we got a luxury suite for 20 euros cause it's the offseason. The big cities were indeed surprisingly more expensive. But nothing about Morocco is sketchy -- the hasslers are annoying but I never once felt threatened (it was also always the 2 of us). The coast is beautiful and you should explore beyond Taghazout -- Essaouira and Sidi Ifni if you can.

You can find loneliness anywhere.

Being "always connected," I'm beginning to realize, is not always the optimal state. You lose the ability to focus, to consider the future, and form thoughts of your own. As Douglas Rushkoff suggests: we all live in the present.

For better or worse this is the way things work... but I think it's rather amazing that we have the option to work on a terrace in a medina in some North African city if we want to. And yet so few of us, at the forefront of the technology that enables this lifestyle, take advantage of it -- even for temporary periods. There's something to be said about taking a few months away from the Valley to think for a while.

My internet was even more limited (EDGE), power went out sometimes (two power bricks were enough for my mac air, though, and the cell towers never went out, so I could make it through even a multi-day outage without losing internet!), and comfy fast wifi in a coffee shop was 40 minutes away (I'd schedule voice or video meetings on days I liked to go into town to buy things or eat at good restaurants).

And surfing fast, big, tropical beach and point breaks ... well.

I bought a house down there; I'm back in the states right now, because I came back and got married to a girl from my hometown. But we're heading to Ecuador again as soon as we can. :)

But a startup? Hmm.

I think I'd have been a good startup employee, but contracting was a better fit anyway since I really appreciated multi-month blocks without work.

My internet was even more limited (EDGE), power went out sometimes (two power bricks were enough for my mac air, though, and the cell towers never went out, so I could make it through even a multi-day outage without losing internet!), and comfy fast wifi in a coffee shop was 40 minutes away (I'd schedule voice or video meetings on days I liked to go into town to buy things or eat at good restaurants).

And surfing fast, big, tropical beach and point breaks ... well. It was rainy during nearly half of the year, but I didn't even need a wetsuit, and during the good season, it put a smil

I bought a house down there; I'm back in the states right now, because I came back and got married to a girl from my hometown. But we're heading to Ecuador again as soon as we can. :)

But a startup? Hmm.

I think I'd have been a good startup employee, but contracting was a better fit anyway since I really appreciated multi-month blocks without work.