I've lived in all of Durham, San Francisco, and Menlo Park (next town over to Palo Alto).

Durham, in my mind, had a weird vibe. Despite growing up there, I think what I remember best is taking a swing dance workshop (in my mid-twenties) from Sharon Ashe. Sharon had been at the heart and center of the San Francisco lindy hop community, possibly the best swing dance scene in the world. She had co-founded the 9:20 Special, which still attracts a crowd of hundreds every week.

But apparently she had burned out, and had too much of the cost of living and the competition (there isn't really any smog) and decided to move to Durham. She wanted a lower-key, quieter life, while still enjoying most of what she'd enjoyed in San Francisco. At the time, this struck me as a profoundly sad thing to do, and soon after I left town.

I would say that compromise is at the heart of what Durham has to offer. This is ultimately why I left, but it has got great restaurants, good weather, a lot of culture going on, and above all a wide range of diverse, interesting, active, intelligent people. Just not quite as much of any of the above (except for the weather) than SF or Cambridge. Take that for what you will.

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Yeah, I can kinda see what you mean by that. Durham seems like a nice, charming sitting with a quirky blend of different attitudes. Raleigh has more of "business orientation" thing, but seems less startup oriented in general. Although since the ATC opened the American Underground, the Underground @ Main, and the new Raleigh location, that has really contributed a lot of the energy of the local startup scene.

That said, one thing I love about living here (well, Chapel Hill) is that the weather is relatively pleasant pretty much all year round (read: it doesn't get really cold here, at least not usually for more than a day or two at a time). I could probably handle living in the Bay Area, but Cambridge would never work for me. Too damn cold. Same for Chicago...I love Chicago, but no way would I want to live there year round.

Don't forget the beer. Durham (and all of the triangle) has amazing beer.

I never really found the vibe to be weird. It seemed like a less pretentious Brooklyn (I live in BK now). And I can understand why you would think an area you grew up in is about compromise, but I respectfully disagree. Durham is a great mix of southern charm, unique quirky culture, down home feel, and high-tech progressiveness - I haven't been able to find that mix anywhere else. It's also large and varied - the area near Southgate mall is completely different than downtown Durham.

> a less pretentious Brooklyn (I live in BK now).

Interesting. My main complaint about Durham was that it was very suburban; the idea of traveling between any pair of locations other than by car was wholly ridiculous. (But last time I was there, there were a bunch of new bars and restaurants downtown! This is a quite recent development.)

There is no "Southgate mall" in Durham. That said, I'm not disputing that it has a lot of good points. Including the beer :)

A little late to the convo, but guessing he meant Southpointe and the rest of the suburban buildup at Fayetteville Rd./I-40, which is definitely a different feel than downtown.

I moved from Pittsburgh to SF, and I have zero regrets. I've found no where in the world better for people trying to build the future.

I agree with PG that the best conversation is in Cambridge, MA, wealth-gathering in NY, but if you want to build your ideas - the Bay Area is the center of the modern enlightenment.

I don't "get" SF, not as a place to live in (e.g. one that should satisfy all my needs, practical and intellectual). To me, SF is the mum in the Woody Allen sketch that keeps saying "Do your homework! Brooklyn is not expanding!" -- aka, no time for introspection or philosophical pursuits. I've found there, on top of social inequality, a curious brand of intellectual pragmatism, something like: if you cannot market it, then it's not interesting. But maybe it's a distorted perception?

That was about 80% of my impression also. Not 100%, to be sure, but there was a huge pervasive pollution from the "what will the VCs think? how does this advance your career? how will you monetize?" mindset. Everything was dominated by a certain amount of what I might call intellectual strip-mining, rather than intellectual advancement: look for something that was already developed but not yet monetized, and come up with a monetization scheme for it, rather than inventing something genuinely new.

Yea, there's no doubt that's true, but it's true everywhere. The people who are doing novel things are of course everywhere, but the filter is harder.

In SF, you can find a lot of people doing novel things, but you need to filter like anywhere else. It's just that the raw number of creatives here makes these groups larger. I still have yet to find the concentration of these types greater than anywhere else in the world.

I agree. I think if you're someone who really wants to make an impact with technology then get around people like you and stop trying to make the people around you like you. At this point, I am talking to myself :)

Yeah, I hear ya. I feel the same thing that another commenter here mentioned, it's the "nobody else around here is interested in the same things I am" thing. Even among the local startup community, we're one of a small number of enterprise software plays, and an even smaller number who are passionately focused on OSS. There are the OpenNMS guys, and I think Alfresco have an office around here somewhere, and Cloudera have something of a presence here... but still, by and large, I don't feel like there's much passion for enterprise stuff.

And yeah, obviously Red Hat are here as well, but they're way past "startup" stage. Same for IBM, Cisco, etc. There are people here who do enterprise stuff, but they're mostly sequestered away inside big shops like IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, EMC, etc. and not really participating in the startup scene.

I think it is best to optimize for collisions. Meaning, be in places where people running into to each to do interesting things just happens naturally. This phenomenon takes place in elite universities and startup hubs.