I woke up at 5:41am today calculating valuation caps. It was still dark out and I had only gone to sleep a few hours earlier, but I was immediately awake and aware of the fact that I had been weighing different strategies and paths for raising money as I dreamt. To quote Paul Graham's recent essay on the topic, raising money was officially "the top idea in my mind."

I was frustrated. Dave was supposed to be the one focusing his time on raising money so I could keep focusing on building HireHive. I wanted to be sleeping rather than tossing in bed making financial calculations.

Then something surprising happened. My frustration gave way as my mind shifted gears: my thoughts drifted towards figuring out how to control the top idea in my mind. I had, without intending to, changed the top idea in my mind.

That's when I realized that changing the top idea in your mind is like performing inception on yourself. You have to plant a seed idea in your subconscious and let it spread until it takes over.

I started thinking about why it was that my top idea had apparently shifted so quickly from one thing (raising investment for HireHive) to another (how to control the top idea in my mind).^[1] If changing my top idea is like performing inception on myself, could this help me more directly control my top idea?

I've thought about this some and have come up with a few hypotheses.

Broadly speaking, there are two ways I can imagine getting my top idea to change: Pushing another one on top of it, or popping the current one off. Pushing another idea on top means that another thought is strong and infectious enough to dominate my mind. Popping the current idea off means solving it, for some definition of "solving it."^[2]

When pushing a new idea on top, it's not enough to just have another idea that you "care more about." There are at least two other factors I can think of at play.

First, the reason I think it was easy for me to shift to another top idea so quickly was because the seeds of this other idea had already been planted in my mind. I had read Paul's essay last month. I had enjoyed it but finished it feeling a little let down; I wanted a more direct process for controlling the top idea in my mind.

I had seen Inception. I had enjoyed it as mind candy, at least as much as one can enjoy a film while being struck with intermittent pangs of guilt for taking an evening off work. 

I had gone to bed the night before wondering what to blog about. I had a couple ideas swirling around my head but I wasn't very excited about any of them. 

It was these different but ultimately related thoughts (my reflections on Paul's essay and Inception, as well as wanting to blog) that came together and coalesced into my new top idea.

The second factor that I think effects how likely an idea is to become your top idea is how concisely you can state it. The fewer words it takes to express an idea, the more likely it will be planted deep in your mind.^[3]

Like in the movie, performing inception requires that you start with the smallest possible kernel. The shorter and clearer your formulation of an idea, the purer the seed. The question that took dominance ("how can I control the top idea in my mind?") is nothing but short. 

If you want to change the top idea in your mind, make sure you can state the new one you want succinctly. Think about it deeply and then stop concentrating on it. Do the same for a couple other thoughts, possibly related and possibly not. Then either solve your current top idea or blog about it. I've found getting an idea to a "bloggable" state is a good way to pop it off the stack, leaving room for the next one to take root.

At least, that's what I'm hoping.

[1] For those who would claim the former hadn't actually been my top idea, I assure you it was: It's what my mind naturally drifted to when showering and it's what my dreaming self was focused on. Shower-thinking and dreams are the two strongest examples of ambient thought I know of.

For those who think the new idea didn't really take over, I can only say that it's what I dreamt about once I fell back asleep and what my mind explored further as I showered this morning.

[2]There's actually another option here: deciding you don't care about your current top idea. I don't think this is a common case for two reasons. First, since it's already the top idea in your mind, there's strong evidence that you do care about it a good deal. Second, trying to convince yourself that you don't really care about something and you shouldn't think about it is like the "don't think of an elephant" problem. It's unlikely to work because it's direct and it effectively wastes cycles. Why spend your time trying to not solve a problem?

[3] It's not exactly this, but the number of words it takes to state a thought is directly proportional to how clearly you understand it. The reason this isn't exact is because some ideas are more complex than others. It's possible that your thinking on idea A is clearer than idea B, even though you can express B in fewer words because it's a less complex idea. Regardless, I think "number of words needed to express" is a good heuristic.

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Note: I know and like Antonio and the Adgrok guys very well, but they have insulted my hometown and I will not stand for it.

Disclaimer: Even though this is posted on the HireHive blog, the following is only my opinion and not the opinion or policy of my employer, except when my cofounder agrees with me, which is all of it, so never mind. The expletives, however, are all mine.

This Tuesday, Antonio Garcia-Martinez from Adgrok wrote that New York will “never be more than a tech sideshow”.

He is wrong.

New York is going to become as important, if not more important, than Silicon Valley.

New York is the capital of food, fashion, music, finance, diplomacy, culture and news. It is a great place to start a company. Nick and I started HireHive there, and while we’re out in Mountain View right now to be a part of Y Combinator, we’ll be back there before you know it.

Why? Because New York is the greatest city in the world. So, I’m going to do my part and break down Antonio’s arguments the only way I know how: like a New Yorker — crassly and with lots of vulgarities.

The hero with, well, a couple of faces

The mythology in New York is all wrong for startups

The nice thing about myths is that the winners get to write them. The mansions in Atherton and Woodside are monuments to the success of the Valley’s finest companies. These inspire the next generation of Valley entrepreneurs.

There’s no question that New York needs some serious tech heros to succeed. But who’s looking like heroes now? The Wall Street guys? Fuhgeddaboutit.

The Dennis Crowleys, Chris Dixons, and Fred Wilsons of New York are building their legacies now. The monuments will come later.

$2495 for a 500 sq. ft. one bedroom apartment

There, that’s how much my first apartment in New York cost.

If you’re going to start a startup, you gotta live like you mean it. That means you can’t be in a one bedroom on the Lower East Side and complain about your rent. Save the hip hoods for when you make the money (and then you only spend a percentage of it). There are plenty of cheap places to live, assuming you look north of 14th Street. The Upper West Side, Morningside Heights, Washington Heights, Yorkville, Hell's Kitchen, and Murray Hill are all cheaper and sometimes even nicer. If you dare to venture out of Manhattan, you can find a great place in Astoria or Brooklyn with a back yard and a quick commute.

Nick was living in 81 square feet in a 3 bedroom in a beautiful brownstone in Park Slope for under $800. Living out here is costing him more money.

The cathedral and the brothel

Every yuppie I knew in New York worked as either a Wall Street guy, a lawyer, or an agent of some sort.

The people in NY are a different breed, for sure. They are most definitely the embodiment of the “ambitious ass-kicker.” The energy and ambition may need to be redirected a bit, but if there’s one thing New Yorkers respect more than anything else, it’s success.

Furthermore, while it’s true that Upper East Side banking culture isn’t startup culture, in a city of over 8 million, it’s only a tiny fraction of what New York has to offer. You can go out and meet the best thinkers, authors, artists, musicians, journalists, creatives, hackers, makers, nerds, you name it.

I swear, the last time my cofounder and I were out in SF the only people we met were entrepreneurs and social media experts. Nick had people telling him they knew Fred Wilson or had a meeting with Dave McClure before he even had a chance to introduce himself! You know what? Who the fuck cares? I’m going to go nutty if I stay out here for too long.

Note: Fred Wilson and Dave McClure are both very nice, upstanding gentlemen whom we hope to meet soon.

Open vs. closed source

New York’s entire economy is based on monopolies of information.

Every great business creates some type of competitive advantage, monopoly or otherwise. Look at Apple for crying out loud. They’re suing the pants off some guy for posting pictures of their new phone two months early.

I will give you the real estate brokers though. I don’t like them one bit. Still, at $5,000+ for broker fees, you’re living in the wrong neighborhood, pal.

And speaking of open source, New York is the capital of the open source hardware movement, soon to be a $1 billion business. I mean seriously: Bug Labs, Adafruit, MakerBot. Not to mention other groups like the the NYSenate CIO’s office and OpenPlans both of whom are pushing for more transparency and open source in government. I think it’s pretty tough to claim that New York is somehow closed source compared to the Valley.

Oh, also, Craigslist sucks. When New Yorkers can’t find an apartment, they make PadMapper and make Craigslist obsolete.

Disclaimer: I used to work at Bug Labs and Nick used to work at OpenPlans. They’re great places to work and they’re hiring. You should work there.

The intellectual candle-power isn’t there

Columbia is not a top-notch engineering school, and anyhow, it’s way the hell up and gone in Harlem, and no one who isn’t a student or faculty ever goes up there.

Now you’ve gone and made me angry. New York may not be Cambridge, MA, but Columbia (Nick’s and my alma mater) has a fantastic engineering school. I mean, fucking Al Aho teaches there. He wrote the Dragon Book (the book on compilers) and the programming language AWK. He even wrote egrep because he wanted to solve New York Times crossword puzzles. egrep people! The man wrote egrep to solve a fucking cross word puzzle. Al Aho was confronted with a problem, thought “I know, I’ll use regular expressions,” and then he had NO problems (please can someone make an Al Aho facts website?).

No place for Trotsky to sit down

One of the biggest shocks upon moving to New York was realizing it had no cafés.

First of all, New York has plenty of cafés. Try Eartmatters, Think Coffee, Grounded, Hungarian Pastry Shop (gotta go north of 14th for that one), or Gorilla Coffee (:gasp: Leave the borough?) to name a few.

But really, who needs cafés when you have something much better. HireHive was practically born in Nick’s old office on Lafayette street. There’s nothing better than grabbing $3 dumplings for dinner and then working on the top floor while watching the sun set over a 360 degree view of the Manhattan skyline.

Bla bla bla the food

The food culture in New York mostly sucks.

The food argument is bull. It might be fresher out here, but New York has every type of person and thus every type of cuisine under the sun. And I’m not talking $300 sushi either. Off the top of my head: Bagels, Indian, Szechuan, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Tibetan, Malaysian, Ethiopian, Italian, French, Spanish, Brazilian, Peruvian, Argentine, Mexican, Jamaican, Australian, Ukrainian, proper pizza with no grilled zucchini or what have you, and Jewish Delis. All for cheap if you know where to look.

Plus, New York is the king of the hip, roving, tweeting food vehicles (see: Big Gay Ice Cream Truck, Waffles & Dinges, Treats Truck, Schnitzel & Things, Calexico, Chicken and Rice).

Oh, one more thing? In-N-Out Burger sucks. Doesn’t hold a candle to Five Guys, let alone the holy grail of the fast food hamburger: Shake Shack.

Building shit

I’m fairly sure that between the big Oakland Home Depot and the geek paradise of Fry’s Electronics in Palo Alto, I and a band of hardy souls could re-build all of 21st century human technological life on some barren island if need be. Good luck doing that with what you find on Fifth Avenue.

The maker community in the Valley has nothing on New York. Seriously, NYC Resistor is possibly the coolest hacker space in the world. They have a fucking LASER cutter. And you can use it! Just ask them.

If there’s anywhere that’s holding the torch that was ignited at the Homebrew Computer Club, it’s New York City. Apple may have started the personal computing revolution at the HCC, but Makerbot is starting the personal manufacturing revolution at Resistor and they sure as hell aren’t in the Valley.

Greed is Good

None of those Goldman Sachs quants really knew about or understood the startup scene.

Ambition drives the Valley as much as it drives New York. It just has to be channeled correctly. New York nerds need some proper success stories to point them in the right direction. We don’t have our Google or Facebook yet, but it won’t be long. Just keep your eyes on Foursquare, Meetup, Etsy, et. al. If any one of these goes public the tectonic plates in NYC are going to shift drastically.

The startup scene in New York is growing at an incredible rate. Ten years ago, if you were a programmer in New York, you did finance. Just ask Joshua Schachter. This isn’t the case any more. Nick and I both came up exclusively through the startup world in New York and there are tons of hackers just like us who have tasted city life and wouldn’t give it up. This isn’t even taking into account Google’s now huge presence in NYC. It’s now possible to be a proper engineer in New York.

Why New York Is Better

All of this has just been why New York doesn’t suck. It’s not enough to bring it up to par with the Valley. New York needs to be actively better. For this, I’m going to take a page directly from David Lee: The big things (tm) in tech right now are social, mobile, and local. These work best when you have a lot of people and a lot of stuff all mashed together. It’s not a coincidence that Foursquare is happening in New York and not Palo Alto.

The New York tech scene is practically bubbling over with excitement and activity. Here’s a list of awesome things you’ll only find in New York: New York Tech Meetup, IgniteNYC, Dorkbot, Eyebeam, Rhizome, ITP, Betaworks, NYC Startup Job Fair, Hackers On Planet Earth, Adafruit, Resistor, Alpha One Labs, bit.ly, Kickstarter, Meetup, Makerbot, Etsy, Foursquare, Gilt, Makerbot, Bug Labs, Fog Creek, stackoverflow, Boxee, Tumblr, drop.io, Hunch, SecondMarket, GetGlue, OMGPOP, and the list goes on.

Oh and one more thing about the Valley: It’s the suburbs for crying out loud! I mean, I went to visit some family in San Francisco on Sunday and the last train back to Mountain View was at 9:15pm. Seriously? Yeesh.

TL;DR

The Valley may be the tech capital of the world now, but just you wait. New York is on its way to the top.

Is this aspirational? Hell yes. New York certainly won’t become the tech capital without boosters and success stories, but it is the center of everything else in the world. It’s just a matter of time. We’re doing our part.

Update 8/4/2010: Kelly Sutton wrote a great post about this too. Go New York!

Want to hire great people in New York, the Valley, or anywhere else in the world? You should try HireHive for easy and painless video prescreens.

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At HireHive, we remember a time when Hello World was a rite of passage of geeky programmers. But it seems times have changed. How do we know this? Well, when LeBron James joins Twitter with a hello world tweet, we think it's safe to assume the meme has become mainstream.

So: Hello, World!

We've got lots more to come. Stay tuned.

Best,

  -Nick & Dave

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