As lots of people are starting to consider leaving the Bay Area during the pandemic, I sit here wondering what its like to found a tech company in other cities outside of the Bay Area tech bubble in which I live?<p>I am often told by founders here that the bay is the best place to found a tech company because the talent is here, and so is the venture capital, but I wonder how true that really is.<p>Tech founders in other cities, what is it like?<p>Is hiring really that hard? Is getting VC really an issue?<p>What are some benefits you’ve noticed that might be unique to your city/area?
We're based in Algiers, Algeria. We have a presence in Paris, France (a few members live there). Our clients are in Europe. We've been building custom, turn-key, machine learning products for large enterprise clients for around seven years.<p>We started pushing for remote about two years ago experimenting with different schemes to stress test our processes. Inefficiencies become clear when you're not all at in the office. We used that to expose these weaknesses and address them because we figured we'd hire people in different countries sooner or later, and we'd experiment and learn before we had to.<p>We've had a couple of people in Paris so we were not completely strager to that. One reason we pushed for remote as well was because public transportation isn't good here for our work schedules.<p>We didn't need VC as we've been fortunate enough to be profitable from the get go.<p>><i>What are some benefits you’ve noticed that might be unique to your city/area?</i><p>Offices in piano nobile of 170m² (~1700 sq-ft) with ~3.2m (11ft) ceilings in a Haussmannian building facing the marina (Bay of Algiers) with a great view for $400 a month. The offices in downtown Algiers. Subway a few metres away. Facing a train station. You could swim almost through the whole year (I mean, it's november but it's 24°C and the water is warm).<p>Again, our clients are in Europe, so I'm not talking about doing business here. But for companies who have a runway, they can live really well here on $500 (eating out daily, fresh food, drinks, etc).