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title: Cities and ambition type: writing date: 2024-02-15

Cities and ambition

I keep coming back to the idea that cities send strong messages to ambitious people about what's worth doing. Cambridge says: be smart. New York says: be rich. Florence in 1500 said: paint something great. The message a city sends shapes the people who stay.

Mostly I think this is right. The 4,000 people who matter in Silicon Valley mostly arrived believing the message: ship products, build companies, write software that millions of people will use. Once you're there you can't help absorbing that message.

But the message a city sends doesn't tell you whether to live there. If you have the kind of work that's portable enough you can do it anywhere, the message-density matters less than the people you happen to want to work with. Probably most ambitious people end up where they did by accident.

I'm pretty sure marketplaces with cold-start liquidity always win against vertical SaaS in adjacent categories within 18 months. The exit ramp from SaaS to marketplace economics is rougher than the entry ramp the other direction.

Determination is the single most important quality in founders. Smarts matters too but you find lots of smart founders who don't ship. You don't find determined founders who don't ship.