Paul Graham: Should you move to Silicon Valley?

**Paul Graham** (0:00)
I'm going to talk about two questions today that many of you have probably wondered about. The first one is about you. Should you go to Silicon Valley? The second one is about Sweden. What should Sweden do to thrive as a startup hub? Well, the first question is a lot older than startups. In fact, it's thousands of years old. Whenever there's something that people are working on very intensely, there's usually one place in the world that's the center of that thing. So, for painting in 1870, it was Paris. For math in 1900, it was Goettingen. For movies in 1950, it was Hollywood. Everyone, every ambitious person working on those things at those times had the same question you have, the same question startup founders have. Should I go there? And the answer is the same now as it always is. Yes, you should. You can go there for a bit and then come back, but you should at least go. The reason is the same reason it's worthwhile to move within one country. If you were living in a small village and you were interested in startups, obviously you'd benefit from moving to the capital, right, where there'd be a lot of other people doing it, or at least somebody else doing it. Well, that doesn't change when you're moving across a dotted line on a map, right? That reasoning doesn't even know the dotted line is there. What exactly do you get when you move to the big center?
The answer to that question is always the same too. You get the best peers, and in fact, the talent pool expands in two dimensions. The people are better, and there's also a lot more of them, and on top of that, they tend to cluster in certain places. So the resulting concentration of talent is, I mean, it's really intoxicating. Honestly, during a YC batch, every dinner feels like this in this room. It's true, isn't it? Is Gustav here? This is what it feels like in YC. Imagine this every week for three months.
So, I mean, it's actually pretty good that this feels like a YC dinner. That's a high standard to meet. It's very exciting to be in the same place as a lot of people working on the same thing as you. If you're working on something that not a lot of people are working on, Gustav mentioned this when he got to Silicon Valley. He felt like finally he'd met his people. But there's also a practical benefit that's much more important than the effect on your morale. You have a lot more serendipitous meetings that turn out to be valuable. I am still not sure why this is so, but serendipitous meetings seem to be enormously important. If you read biographies of people who've done great things, you constantly see examples of some serendipitous meeting that changes their whole life. It's such, I don't understand why, actually. Why are unplanned meetings? Why do they seem to be so much more valuable than planned meetings? It could be because there are simply more of them. And so, of course, if there are more unplanned meetings than planned, then more of the outliers will be the unplanned kind. Or maybe, excitingly, maybe, there's something especially good about unplannedness. Wouldn't that be cool?
Maybe it's because planned meetings are too conservative. Maybe planned meetings lop off the outliers, just like deliberately trying to find startup ideas lops off the outliers. You have to have a reason for the meeting beforehand, and that makes you too conservative. Or maybe it's because there's more selection in unplanned meetings. If you think about how unplanned meetings happen, you can decide after the first few sentences whether you keep having the conversation or not, right? And so if the first few sentences are like, oh, you're interested in that too? Oh my gosh, we need to talk, right? But there's something about serendipitous meetings. Like if you're working on something ambitious, there's nothing in the world that's better than serendipitous meetings with people who are working on the same stuff. And in one of the big centers for art or math or movies or startups, you just have more of them. Things also tend to move faster in the big centers because the people are better, they're more confident and that's more decisive. They also tend to egg one another on. They both encourage and compete with one another, and that means when someone who has a good idea doesn't sit on it. That's the problem with the people out in the villages.
They sort of half have these ideas. In fact, when there's some big startup 10 years later, they're like, I thought of that, right?