Whenever I read about power outages in the states and the kind of mayhem they cause I think about how different the situation here is -- Lebanon that is.
We haven't had enough power to run the entire country ever since the end of the civil war in '90 so there's a rationing scheme whereby you get power during certain times of the day depending on where you live. People have just gotten used to having generators that kick in automatically about a minute after the power goes out and using UPSs to bridge the gap.
I just bought an apartment in a Beirut suburb and one of the main advantages the owner was touting was that the building has its own generator(so you don't have to deal with a distributor as those tend to have insane prices because they know that people need the electricity anyway).
Our startup just moved in to a proper office a couple of days ago. One of the problems we are now dealing with is that the A/C in that office is too power-hungry to run on a generator and we're having split units installed so we don't have to work in a sauna-like environment for the ~6hrs/day when there's no power.
I'm actually not complaining, you get used to this stuff and it's not that much of an inconvenience once you know how to deal with it. I know this was off topic, but this is what I'm reminded off every time a story like this comes up.
That's a really interesting point. I think a big part of anything like this is how prepared you are. For example, Florida routinely gets hit with much stronger storms, but they are much better prepared. New York doesn't deal with many Hurricanes, so our infrastructure--that millions have learned to depend on--failed. To your point, it's amazing how places and people can adapt to different conditions. I'd love to hear more about running a startup in Lebanon
Well, it's not easy to say the least. There are essentially two big problems we have.
One, anything telecom related tends to be much more expensive here than almost anywhere else in the world. For example the best home connection I can get right now is 1Mb/s down 128Kb/s up with a 12GB/mo data cap for ~35$/mo. And that's DSL, for 3G(whose coverage is spotty at best) it's a 100MB/mo cap for 10$/mo(above and beyond the 20$/mo just to have a cell phone line). My cell phone bill regularly ends up in the 80-100$ range and I don't talk that much on the phone, people who do end up closer to 150$.
Two, and this flows from one and the fact that salaries here are about 1/3rd of US ones with comparable cost of living; any talented people that have options will just say "fuck this"(possibly turn over a table as they get up) and just leave. I regularly half-joke with foreigners I meet that our main export is engineers. Through college I met about 5 people who I'd consider co-founding something with. Of those 5, one is now in new york, another is at Intel, a 3rd is in france doing graduate studies and the other two left but I've lost touch with them. This even extends no non-computer fields and basically anything that requires high skill-level(so any engineering field, business consulting, finance, etc...).
The startup I'm working at now is actually based in the states. The founder is Lebanese-American and a mutual friend introduced us. We're trying to start something here(we're currently only 2 guys). My hope is that people eventually realize that programming can be done from anywhere and they don't have to go to SV and we might have a viable startup culture at some point. We're still very far from that point though.
Comments
Whenever I read about power outages in the states and the kind of mayhem they cause I think about how different the situation here is -- Lebanon that is.
We haven't had enough power to run the entire country ever since the end of the civil war in '90 so there's a rationing scheme whereby you get power during certain times of the day depending on where you live. People have just gotten used to having generators that kick in automatically about a minute after the power goes out and using UPSs to bridge the gap.
I just bought an apartment in a Beirut suburb and one of the main advantages the owner was touting was that the building has its own generator(so you don't have to deal with a distributor as those tend to have insane prices because they know that people need the electricity anyway).
Our startup just moved in to a proper office a couple of days ago. One of the problems we are now dealing with is that the A/C in that office is too power-hungry to run on a generator and we're having split units installed so we don't have to work in a sauna-like environment for the ~6hrs/day when there's no power.
I'm actually not complaining, you get used to this stuff and it's not that much of an inconvenience once you know how to deal with it. I know this was off topic, but this is what I'm reminded off every time a story like this comes up.
That's a really interesting point. I think a big part of anything like this is how prepared you are. For example, Florida routinely gets hit with much stronger storms, but they are much better prepared. New York doesn't deal with many Hurricanes, so our infrastructure--that millions have learned to depend on--failed. To your point, it's amazing how places and people can adapt to different conditions. I'd love to hear more about running a startup in Lebanon
Well, it's not easy to say the least. There are essentially two big problems we have.
One, anything telecom related tends to be much more expensive here than almost anywhere else in the world. For example the best home connection I can get right now is 1Mb/s down 128Kb/s up with a 12GB/mo data cap for ~35$/mo. And that's DSL, for 3G(whose coverage is spotty at best) it's a 100MB/mo cap for 10$/mo(above and beyond the 20$/mo just to have a cell phone line). My cell phone bill regularly ends up in the 80-100$ range and I don't talk that much on the phone, people who do end up closer to 150$.
Two, and this flows from one and the fact that salaries here are about 1/3rd of US ones with comparable cost of living; any talented people that have options will just say "fuck this"(possibly turn over a table as they get up) and just leave. I regularly half-joke with foreigners I meet that our main export is engineers. Through college I met about 5 people who I'd consider co-founding something with. Of those 5, one is now in new york, another is at Intel, a 3rd is in france doing graduate studies and the other two left but I've lost touch with them. This even extends no non-computer fields and basically anything that requires high skill-level(so any engineering field, business consulting, finance, etc...).
The startup I'm working at now is actually based in the states. The founder is Lebanese-American and a mutual friend introduced us. We're trying to start something here(we're currently only 2 guys). My hope is that people eventually realize that programming can be done from anywhere and they don't have to go to SV and we might have a viable startup culture at some point. We're still very far from that point though.