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$.
Two, and this flows from one and the fact that salaries here are about 1/3rd of US ones with comparable cost of living; any talented people that have options will just say "fuck this"(possibly turn over a table as they get up) and just leave. I regularly half-joke with foreigners I meet that our main export is engineers. Through college I met about 5 people who I'd consider co-founding something with. Of those 5, one is now in new york, another is at Intel, a 3rd is in france doing graduate studies and the other two left but I've lost touch with them. This even extends no non-computer fields and basically anything that requires high skill-level(so any engineering field, business consulting, finance, etc...).
The startup I'm working at now is actually based in the states. The founder is Lebanese-American and a mutual friend introduced us. We're trying to start something here(we're currently only 2 guys). My hope is that people eventually realize that programming can be done from anywhere and they don't have to go to SV and we might have a viable startup culture at some point. We're still very far from that point though.
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Well, it's not easy to say the least. There are essentially two big problems we have.
One, anything telecom related tends to be much more expensive here than almost anywhere else in the world. For example the best home connection I can get right now is 1Mb/s down 128Kb/s up with a 12GB/mo data cap for ~35$/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.