A Startup SaaS Company in Omaha and Pmarca

I’m a big fan of Marc Andreessen’s PMARCA blog. I and thousands of others greatly appreciate the time he spends to share his experience and wisdom so freely with so many. His early series of posts on The Pmarca Guide to Startups, especially Part 1: Why not to do a startup, are wonderful reading for any entrepreneur who is considering starting their own company. You have to be one part crazy, one part lucky, one part gifted, and many parts incredibly committed to take a company from an idea to something really special. I personally will never forget the day when John and I decided our best course of action was to jettison every single one of our original developers and start over. I’m not sure how well John slept that night, but I’ll always admire the courage it took for him to do this, and in hind sight, it was one of our best decisions.

A recent series of posts, The Pmarca Guide to Career Planning, is equally entertaining and insightful, but one little piece of Part 3: Where to go and why has been bothering me since I fist read it on October 3. Marc advises:

Go to the city where all the action is happening. For technology, at least in the US, this is Silicon Valley…

In my opinion, living anywhere other than the center of your industry is a mistake. A lot of people — those who don’t live in that place — don’t want to hear it. But it’s true. Geographic locality is still — even in the age of the Internet — critically important if you want to maximize your access to the best companies, the best people, and the best opportunities. You can always cite exceptions, but that’s what they are: exceptions.

In general, Marc’s point is a good one, especially if you’re giving “go west young man” advice to a young person who dreams of striking it big in their chosen field, which is what Marc is doing here. To a certain extent, this advice also applies to entrepreneurs choosing to start a new company. John and I recently had one of the wisest and most experienced investors in Omaha (no, not him) explain to us that while people is the most important criteria in his investment philosophy and generally this refers to the founders, the talent pool within the company’s location is an important part of this people criteria. He explained that even if we each had years of experience working for Disney and Pixar and came to him wanting to start a new animated movie studio in Omaha he wouldn’t invest since Omaha isn’t exactly full of talent in this industry.

If you’re an entrepreneur wanting to start a technology company today though, there is no requirement that you be in Silicon Valley.

Sure, if you already happen to be there, your access to technical talent may be better than anywhere else in the US, but in my career I’ve worked with brilliant technical minds all over the US — Boston, NYC, Philly, DC, Charlotte, Atlanta, Tampa, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, even, gasp, Omaha! If you want to go international, I can point you to good friends and brilliant developers on five continents from Hanoi to Wiesbaden to Pretoria to Sydney to Toronto. Without hesitation, in Omaha, Nebraska, I’d put our VP of Technology and Chief Architect, John Borders, and our head DAL and database developer, Eric Smith, up against any technical minds in the world.

Also, as I’m sure Marc would agree, technical talent alone doesn’t make a good member of a startup team. Attitude and effort are equally important. While no company is ever a democracy, a startup company must be a team. To succeed in the early days, each member of the team must be able to pull their own weight and earn the trust of their team members. There simply isn’t room for non-contributing managers in the early days and there isn’t time to micro-manage everyone.

Finally, I’m going to shamelessly plug Omaha. Perhaps when you think of Omaha you think of Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway, Union Pacific, Conagra, Mutual of Omaha, and Peter Kiewit Sons. You should, these are all great companies. Do you know though that Newsweek has named Omaha a “top 10 high tech haven?” Do you know that Omaha ranks first in the country in millionaires per capita and golf holes per capita? Do you know that Omaha ranks 8th in the top 50 US cities in billionaires per capita and Fortune 500 companies? Do you think of Omaha every time you use an ATM card or a credit card? You should. Check out ACI Worldwide, First Data, and First National Bank of Omaha. Do you think of Omaha when you call just about any large company for customer service? Check out West Corporation and Sitel.  TD Ameritrade, Gallup, infoUSA, PayPal, LinkedIn — all are either headquartered here or have a major operations center here.  Who knew when Lori and I moved here 5 years ago that I’d become such a fan of Omaha?  I guess I just like being right in the heart of it all…