I just came back from Medellin this week (Monday), and I wouldn't say that Medellin is a tech hub or will be one any time soon.
I think the most important reason against it is the Internet. It's hard to find even the average U.S. city Internet speed here. Additionally, you won't be able to carry your laptop around the city because there is no concept of "hot spots" (The only "public" hot spot is the Juan Valdez Cafe, which is the Colombian equivalent of Starbucks).
Another major reason is that nearly no one speaks English. If you want to get by, you MUST know how to speak Spanish. This is a huge hurdle, knowing that English is the de facto technology, hacker language.
> you won't be able to carry your laptop around the city because there is no concept of "hot spots"
As a white European, I wouldn't carry my laptop around many parts of Medellin full stop!
I ended up going to Medellin for a bit to oversee some outsourcing back in 2012. We outsourced because one of the co-founders of the company had moved their and set up his own offshore team. To their credit:
* The team in Medellin were smart and capable
* The quality of the product was no worse than any other offshore work we'd done elsewhere (conversely, it was no better either)
* I never felt particularly unsafe, although you needed to take standard precautions
I agree with you that nobody speaks English, and my Spanish is appalling. I found that quite hard. That said, all of the team I was working with had excellent English skills: from what I can tell, most engineers did. The biggest problem I had was around the availability of current technology. I would imagine this has changed a lot since I was there in 2012, but smartphones were not hugely prevalent, and as you mention, internet speeds were somewhat slow.
For me, it wasn't a real success, but only because the experience and the final product was no better than outsourcing elsewhere. I loved working with the team (I imagine they'll probably come here and read this, so hi guys!), and I was somewhat sad it wasn't as a resounding success as I'd have hoped. Like you, I definitely wouldn't have called Medellin a tech hub, although I would hope it's come a long way even in the two years since I was last there.
I've spent the last 4 months working from Medellin and 10 months in total from various places in Colombia.
It's not a tech hotspot as the article might suggest with cafes full of people sipping latte and working on the next big thing, but nonetheless an amazing city to live and work in. Personally, I'd prefer Medellin and Bogota over many "western" cities, but it really comes down to what you're expecting and requiring.
Getting Wifi is not that big a problem in my experience, power sockets are though. But i prefer to work outside in the backyard of the hostel, so that wasn't a problem for me.
Most of the people in tech or arts I met spoke english quite well. But if you really want to enjoy a country, you have to be willing to learn the language. And spanish is among the easier ones in my opinion.
I spent 3 weeks there and there was multiple areas with free wifi in the Poblado and the malls, I don't think it's any less prevalent than in the US or Canada.
I was definitely carrying my laptop around for that.
But I would say the issue with carrying your laptop is more around security. The city is much better than before, like those stories tell you, but I still don't feel secure like I would in North America so for me I felt a bit worried carrying my laptop around.
Your argument is basically "It's not exactly like California". In general, in Latin America, internet access is slower but like all sevices, a lot cheaper than the US, and phone carriers still can afford to offer unlimited 3G plans so people use that instead of wifi. Spanish as a native language isn't a disadvantage -basically every single developer or indeed any techie in the world knows english anyways.
> Additionally, you won't be able to carry your laptop around the city because there is no concept of "hot spots"
I live here. And my brother travel all around the city, so if in USA you can get wifi free everywhere then this is true, otherwise we don't see that get internet acces is difficult at all..
Free wifi is likely less available there than we are used to in the US. I went to Europe last year for vacation and it was hard to find free wifi, too. I almost got stranded in Denmark one day because my credit card didn't work in Europe (no smartchip), and I had counted on using wifi to contact the person I was staying with. Every place in the US that I use for free wifi was charging for it in Europe, and even then it was harder to find paid wifi hotspots than back here in the US. In the US, you can get free wifi at any Starbucks, McDonald's, public library, most coffee shops, a lot of restaurants--we have come to expect it to be in a lot of places. When traveling, only hotels that are aimed at business travelers charge for wifi in the room (because business travelers aren't paying for any of it and thus don't care about the added cost for wifi)--the cheaper hotels offer it for free. When the OP complained about not having hot spots in Medellin, that's the expectation he's got--and he'd probably make the same complaint about Sweden, Denmark, or Switzerland (I know I did).
It should definitely not be hard to find wifi in Denmark. The biggest coffee chain (Baresso) has wifi at all locations that isn't even passworded, and most smaller cafes have a hotspot with a password (in Copenhagen at least, working in coffee shops on laptops is very common). There is also wifi at public libraries, on the buses, on the commuter rail, in malls, at museums, etc. And in Sweden, every 7-11 has wifi, which means that hotspots are almost literally everywhere. I doubt you could walk more than a few blocks in Copenhagen or Stockholm without hitting free wireless.
Ah, well I wasn't trying to throw any stones at Denmark or Sweden. My point, probably phrased with too many words, was just that nobody would go to Denmark expecting chickens in the street or no civilization, but wifi just wasn't as available as I'm used to in the US there, either. (It was free at 7-11 in Denmark, too, although only for 10 minutes--that was still long enough to save me from spending a long afternoon at the train station in Aarhus.)
"Hot spot" is not data plan, is using real WiFi to get work done specially in coffee shops. But not even "Juan Valdez" here in Colombia has power sockets available for customers to use; while most of them in USA (at least in California) are filled with them.
I lived in the US for some months, and then I tried to keep working on coffee shops when I came back here, but in Bogota is just not possible. The most similar thing is working from libraries, but you can't eat nor drink on those so it's very inconvenient.
I was loosely playing around with the idea of checking the place out at some point over the next 12-24 months so this kind of advice is much appreciated.
Unfortunately, the author tweaks facts and statistics to make his claims more believable than they are.
For example, the author claims that Germany lost its chance to conquer Europe and the U.S. This is very misleading, and here's why.
Even though Germany rose to the Europe's most industrial and populous nation state following the unification of 1871, its production capacity was incomparable to that of the combined outputs of its western rivals. That is why Otto von Bismarck wanted the newly established Empire to stay out of any conflicts (and this is why he got fired by the more aggressive Wilhelm II).
The U.S. at that time was nobody. It was still undergoing the post-Civil War recovery and the Industrial Revolution JUST arrived on the continent. No European nation was interested in conquering the largely agrarian society.
Germany didn't miss a chance. It had neither the capacity nor the will to conquer the U.S.
>> Germany didn't miss a chance. It had neither the capacity nor the will to conquer the U.S.
I doesn't seem the author is saying that Germany wanted to conquer the US. Germany wanted to create the equivalent of a US on continental Europe by annexing large landed regions and populations to get parity with the US on natural resources and population.
It wasn't even all that much earlier that European countries were selling off their American land holdings, to Americans mostly to finance their various national monetary needs.
The US was an APEX power and had been for a long time. Nobody could conquer it. To claim the US was a nobody is a laughable.
> It was still undergoing the post-Civil War recovery
After the civil war, the US fielded the greatest army in the world and it's economy was growing because it was shifting to westward expansion. We took over territory bigger than western europe. Not only that, the US was the largest producer of oil BY FAR at that time.
> the Industrial Revolution JUST arrived on the continent.
It just arrived in european mainland as well relatively speaking...
> No European nation was interested in conquering the largely agrarian society.
No european nation could. Let's stop pretending any european country had any hope.
A european country conquering the US in the 1800s is like costa rica conquering the US today. It's laughable.
During the civil war, the US developed much of the military technology that was used in the first world war a few decades later.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted for this because it's true.
In addition, to your points, after the civil war, the U.S. had the largest number of guns in civilian hands of any country by far. The populace was so well armed that an invasion would have been ridiculous.
The U.S. also had the largest economy in the world at the time, a population about the same size as Germany, and had the Atlantic Ocean situated between itself and an invading army.
By the 1870s the U.S. had a large iron and steel industry and in less than 20 years later (by 1889) the U.S. was producing more steel than Great Britain.
Furthermore, the U.S. had the second largest navy in the world at the end of the Civil War--a navy that was very modern since it was largely composed of new ships built during the war. The U.S. Navy was also the most experienced by far with modern naval combat since they were the first country to use ironclads in battle. Granted the Navy rapidly declined in size after this time period, but given that the buildup happened in only 4 years in the first place, new ships could have been rapidly brought online if a war broke out.
The U.S. was also covered in railroads and telegraph lines by this time that they could use to coordinate movements and rapidly deploy troops--this was a huge advantage not available to an invading army.
The idea of a European power invading the U.S. after the civil war is definitely laughable.
I agree. Starting a company isn't a glamorous lifestyle that mass media portray it to be. During startup, you spend a lot of time figuring out how to cut down food and housing costs, how we're gonna pay for salaries and office expenses 6 months later, etc.
You have to try EVERYTHING you can, and that's what makes / breaks a startup.
P.S. A lot of people on HN or even many people at Startup School seem to be interested in startups for the "lifestyle" that doesn't exist in real life. In the real world, your company is not Pied Piper.
We're discussing high-skilled immigrants. People trying to reach the southern European countries (especially Italy and Greece) or wanting to work in Qatar are a different kind of immigrants.
I think the most important reason against it is the Internet. It's hard to find even the average U.S. city Internet speed here. Additionally, you won't be able to carry your laptop around the city because there is no concept of "hot spots" (The only "public" hot spot is the Juan Valdez Cafe, which is the Colombian equivalent of Starbucks).
Another major reason is that nearly no one speaks English. If you want to get by, you MUST know how to speak Spanish. This is a huge hurdle, knowing that English is the de facto technology, hacker language.