A city that says yes

Every young founder hears the same advice eventually: get to San Francisco, because that's where the money is. Maybe. I'm 16, I live in San Antonio, and I've come around to a different view. For a first company, a city that says yes is worth more than a city with more money.

Here's what yes looks like in practice. Geekdom ran a pitch competition during San Antonio Startup Week that a high schooler could actually enter. So I entered, and I won $1,000. Nobody checked my age at the door and decided the whole thing was cute. The pitch got judged like any other pitch.

It kept happening. LaunchSA gave Lumora, my sleep company, a table. St. Mary's University runs a summer entrepreneurship academy for high schoolers at the Greehey School of Business, and I spent part of a summer there studying with Dr. Sergio Palacios. KSAT12 put a student campaign on morning TV. None of these people had to take a teenager seriously. They did anyway.

The scene here is small, and small turns out to be the point. Show up twice and you're a regular, and regulars get introduced to the next person. (In a bigger city I'd still be figuring out which line to stand in.)

The strongest evidence is a sentence I never heard. Nobody in San Antonio told me to come back when I'm older. That line is the default answer to teenagers almost everywhere, the polite version of no, and I stayed braced for it. It never came. Eventually I stopped bracing and got back to work.

To be clear, the city doesn't do the work for you. Nobody at Geekdom is writing my cold emails. What San Antonio gives you is at-bats, and at 16 that's the whole game.

So no, I'm not moving to San Francisco for my first company. Startup Week will come back around, and I'll be at Geekdom when it does.