About a month ago, I came across a great post by Paul Graham that discussed great cities and how their culture affects the ambitions of the people within them.

Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.

- New York tells you, above all: you should make more money.
- What I like about Cambridge is that the message there is: you should be smarter.
- As much as they respect brains in Silicon Valley, the message the Valley sends is: you should be more powerful.

Here in Boulder I would say that the resounding message is: you should be more healthy. It’s apparent everywhere you look; people are active, they eat healthy, and they have a keen focus on sustainability. But below the surface I think there is another message that is equally powerful among a smaller subset of Boulderites. Within the tech/startup community there is a clear sense that you should be more collaborative. The Foodzie team has been in Boulder for only a month, but already it’s clear how willing the people in this community are to help.

How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you’d be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time.

No matter how determined you are, it’s hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It’s not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.

When I read this, I instantly began thinking about our transition from Greensboro, North Carolina to Boulder, Colorado. Looking back on our time in Greensboro, I can’t say that I’m entirely sure what the message was, or even that there was one. As an early-stage tech startup we felt alone, and although we closely followed and reached out to founders, bloggers, and other techie-types in San Francisco, Boulder, and New York we still felt like a silo. We realized that although we were surrounded by many great people, very few actually shared our interests or cared about the things that we were passionate about.

So here we are in Boulder, Colorado… a hotbed of natural and organic foods, and one of the the most collaborative and exciting places for a young, tech startup. There’s no way to tell what the future holds, but we think we’ve found the right place for Foodzie.