A new app called Teleport is trying to tell startup people the best places across the world for them to set up shop.
The problem solved by Teleport is simple, says co-founder and CEO Sten Tamkivi, who was previously an early executive hire at Skype and most recently an entreprenuer in residence at prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
"It used to be that you had to move to a place if you want a job in that place," Tamkivi says.
Now, since technology like Slack, GoToMeeting, and Skype makes it so easy to work anywhere, and since the modern startup lifestyle requires so much travel to customers across the country and the globe, you don't have to physically be located anywhere you don't want to be.
But figuring out the right city to start up a business takes a combination of factors. Where's your family based? What are your hobbies and interests? Where are your ideal customers? What are the costs of living in a new city? How friendly are local regulations to the business you're trying to build?
Teleport
"Those decisions are increasingly complicated," Tamkivi says.
"Top 50 Cities" lists in travel and business magazines only take you so far, since they don't take into account your particular circumstances.
It's especially important if you're trying to build a business without a huge amount of cash to start with - Tamkivi says that here in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Teleport is based, a 30-minute change of commute can save you $25,000 a year.
So what Teleport does is crunch all kinds of census data, salary data, quality-of-life survey data, studies on entrepreneur-friendliness , and as much other stuff as it can get its hands on from all 100-plus target cities, and put it all behind a slick iOS and Android app that lets the user choose what's important for them.
That includes weather data, quality of Internet, and travel times to other cities you need to frequent, as well as the obvious stuff.It even pulls in data from places like Airbnb to tell you the cost of spending, say, two months a year in another city for the occassional visit with investors.
"It's a marketplace between cities and talent," Tamkivi says.
While it's optimized for entrepreneur folks who want to find places where rent is cheap and affordable talent is plentiful (unlike San Francsico), it goes the other way, too: Developers and other tech industry types can find the centers where people are hiring at the salaries they want, across the globe.
Local governments in places like Estonia and Finland are even working with Teleport to hype themselves up as progressive, startup-friendly places to launch a tech company.
And if you need help actually making the jump, Teleport actually employs "scouts" in select destination cities whose job it is to do the legwork and help you make the decision on whether or not that locale is for your business.
The Teleport team first noticed the problem during their time at Andreessen Horowitz: Tamkivi had been reflecting on how hard it was to keep moving around (he's lived in places like London, Singapore, and now Palo Alto).
He reconnected while at Andreessen Horowitz with former Skype AI researcher Silver Keskküla, who had similar experiences with his own constant stints at universities across the globe. Andreessen Horowitz general partner Balaji Srinivasan saw value in the vision and joined as a co-founder himself.
After a seed investment from Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Seedcamp, and other investors and Teleport was officially founded this time last year. In fact, tomorrow, April 1st, is the company's one-year anniversary.
In the future, the company is going to experiment with multiple models for making money, including selling reports based on its data. But for now, it just wants to get up and running.
But today, the company is living the multiple-cities lifestyle it's pushing: Teleport has 8 employees across 5 countries, from Estonia to London to Germany. In fact, co-founder Keskküla moved to Columbia recently "just for the fun of it," Tamkivi says.
Disclosure: Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, is an investor in Business Insider.