Teleport: Startup Cities — Discover and budget your next move to 100+ startup cities.

Hehe, that essay alone was a big reason @balajis became a co-founder of @TeleportInc with us :) Love what @levelsio especially, and many other smart people are doing in the digital nomad movement. I think we complement each-other well and as a result of all the activities around housing, travel, tools, etc the entire space of location independent people will just grow, as you say. At Teleport we have positioned our value prop more to the startup people in broader sense, not just the set who self-identify by being constantly on the move. E.g if you are a founder of a distributed team in 3 offices, then you need to figure out how you split your time between them (and then probably somewhere else in addition). Or if you are a software engineer who has an offer from London and another one from Google in Mountain View, how do you actually figure out where the math works for you? These people might not even think they are nomads, but location matters to their success and happiness, and we will help them figure it out. As a result of that positioning nuance, the first 100 cities you see on Teleport are the biggest and busiest startup migration hubs, not necessarily the pleasant tropical hideouts for individual nomads. And you will probably see us looking more at how groups form and coordinate over time. Data wise we're at 100+ layers in the first release, coming from a few dozen sources. This has actually been quite complex engineering in itself - which APIs to plug into, what to scrape, how to normalize to achieve comparability across the world, which cities can we cover with granular details (say salaries from AngelList job offers or fresh rent predictions based on local apartment rental listings of last 2 weeks) and where do we have to deduct more generic estimates on easily available macro data.

thanks, @dswiese! On mobile first: our first product, https://bayarea.teleport.org local search was built web first. We believe it works very well for full screen, map-centric experiences, and lends itself to integrations and deep linking (see for example https://bayarea.teleport.org/inc... on pre-filled queries). The downside of the web experience was that it feels very transactional, 1) need to move, 2) run a search on Teleport. Input-output. Done. Now, with the global cities app we want to move towards more ambient, always-with-you experience, where you keep improving your profile over time, and Teleport keeps running queries in the background and occasionally pops up with things you should know - depending how your location, environments, etc change. We also found that maps are less crucial in high level international search. The resulting modality is better fit for mobile, we believe and have heard from our users who are always on the move. That all said, we shall bring some parts of the experience back to the web where they make more sense. On WorkFrom: we are in touch with @workfromco guys and they have been very kind to let us play with their APIs. now comparing notes on data coverage.

@workfromco @seikatsu That all makes sense. thanks for the response! yeah the guys from workfrom are great. and I gotta support my local PDX startups.