The whole Silicon Valley advantage is fading. I went there back in 1997 when it was very hard to find technical jobs in my country (Canada) because a lot of those kinds of jobs gravitated to head office cities for large companies, and many Canadian companies were subsidiaries of large American companies. In Silicon Valley, I learned that most startups fail or are acquired within in a year or so. It's like a lottery.…
I always find it interesting how a company that takes off and IPOs outside SV seems to gain almost no attention even when they have profits that would dwarf most of the hot startups. I work down the street from a startup that IPO'd a couple years ago for hundreds of millions, does double digits of daily trading on the NASDAQ, and seemingly nobody has heard of. Instagram selling for a billion is cool and all, but ther…
Not having ever founded a company I could be extremely wrong here but my take is that SF could be detrimental to certain startups.. If you have $x saved up to support you while you start a company it's going to last you much longer in basically any other city in the country other than perhaps Manhattan. At that point you basically have to decide which is going to be more of a factor in your success, extra time with which to build your product or physical proximity to an entrepreneurial community? Of course there's no one right answer, but I suspect that for many web-based startups the extra time and savings would be more important than the surrounding environment.