

Why You Need to be in Silicon Valley  - prakash
http://startupboy.com/2010/01/17/why-you-need-to-be-in-silicon-valley/

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toddml
Tell that to foursquare, tumblr, bit.ly, etsy, gilt, drop.io, aviary, boxee,
meetup, gdgt, hunch, betaworks, hot potato, kickstarter, challengepost, etc,
etc, etc. All New York startups.

~~~
breck
Interesting list.

But, if you summed the market caps of all these companies, what would you get?

My guess is $2-5 billion.

Now Google alone is worth ~$200B.

I agree that you can start a really successful Internet company in NYC. I'd
say any city in the U.S. would do. However, if you have some pathological urge
to build a gigantic Internet company, you absolutely _need_ to be in Silicon
Valley.

~~~
wheels
Like Amazon, Microsoft and Activision Blizard?

Being in the valley is definitely a boon, but calling it a _must_ is silly.
Those guys combined have a market cap of $343 billion. The other end of the
bullshit-spectrum is people pretending that it doesn't make a difference
because they don't want to move.

~~~
nostrademons
Part of the guy's argument (and one I've heard from a few YC founders) is that
with all the other odds that are stacked against you in a startup, do you
really want to take a chance on location too? If it gives you a few percentage
points better chance of success, why not take it? If your startup failed, how
would you feel if it was only because you didn't move to Silicon Valley? Tech
markets are often winner-take-all - if you're a couple percentage points
better than the other guy, you win.

~~~
wheels
That uhm, wasn't _part_ of his argument, that _was_ his argument. And it's a
fair one.

That said, all startup successes are statistical anomalies. The implicit
irrational assumption is that you can beat the odds. Some companies beat
harder odds than others, and being outside the valley does set them up for
that.

There are lots of reasons one might not want or be able to move -- visas,
family, other attachment to a particular place -- and that just has to become
part of the calculation, "This makes it x% more likely that I'm just wasting
my time, but I'm still [irrationally] convinced I can beat those odds."

We know that this works because there are examples of it. We also know that
it's harder because of how relatively few there are.

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jasonlbaptiste
You can succeed ANYWHERE, just like you can succeed regardless of what college
you go to. Silicon Valley is a lot like Harvard in the sense that you afford
yourself with the best possible resources (education, peers, network,
opportunities,etc.), except it's open to everyone. Why not give yourself the
best possible opportunity if you can have it?

~~~
patio11
_Silicon Valley is a lot like Harvard... Why not give yourself the best
possible opportunity if you can have it?_

Crikey, you are nearly giving me flashbacks to high school. I was speaking to
an admissions officer from Harvard and, after answering his questions about
myself, he asked me whether I had a question for him. I asked "Well, you know,
I probably have a bit of ability to pick where I go to school. Why should I go
to Harvard?" I remember his response _exactly_ : "If you can get into Harvard,
why would you go anywhere else?"

That line convinced me not to apply, on the theory I'd have to spend four
years of my life with people who thought like that. (Which, come to think of
it, is one reason I would not love to live in Silicon Valley.)

~~~
paulbaumgart
I see your point, but I don't entirely agree with the analogy; the types of
people who think like the admissions officer you quote are influenced a lot by
the prestige that comes from saying "I went to Harvard." Saying "I live in
Silicon Valley" isn't nearly as impressive to most folks. :-)

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mcav
Living in Silicon Valley can be advantageous.

Never mistake advantage for necessity.

Startups thrive and wither in the Valley, just as they do anywhere else.
Silicon Valley can be a useful card in your hand, but the flop is more
important.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
Pretty much what I was saying above. As a startup, you need to give yourself
as many possible advantages as you can. Silicon Valley lets you do that over
any other geo, hence why it makes the most sense.

~~~
Estragon

      Silicon Valley lets you do that over any other geo, hence
      why it makes the most sense.
    

Other things being equal, of course.

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gamble
What most distinguishes Silicon Valley from elsewhere is how much easier it is
to find investors - not just VC, but angels who are comfortable putting their
money into tech startups.

Startups in the Valley are never more than a couple degrees of separation from
someone who's made money in tech, or has friends who did. There's a level of
comfort with tech startups that doesn't exist elsewhere. Though there may be
plenty of rich people in other areas, they don't have the familiarity with
tech to risk their money on a startup when they could buy real estate or
whatever.

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profquail
I've given this a lot of thought recently, and I _don't_ think you need to be
in Silicon Valley. Rather, I think you need to be surrounded by a lively
startup community, so that you have opportunities to interact with other
startup founders and to learn from each other. The chances of that are much
greater in Silicon Valley, but now that there's little pockets of startup
activity springing up all around the US (and the world, it seems), it's not a
necessity.

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yankeeracer73
It's advantageous to be in Silicon Valley if you're going the VC route. If
you're going to bootstrap for awhile, SV is quite expensive to live and work
in and other cities may actually be a better fit. Agreed though that most
other cities outside NY and Boston, and maybe Austin you're going to feel much
more isolated.

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tptacek
Just think about how much more successful you could have been as an _early
adopter_ of Twitter and Nexus One.

~~~
helwr
think about how much more successful you could have been as a _creator_ of
Twitter or Nexus One

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brown9-2
Caterina Fake on how there are great engineers everywhere:
<http://www.caterina.net/archive/001215.html>

she also touches on some cultural differences between NYC and CA:

 _But what NYC is actually missing is not engineers. In NYC you can find lots
of great engineers, visual designers, and great publishers and contributors to
social media. But in CA I seem to find far more people with multiple skills -
engineers who blog and dabble in design, designers who can do great UI but
also great UX, etc. These multidisciplinary people are the ones who hack
together brilliant new stuff, can innovate across the board, see various
avenues of attack, and are indispensable at startups. It is these hybrid
people that we are always looking for at Hunch and for whatever reason find
them much more often in CA than NYC._

~~~
rdouble
Her article is wrong. NYC actually is missing engineers, or more accurately,
missing internet-software-company-potential-employees. There are quantifiably
more of these people in the Bay Area than there are in NYC. I don't have any
numbers to back this up, but I actually think there are a higher percentage of
"jack of all trades" programmers in NYC. In the Bay Area there are enough
software engineers so that people can get much more specific about their areas
of expertise. In NYC, there are fewer engineers, so people are forced to do a
bit of everything.

Caterina Fake's real complaint is that she can't find one person to do three
jobs at once for her at Hunch, which isn't surprising.

~~~
brown9-2
Are you basing this opinion on experience of working in NYC?

~~~
rdouble
I worked in the Bay Area (SF, Cupertino) for 5 years and now work in
Manhattan.

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marltod
I don't get what makes "startups" different from other businesses. Why is a
"cloud social network" business different from a new innovative retailer. Why
is Wal-mart (started in Alabama), less financially successful than Google
(started in CA).

------
helwr
take a look at facebook, a bostonian startup, i’ve heard they are pretty
successful

~~~
jackowayed
Yes, they _started_ in Boston. But they moved to Palo Alto very, very early on
because that's where their first investor was from.

~~~
helwr
i see 3 underlying assumptions here (both in your reply and in the original
post) 1) You need investors to scale 2) It is easier to find VC money in the
Valley 3) Being an early adopter is a critical factor in startup success. I
would disagree with all of these, i think you need a good product and loyal
customers, everything else including the "networking edge" of being in the
center of the startup universe is secondary in my opinion. Paying customers
will let you scale. It is bad to be an "adopter", make your own thing. And its
easy to find an investor if you have a good product, no matter where you are.
I'd move from Boston to CA just for the sake of windsurfing.

~~~
sreitshamer
Boston's great for windsurfing! Pleasure Bay is convenient. And Kalmus beach
in Hyannis is statistically the windiest place on the east coast.

~~~
helwr
nice! didn't know that. I need to get out of New York more often

