I'm not sure I completely agree. There are economic advantages to being in a city. Lots of friction is reduced when you have easy access to resources, like talented personnel and capital. That said - on a place like Hacker News we talk openly about being able to work from Chiang May (for example) but we don't point out that it would be just as easy to work from somewhere in rural America. If you can build a software company in Portland or Seattle, what's actually stopping you from doing the same in Kansas or Iowa?
Nothing, really. Except business guests really like to have a nearby airport to fly into.
I know this as I used to work for Acxiom, headquartered in Conway, Arkansas. (Population: about 30k then, an hour from the Little Rock airport). It really was a restriction.
