I just came back from SF yesterday, and would certainly recommend dropping everything and going there. Better yet, relocate to Palo Alto. Every other office on University Avenue is a startup and the ones that aren't are either VC firms or gathering haunts like coffeeshops & restaurants. There is a certain electricity in the air. You have to be there to feel it. It is definitely quite surreal, like out of a parallel universe. 20 year olds in jeans & tees & sandals lugging their laptops & iphones, talking animatedly about monads and dependency injection and mock functions, while 60 year old asset managers in black suits and polished shoes walk around in reverence.
I remember thinking that I would have to be an absolute rank idiot if I can't get some bloke to fund me a half mil on a quick-flip consumer web play. On top of that, the guy who was escorting me, a 25 year old hotshot ceo of a stealth startup, pointed out various coffeehouses and said things like "i pitched here", " i raised 200k there" and so on and so forth until it was clear i was a dumb fuck wasting my time in the midwest.
So why am I back to the midwest ? Well, I'm not running a startup myself, atleast not yet :) And when it comes time to do so, I'll rush over there myself.
I guess this is what it was like in the 1960s in Greenwich village in NYC, or Berkeley CA or Woodstock or whereever else. Its just quite surreal & I still haven't gotten over it.
While I respect your opinion, I will say that for someone from the midwest who's never been to SV until yesterday, it does feel like something out of a science fiction movie. Its just so vastly different out here in the midwest. Hell, I can't start a conversation about currying and mapreduce even if I stand in the middle of my university's comp science department and scream. And yet, in SF, the buzz is so palpable it feels outright weird. In the span of a few minutes in which I sipped some coffee, the chap next to me drew up some enterprise routing system for something called postgres. Another bloke gave a demo of some ipad thingy called doctor krono. And a third chap was going on and on about some series A series C thingy.
I dare you to find a place in Chicago where all of these things happen. Or even any of these things happen.
If it makes you feel better, my sense from what I've read is that you're more likely to have success once you get funding. You've been through a lot of pain, and you still believe in yourself and what you're doing. And apparently some very experienced and talented people believe in you too. That says a lot.
As for the "Somebodies", it's not all about past success; there is a lot of luck and flair to it. There are, in any human culture, people who are utterly worthless but can make the magic happen. They don't know much technically, but they're great at using the herd mentality and certain exploitable vulnerabilities in weak minds in order to make other people like them, so getting funding and press comes easily to them. When they actually have to build a product and a team and a company, they're screwed, and they tend to flame out catastrophically. Whereas the people who actually work hard and have real capability will have slower paths to success but, when they get there, they'll be able to stay where they are because they've actually earned it.
It's not unheard of that I'll be hanging out at a cafe in Palo Alto and run into other entrepreneurs I've met before.
I went to a talk at the CS dept at Berkeley and ran into a direct competitor (who actually had my app installed on his phone). Had a great convo with him.
I've also had people come up to me who are in similar spaces who propose a possible collaboration.
So why am I back to the midwest ? Well, I'm not running a startup myself, atleast not yet :) And when it comes time to do so, I'll rush over there myself.
I guess this is what it was like in the 1960s in Greenwich village in NYC, or Berkeley CA or Woodstock or whereever else. Its just quite surreal & I still haven't gotten over it.