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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

A competing hypothesis is that YC's success is tied to a geographical location.

If PG and Jessica were the "key" you could send them to Pittsburgh, Berlin, or Dakar and they could do the the same.

For a long time communities around the world have been asking YC to expand their business to new geographies. Except for China it has always been "talking to the hand". China didn't turn out well.

YC can't have it both ways: "we can only function in one place" and "we have some value apart from being in that one sacred place". COVID-19 may be changing this, but the contradiction is one for YC to resolve. The rest of us have to recognize a gap between what they have done (beliefs that seem to be implicit in their behavior) and what they say ("the secret to our success is...")

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That's kind of a weird take. The vast majority of startup funding happens in the SF bay area. It is true that YC wouldn't have worked in another city (they did move it from Boston after all), but that's unrelated to PG and Jessica's efforts.

If what you're doing is giving people credibility in an _existing_ investor ecosystem, you can't just ... create a new investor ecosystem somewhere else.

It's a problem. A big problem.

If you look at "racism" and other forms of inequality that are intractable in the US and other countries you find it can understood in terms of "placism".

(e.g. "busing" as an answer to school inequality and the resulting backlash; if minorities lived in as a diverse set of places as white people did in the US the Democrats would have 58+ seats in the Senate, etc.)

Sam could prove me wrong by sending the PG/Jessica combo to another place (Fresno, LA, Las Vegas, Dublin, Edingburgh, ...) and have them accomplish something. People have been asking for this for years but we've always heard that it's not negotiable, YC is tied to a sacred patch of land, etc.

Someone who shows that "sacred land is everything" by their behavior is going to inevitable sound disingenuous when they try to distill universal principles out of the YC experience.

It's about the community, not the land.

I expect you could relocate PG and Jessica and have similar results.

The trick is that you'd need to also transplant a huge social circle and startup-friendly infrastructure.

Including unintuitive things like a large collection of small café and independent restaurant owners.

Paul touched on this a bit in his writings on making cities into startup hubs:

http://paulgraham.com/pgh.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

Outlier successes are rarely because of one factor.

YC was started in Boston and worked well there. They moved to the SFBA because they wanted to scale it up and knew if they didn't, someone else would do there.

Had they stayed in Boston, it likely would've continued to be successful but would not have had the enormous impact it has had.

> YC was started in Boston and worked well there.

I would actually argue that this was critical.

Boston (and East Coast in general) at that point was a closed ecosystem that had pent up startup founders and no real release valve for those same founders.

That gave YC a significant amount of traction before having to scale out.

Silicon Valley isn't really a place. Plenty of people come here for a "tour", but there isn't actually a single place in the bay area you can visit to see Silicon Valley in action.

(Before Covid) It just has a high density of three groups of people that you need for a startup ecosystem. Founders, Students, and Investors. It's actually the high density network of people interested in the same thing.

YC's geographic location is a proxy for this high density network. This high density network was a necessary, but not sufficient condition for YC's success today at the time the decision was made. The post is about what else PG and Jessica added on top of the necessary conditions.

Just as you can't pull a startup out of a market that doesn't want it, you can't pull an accelerator out of a city that doesn't have the network for it.

To your point, I always thought of Red Rock and Coupa as the most physical manifestations of Silicon Valley, since you can see a bunch of teams brainstorming, others pitching VCs, etc. The personification of the network you're talking about. But yeah, SV the place is mostly boring suburban and office park sprawl.

Yeah, I guess it's as close as you can get, even though people come here for tours of facebook or google.

You can usually tell who the investors are and who the founders are at Red Rock or Coupa. The one leaning back is the investor, usually.

Paul told me directly back in 2009 that YC had to be in SV and he had a bunch of reasons for it. Whether those reasons are still true today could be debated, but it was clear to him, at least that location mattered. Like most things it's a combination of factors that give the best result.

To refine what others have been pointing out: YC being based in the Valley wasn't inevitable, it was a deliberate decision on the part of the founders.

So yes, right place at the right time, as in, the founders said "this looks like the right time to start an incubator, and we think we have the right plan. What's the right place? let's go there".

They could have been wrong about any of those three things, but they weren't. Luck is still a component, but then, isn't it always?

> A competing hypothesis is that YC's success is tied to a geographical location.

If this is true why haven't there been other comparably successful incubators/accelerators based in California?

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