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I'll be moving from Minneapolis to SF soon. Before spending significant time in the Bay Area, I thought that the noise/saturation/and "meh" were a problem, but my experience was different. It's a very supportive environment, with a lot of smart people willing to help out.

There are three problems to the Bay Area:

1. Massive competition for engineering talent. It's probably harder to hire 20 brilliant engineers in SF than in any other major city in North America.

2. Cost. Our burn is increasing by 20%-30% because we're moving.

3. Echo chamber. Ideas tend to get reinforced here. This is often good or neutral; SV will sometimes recognize the significance of something before the rest of the country will. (There are a lot of people who still think Facebook and Twitter are hype and will go bankrupt soon.) But I imagine that there are ideas that make sense in SV that are ultimately bad ideas. And there are ideas that wouldn't resonate in SV that are probably huge opportunities.

This is a little off-topic from the original article, which is fantastic. But circling back: startups are hard, and moving to SV isn't a panacea. It may help a little, but do it with eyes open - because you want to commit to the startup life, and SV is a good place to do that.

All the three problem areas you identified are reasons why I would not move to SF until we are ready. If I see that the idea has traction, and revenue, and I didnt care about finding investors and talent, then I would think of moving to SF. Today, what we have built and is currently building, is still a pet project. We are keenly watching where it goes from here, but simply cannot move mid-sentence to the other coast.

Good luck though. You are much better positioned due to the YC framework and which should open doors far more easily than to a couple of outliers like us.

You're too close to the forest to see the trees. Forget you are a hacker for a minute and think of yourself as say a screenplay writer. Where would you rather be, LA or some hicksville town ? If you are in LA and you bump into some two-bit actress moonlighting in a bar and talk about your script, soon, she'll connect you to someone who knows someone else who knows something who will soon reshape your unsellable script into something that can actually get made and within a span of a few weeks you'll be on a studio lot while they go over the makeup of a costar you only saw on TV until yesterday! Sounds like complete baloney, but that's how it really works!! You can read say William Goldman's book Adventures in Screen Trade where he spells it out in considerable detail - Why professors with PhD in literature are still working on the nth draft of their dream project in the English Dept at Andover while some street smart dropout hacks away at a script on a couch in some dinghy motel on Hollywood Blvd that actually gets made.

It ain't fair but that's how it is.

In you go to SF with your pet project which has no traction and revenue, it will suddenly have traction and revenue. Don't ask me how. It isn't exactly logical. Things happen. You'll meet people who'll tell you if only you change this feature and add that feature and do this and not that you'll have a saleable proposition. So you'll say what the hell and give it a shot and soon it becomes so! Its just not rational, and as a coder and mathematician I hate irrationality just as much as you. But that's how it is. Whereas with no such brutal feedback, you can labor away at some precious project until it becomes larger than life and super-brittle and soon even you don't want to touch it cause who knows which module will break which other module, and then you go looking for customers and nobody really wants it cause its gotten way too complex for anybody to decipher.

I've heard ideas that are so lame ( an app that counts ONE TWO THREE while you do pushups. Really! Yeah, that's got funding to the tune of a couple mil! ) your 3 year old could have come up with it. So its not the traction, framework, revenue model etc. Its just finetuning an idea to the point where it becomes saleable. And for whatever reason, perhaps because its in their DNA, SV seems to have the sort of people who actually give you a listen and then tell you exactly how to go about it. They actually give a damn! If you have an idea, I think you should atleast spend 1-2 weeks in SV trying to pitch before writing it off as a futile exercise. Nothing to lose, everything to gain.

I agree that its better to be in LA than in some podunk town working on a script if you wanted a movie to be made. Because movie making has not exactly been democratized to the extent that software development and creating businesses has been.

However, if what I have is a piss poor idea that has not won over customers, has no traction or revenue, then I dont think thats a problem a million dollar can solve. It will just be someone else's money that I will end up losing over a terrible idea. I would rather fail with this idea where I am now, than work on it (with someone else's money) for the next year and then still fail.

The Valley entices everyone to go there. I both drank the koolaid in 99 and ran for cover in the wake of the dotcom crash. Entrepreneurs who persevered were the ones who coupled the right ideas with a sense of commitment bordering on the insane. Thats what I want to emulate. That, to me is more tangible than a million dollars.

You missed the parent's point. It's not the money of Silicon Valley that helps you, it's the constant brainstorming of ideas. You will be exposed to so much collective experience that your product will improve. On the surface, it will seem to be magic, since really it's the same idea you had when you lived in the middle of nowhere.

Except you benefit from talking to people with deep experience. When someone here tells you "have you tried putting this button on that page?", it's because they did it and it doubled your traffic. Experience of what works and what doesn't circulates so much faster in Silicon Valley.

Why would you want to be disconnected from the flow of ideas? If you think online forums are a substitute, they are, but with a time delay.

Completely agree. I am in the same boat as a Canadian not wanting to move to the states. While it may be true that many investors will rule you out based on location; my firm belief is that first time entrepreneurs should spend their time acquiring customers, not investors.

Customers generally don't mind if you're not in the valley (although it is true that if your product is built for tech oriented people the bay area may be a high customer saturation zone.)

It matters to customers who are themselves in the valley, like me. I know the teams behind most of the products and web services I use, and it matters that I know who to call when something doesn't work. If customers in the tech world are important to you, you should be where you can go meet them for coffee.

It's not just for investors. It's much harder to exit to a US acquirer if your tax/legal structure is that of another country. Due diligence is longer and more expensive and I have heard of cases where UK companies have been skipped due to potential issues of integrating founders re immigration and IP laws.

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.

I've lived there for several years, and in no way do I identify with this post. Not even close.

It is good to be optimistic, but I'd hate for people to get this impression that the streets are paved with gold and make some really poor decisions.

Exactly, which is why I wrote this post. There is a lot of cool stuff happening here, and a lot of money floating around, but nothing comes easy.

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.

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.

> for something called postgres.

> And a third chap was going on and on about some series A series C thingy.

Ok, this has to be a subtle troll...

This is generally quite true.

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.

Most people I meet who visit SF to do a little recon end up deciding to move here permanently because the environment is so great and supportive for entrepreneurs.