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Comment by evgen | Hacker News Reader

Five reasons this VC is full of it and you should stay in the valley:

1: The weather is great and winter is a place on the Nevada/California border you go visit. People don't translate frustration with shitty weather into frustration at work.

2: There is not better place to recruit than the valley. End. Of. Story.

3: More VCs and better options if you decide to cut out the maze bullshit and just head for the goal. You won't spend your time groveling for intros to the few Boston VCs who do not have their heads firmly wedged up their ass.

4: Exit is an option. Unlike Boston, companies in the valley occasionally get bought.

5: There are academics available as board members and even (gasp) real net-savvy business execs who have been through three or four bubbles and can provide you with more than an ivory-tower viewpoint.

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I'm not really sure what you're getting at with your retort.

1. The claim was that in crappier weather people tend to stay in and work instead of lounging about in the sun. That's not to say that this is true, but simply stating that SV has good weather is missing the point.

2. Just because there are lots of people in the Valley to recruit doesn't mean they are automatically better than workers from elsewhere. The ease at which you can fill your company with seemingly qualified people is not tied with how good of a product of how successful a company will be. The article makes a good point about ship jumping and spiking salaries.

3. Your again confusing quantity with quality. You'll still be groveling to get a chance to present at any of the top level VC's in SV and since there are a lot more presentations being made, the chances that they've seen same idea you're trying to present three times already that week means you'll still likely have to settle with the bottom of the VC pile. That is unless you have a good idea and a good presentation in which case top VC's in Boston, Tel Aviv or any other place would be just as happy to have you. This is all besides the fact that plenty of successful startups bootstrapped themselves to success.

4. A startup does not need to 'Exit' in order to be successful. Not all startups have the goal of hoping that Google/MS/Yahoo/Ebay will one day look down pick them as the prettiest girl at the dance, some startups want to be the ones doing the picking and plenty are fine just making decent money doing something they love. A narrow focus of an Exit only strategy puts many startups in an early grave despite good chances of becoming successful in other ways.

5. Good board members can be found just about anywhere on the planet and with teleconferencing technology as it is now, being located in the same city as every board member is not necessary and actually might be a hindrance. Besides that, I'm not quite sure what three other bubbles happened in SV other than the Dot Com one?

There are plenty of good reasons to startup in SV, but that don't make it the only place where a startup can be successful.

I love these kinds of retorts-to-the retorts. Let's start.

1. Yeah, he didn't miss the point though. Better weather means people take good weather for granted, and don't get all gah-gah about it. The keep working, even on sunny days. Californians on the beach? Sure, there are a few, but mostly in the dreams of people who don't live here.

2. The claim was that there are lots of better people. You're right, they aren't automatically better (did he say that?). But there certainly are a lot of great ones, who didn't get that way automatically, but did so with training and experience and exposure.

3. More options is generally not a bad thing. Someone even won a Nobel prize for showing that to be true. Who are we to argue with a Nobel prize winner?

4. Exit is an option. Again, options are good. Where did the guy say you "need" an exit to be successful? I missed that part. Oh, and speaking of prettiest girls at the dance, in Silicon Valley, well, actually, never mind, but trust me, it is just a nice part of the country.

5. Again, I missed the part where she/he said it is the "only" place where a startup can be successful. Good board members can be found anywhere, but they can be found here more often, in greater numbers, through more contacts, with a greater diversity of interests. And teleconferencing works here, too!

6. It's in the Bay Area, which is actually kind of OK in terms of attracting people. Hope the link works. To be fair, it's not a picture of Silicon Valley proper, but of the Bay Area, of which Silicon Valley is a part:

http://flickr.com/photos/22779657@N00/1697466173/sizes/l/in/...

4. Companies in Boston exit plenty of times too. Equallogic just got bought by Dell for $1.4B. Avici went public; my friend's dad was a cofounder there, and cashed out his stock in 2000 right before the market tanked. Akamai is also public. Avid is public. CCBN was bought for $50M by Thompson Financial. My math teacher started a company and got bought out for a few decamillions after 3-4 years.

You just don't hear about the acquisitions & IPOs because they aren't consumer Internet companies. They happen though, and they're for just as much money - or sometimes more - than their SV equivalents.

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