Our dev team is based in Cape Town, but our head office, including sales and marketing, is moving to Silicon Valley (San Francisco to be specific). Mark Shuttleworth was the exception to the rule - if you're not in Silicon Valley you're limiting the odds of success. Anyone else here in Cape Town at the moment?
Ja, UCT B.Bus.Sci first year! I agree re: Silicon Valley, everything from coding resources to VC is restricted here, and the fact that there seem to be only a few of us registered on news.YC is in itself indicative of the different environemnt here. Vinny Lingham and Eric Edelstein seem keen to start some sort of Angel Investing scheme, but I can't see anything ever really equating to the environment in California. As PG says "places that aren't startup hubs are toxic to startups. You can tell that from indirect evidence. You can tell how hard it must be to start a startup in Houston or Chicago or Miami from the microscopically small number, per capita, that succeed there." I'm going to apply to YC for Jan 2009, will hopefully have some cool stuff under the belt by then!
I can assure you though, that Cape Town is years ahead of Pretoria.