Worth observing that for all the excitement about the recent crop of billion-dollar Silicon Valley startups, SoftLayer is based in Dallas, TX (and founded only in 2005).

I suspect, and this will be easy enough to prove one way or the other after a few years so feel free to call me on it, that we'll see a disproportionate number of successful exits come from /outside/ the valley.

My gut tells me that high-cost of living and inter-company cannibalization are going to make it difficult for companies to sustain long-term growth in the Bay Area (once the data-skewing, one-off, billion-dollar Instagram-esque deals are factored out over time).

Whereas talent will tend to stick to the one or two success stories in less saturated geographies, adding a natural doubling down effect when something is working out well. Sort of a healthy survivorship bias, in a good way.

Edit: And while two anecdotes are still hardly data, I just now noticed that Indianapolis, Indiana based ExactTarget sold today for $2.5B.