Should you move your startup to the Valley? | Hacker News Reader

Should you move your startup to the Valley?

tonywright.com

10 pointscalvin3 comments

<snip>The bottom line? It’s hard to quantify the COST of moving to a startup (months of distraction, expense, stress, loss of social network, etc)</snip>

The cost / benefit thing isn't entirely monetary.

It's one of those things where if you're crazy enough to just do it (move), it's something you can look back on and say "glad I did." At least in my experience it has been.

It's also one of those things where if you really don't have much to "lose," there's a lot of room for gain. Moving, yeah, expensive. Getting robbed, yeah, sucks. Cost of living, yeah, ridiculous.

But, I've viewed the experience as an extremely valuable extension of my University education. I've learned a lot: much more than I thought possible from the random spattering of techie-events I've attended. OSMCS 2007 is pretty much the reason I implemented Drupal on my site. :) And the social network here really is great.

So while I'm not endorsing a full-fledged "move" to SV for startuppers, it is the 21st Century. Travel. Experience life while you're young and can have fun.

After I founded my LLC, I "moved" it from Arizona to Utah (very temporary stopover there) to Cali in its first year. The portable nature of a web business has been one of the greatest things about the work. So my advice is: either go where you can participate in the synergy or go out and create some on your own.

It seems like there are some numbers there but w/o some key intersections.

For example CA is NOT just silicon valley, there's a large startup community in LA. Does the LA ventures bring SV down for the CA totals?

Also it would be interesting to also cross reference this with size of acquisition. Are acquisition's larger in SV?

Finally from looking at these it also appears that being in some sort of tech corridor is beneficial.

Same list sorted by acquisition rate.

The top 8 or so have large tech areas, VA and MD I'm assuming are going to be more gov't and defense related and then a huge decline as you get into the sticks.

WA 8.20%

CA 6.90%

NJ 6.60%

TX 5.90%

CO 5.30%

MA 5.20%

IL 5.00%

NY 4.90%

VA 4.30%

MD 4.30%

GA 1.70%

PA 1.50%

AZ 1.30%

FL 1.20%

NC 1.20%

So it looks like there is at least some value in being in tech related areas.

I think what's important to remember too is that investment flows like water in the Valley. In places like Texas for example, we're not that lucky so 'startups' (which half likely never make it into CrunchBase), typically turn into very profitable small web-businesses because we don't have the same access to capital to go after the 'long tail'. We're forced to find revenue early, often at the expense of rapid & insane growth that results in big liquidity events. (usually b/c consumer web guys here are bootstrapping or operating on small angel money)

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