Silicon Valley is coming back strong and here's why

alex.posterous.com

22 points·rantfoil··6 comments

The irony is a lot of the points he makes are reasons to stay out of Silicon Valley. For example, he cites the "death" of VC money and how it's cheaper than ever to start a company. But proximity to VCs was one of the big reasons to move your company to the Valley and starting a company isn't that cheap if you're paying high rent for both home and office space.

Other than that the other points seem pretty superficial ("it's not cool to work for a big company", "SV entrepreneurs are getting really good").

Indeed, this seems like a list of reasons why software companies will come back strong.

I believe he said dearth of VC money and that it's not as big a problem as the media makes it out to be because it's much cheaper to start a company these days. High rent isn't a big problem either, because startups can work out of a tiny shared apartment and use cloud infrastructure and broadband instead of leasing expensive office space with a T1 and a server room.

Those costs that you do have, however, are almost certainly higher in the bay area.

That is definitely true, but it can be worth it to be near VC and a large pool of talented people. I could start a company in Phoenix, AZ for pennies on the dollar vs Silicon Valley, but there would be virtually no VC and far fewer programmers (sorry Phoenix!).

I really wish there were fewer, smarmy, uninformed, superficial blog posts coming out of Silicon Valley. Then I'd be more inclined to agree with this post. Just to pick on one point (no. 2):

"People have figured out SOX just means companies should go the acquisition route. SV has adjusted to the idea of never IPOing"

As an alternative, I'd suggest that in fact the IPO window is suddenly there, which lifts all boats, including the acquisition boat. Thank you, OPEN.

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