How to build a tech startup outside of Silicon Valley

http://venturebeat.com/2011/01/11/how-to-build-a-tech-startup-outside-of-silicon-valley/

by obsaysditto • 16 years ago

33 13 16 years ago

Relevant (has also been posted in the past to HN): http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/09/yes-phlboschisea...

mbertrand• 16 years ago

Couldn't agree more. While Silicon Valley still has the upper hand on available talent, capital etc. there is steep competition for all of it.

JoeAltmaier• 16 years ago

Yes, there's more angel money these days but the investors outside tech hubs are naieve. They have to be educated, they have a long tedious investment cycle, the friction is just enormous.

lincolnpark• 16 years ago

You can start a tech company anywwhere outside Silicon Valley. The problem is its harder to scale a fast growing company.

corp• 16 years ago

Agree. And the articles refers to other emerging tech entrpreneurship hubs (secondary markets) that make it possible to start a company and take advantage of the established ecosystems.

If you are not in a city where such ecosystem exists, you could probably start building a prototype there but as soon as you need to scale up (financially, hiring, or other) you will probably need to start networking or moving a city that has one.

pchristensen• 16 years ago

Yes. Mark Suster has said that you can grow to ~100-200 engineers in LA but it would be hard to go much beyond that. Groupon can hire all the writers and salespeople they need in Chicago but they opened a development office in Palo Alto to get access to a bigger developer pool.

drndown2007• 16 years ago

I'd love to know what the success and failure percentages are for Silicon Valley startups. I'm sure there are overall higher successes in raw numbers, but in per-VC dollar invested, or per-developer capita, I'm skeptical.

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like most of the startups I hear about these days are just CRUD apps aimed at some social niche. Those can be built anywhere, and don't require rockstar programmers.

thewordpainter• 16 years ago

I think it's important to note that david brussin's thoughts are primarily geared towards secondary markets. As an entrepreneur who runs a startup out of a quarternary market (athens, ga), i can assure you that we would be benefitting a lot more from having the valley resources at our disposal.

i tend to make a trip to atlanta (secondary?) every week, but the resources only stretch so far. atlanta may have a VC presence, but the angels are few & far between.

i'd also say that the biggest problem with most secondary markets is they don't cover the entire gamut of industries. talking from my own experience, atlanta is a B2B town with a heavy emphasis on areas like security. if you're running a B2C startup (like we are at http://gorankem.com), i'd almost encourage the entrepreneur to not waste any time seeking money in GA.

overall, the biggest advantage the valley has over all the other markets is the connections. personally, i could deal with the competition for talent because i like to think that we have a stronger product. i shake my head at some of the ideas getting funded.

the wisdom in the tech community that is being transferred in SF on a daily basis cannot be touched.

for that reason & many more, if anybody has a couch to sleep on come this summer, i may be looking for one...

bhousel• 16 years ago

Offtopic, but I hate this trend of articles titled 'How to..." where the article don't actually tell you how to do anything. It seems like there have been a lot of these articles lately. Is it an SEO thing?

Another noiseword title I've learned to avoid is, "What we learned from..."

iamdave• 16 years ago

I like your phrase 'noiseword', as it sums up a lot of the internet in the last few months. Sites like eHow and other content farms are destroying search IMO by constantly producing homogenized 'how to' articles with no real content.

Sort of like filling up on bread. It very well may be an SEO thing.

jasonfried• 16 years ago

How do you build a tech startup outside of Silicon Valley? You start one. Just like any other business.

acconrad• 16 years ago

I was going to say "with a computer" but you pretty much drove the point home.

known• 16 years ago

I'd suggest you to check social/economic/cultural aspects outside Silicon Valley and then plunge.

How to build a tech startup outside of Silicon Valley

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