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The main reason to build outside of silicon valley-- less people poaching your employees, yes, but more importantly: You don't have the bad advice constantly being forced on you. in SV, its like being in a bar full of hot chicks who are constantly coming on to you, and telling you that they will sleep with you, if only you'll get a vasectamy, shave your ballsack, take female hormones, grow your hair out, start dressing in womens clothes, etc-- where each time you do something to please one of them they have another suggestion and two more show up with completely different suggestions. You can never make them happy and none of them will sleep with you, until you have proven yourself to be completely desperate, and wrapped around your finger. So you ultimately end up with an ugly one after being teased by hot chicks to the point of total desperation. Then when they do sleep with you, you find out they have herpes, and a few days later, they start sleeping with your best friend instead and tell you that you have to stop going to bars, or they will make sure you never get laid again. In the end you're screwed, diseased and have wasted several years trying to get laid when you should have been trying to build your business. Only, when I talk about women here I'm talking about VCs and when I talk about changing you I'm talking about really bad business advice. You're left with the choice of running your company into the ground based on their bad advice, or being pushed out of your own company because you wouldn't destroy it for them. No VC realizes that they are incompetent at business and giving their clients bad advice-- the best you can hope for is one that is so busy they aren't paying attention to you. People say you just need to find a good VC-- but the reality is, VCs are like politicians: there are no good ones. If they were decent people they wouldn't be in that line of work. (Not that there's anything wrong with venture investing, just the way its practiced in Silicon Valley is death to high tech startups.) Unless you're a MBA with a marketing focus and cant' write code to save your life, and your only way to make it big is to latch onto some actually talented people and od the high burn rate high profile startup thing-- the Valley is the last place you want to go. |
You need roughly as much money to do a given startup outside the valley as in it. That means you're roughly as beholden to investors no matter where you are. And stupid as many SV investors are, they are on average smarter than those outside it.