Another perspective on “anywhere but Silicon Valley”
September 11th, 2008 by Benjamin KuoHoward Anderson, a venture capitalist at Battery Ventures and a professor at MIT, has an interesting post on GigaOM about 5 Reasons To Move Your Startup Out of Silicon Valley.
Anderson doesn’t mention Southern California–maybe because we keep beating New England in venture funding, or because his first point–that cities where the weather sucks are good for keeping people at work–doesn’t apply. But, he does make a good point:
All tech startups need just a few ingredients to germinate: sophisticated money; first-rate technology universities; and a few template successes (a Google or a Facebook, and so on) to encourage founders to get off their duffs.
Here’s in Southern California, that first-rate sophisticated money includes both a good pool of venture investors (not to mention lots of transitory money from Sand Hill Road); lots of technology universities (Caltech, UCLA, USC, UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine, UC San Diego, Harvey Mudd, etc. etc.); and lots of “template successes” over the years (Qualcomm, Broadcom, MySpace, Overture, LowermyBills, Pricegrabber, JAMDAT, Proflowers, and literally hundreds of others).
