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.
How do you build a tech startup outside of Silicon Valley? You start one. Just like any other business.
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...
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.
You can start a tech company anywwhere outside Silicon Valley. The problem is its harder to scale a fast growing company.
Relevant (has also been posted in the past to HN): http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/09/yes-phlboschisea...
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.
I'd suggest you to check social/economic/cultural aspects outside Silicon Valley and then plunge.
Did I miss the 'how to' part of this article? All of the points address the 'why to' question.
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..."