Is the Valley Really The Place to Be ?

Obviously many of us debate continually the ins and outs of startups and how we wish this area were a bit more “valley like”.  Did any of us ever think that folks on the west coast thought “I wish the valley was more like .. (fill in the blank)?”  I didn’t, never did, and I still haven’t but I did see a great piece on the topic over at the 37Signals blog.  It was a post titled “Are You Sure You Want to be in San Francisco ?”

The post’s author, David, made some great points bout why the valley just might not be the place to be if your a startup. He says

If you’re looking to build the next web 2.0 social media eyeball-collecting application, don’t want to worry about boring details like revenues, and hope to either flip to Google for an early $20 million or get that Facebook billion-dollar valuation, the Bay area is exactly where you want to be.

but he also does well to make the counter point that

The flush availability of other people’s money is simply too tempting. When you’re not spending your own money, it’s easy to splash on a big open office on day one, a staff of 10+ in no time, and have few worries about paying the bills on the 1st of the month. It takes away much of the urgency to make money that I think is critical to build sustainable businesses. It gives you too many resources to be satisfied building simple tools for niche markets. Everything becomes about catching that huge wave.

He also shows that hiring and retaining talent is next to impossible.  The programmers and designers and more about jumping from company to company every 6-18 months in search of the BIG payoff.
I think this is where in these uncertain times, areas like ours in DC have an advantage.  First of all, the area is well insulated by numerous government jobs and contracts and second as we spoke in our previous post the area’s startups perhaps have better business models based upon more fundamental economic principles.  It may not be “exciting” but they do say the slow and steady wins the race.  So maybe we should not look to make this like the valley, rather build the example that in the future that valley will want to emulate.

So in conclusion, I could not say it better than David did, so I will end in his words

So stop worrying to much about where you are and start worrying about how you’re going to make your business succeed the old fashion way: Through having a better product than the competition that people are willing to pay for.