Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Insights: Why Your Next Startup Doesn't Need to be in Silicon Valley
For our Insights and Opinions section today, Erik Caso, CEO and founder of San Diego-based Entangled Media--the maker of personal media streaming platform younity, tells us why your next startup doesn't need to be in Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley, or rather the Bay Area, is the undisputed center of the tech universe. Whether it's experienced labor, capital or services, the density of these startup factors is simply unrivaled anywhere in the world. Yet there is an obvious trend of companies leaving or not moving to the Bay Area to establish themselves. Regions all around the US are developing burgeoning tech ecosystems. As someone who has done this in southern California, a couple of times, I can tell you about the regular stories about investors passing on investment unless you move north or the ones that invest telling you that within the next two rounds you'll actually make the move voluntarily – where else can you scale meaningfully than the Bay Area? "Need to ramp up 300 people, with a 30-person business development team that knows your market? You can only do that in the Bay Area," so I've been told.
While some of my friends/colleagues have made the move, I've noticed more and more of them simply disregard the notion that the Bay Area is where you need to be - great companies have been started all around the world. (More...)
Read all of Erik's article, Why Your Next Startup Doesn't Need to be in Silicon Valley.