Where would you start one then?
I don't think there is universal answer. It depends a lot on your personal situation (connections/resources available/citizenship/lifestyle preferences).
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20160609/BLOGS11/1606...
> Chicago had just 31 total exits during the period, equal to Raleigh. Austin, Texas, had 86; Washington, D.C., saw 87; New York posted 98; and the San Francisco Bay Area recorded 613. While Chicago had 14 deals that produced returns of more than 10-fold, San Francisco had 153 such deals.
There's a TVM calculation in there, to normalize the dollars you got paid on exit to the years that you did the work. And there's an opportunity cost for not being a salaried employee of an existing business while your were building your new business.
In the end, you probably want to reduce it to $X/week, run the calculation for all founders, and then aggregate by metropolitan area to see which city is best.
If your business becomes self-sustaining without a buyout, merger, or IPO, you can probably run the calculation using a TVM for a presumed perpetuity after the day you finally start paying regular dividends, along with your equity value as a lump sum. And if it goes bankrupt, you could end up with a negative value if you chose to pay yourself a salary lower than you could have earned elsewhere.
Moving somewhere just to found a company is a waste of resources. You can always move later if another location is more appropriate for some reason.
The downside of this model is that you never get to actually build anything cool, so you either can't attract top talent, or they hate working for you and your neurotic government customer. So you have to slap on the silver handcuffs (high salary) to keep them from moving away.
It sort of poisons the well for other kinds of tech businesses. Top talent either doesn't want to be there or costs more than you might expect. Mediocre talent is happy to warm a chair to pad out a contract for the same salary you would pay to do actual work. And the dregs are the same there as everywhere else.
Actually, Richardson is a pretty good place for other industries, too, but our specialty is telecom.