It seems very broken that IT specifically should be bound to a physical place. Are there any plans to innovate in this regard or any research YC is doing?
The short version is accumulation of know-how in that geographic region. For years, most of the brilliant minds in the tech domain from all over the world have gone to SV to collaborate together. So even if another country creates a replication of SV in terms of infrastructure (or even gives tax breaks and other incentives), it's hard to recreate the huge pool of bright professionals who have years of know-how to tackle startup related challenges.
I've lived all over the country and all over the world and between countries I'd say it is 100% cultural.
In "europe" employee protection laws make it difficult to quickly hire and fire employees, making it difficult to scale.
In Chile failure was shameful. A stable bureaucratic government job was the most coveted job.
In Japan you are a social outcast if you aren't a company man.
I found quite a bit of entrepreneurial effort in west Africa, however I think that area lacks the required infrastructure to support large scale innovation.
I don't buy the concentration argument within the US borders. The bay area has a population of 7M, the greater NYC area has a population of 20M. Purely based on population numbers it is difficult to believe the bay area has a higher concentration of educated people.
And IMO US anti-discrimination laws are also flawed. I think a good compromise is to only include certain kinds of jobs like manual labor under employment anti-discrimination laws.
Though quotas have been outlawed in the United States, the European Union has had a recent push to punish companies whose boards aren't composed of at least 40% women. And India, Brazil and Malaysia, among other countries, have laws and policies that address affirmative action in schools and throughout society.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/business/global/18iht-boar...
There are lots of anti-discrimination laws in the US. While affirmative action is usually spoken of in general terms, there is no singular policy or implementation of the ways in which affirmative action take shape in government organizations, colleges and corporations. It varies.
Court cases continue to refine interpretations of how race is used at the university level. Some schools have experimented with a variety of ways of non-race-based models, like the Top 10 model that the University of Texas employs, to ensure the racial diversity of students.
A 2005 study by Princeton sociologists Thomas J. Espenshade and Chang Y. Chung compared the effects of affirmative action on racial and special groups at three highly selective private research universities. The data from the study represent admissions disadvantage and advantage in terms of SAT points (on the old 1600-point scale):
Whites (non-recruited athlete/non-legacy status): 0 (control group) Blacks: +230 Hispanics: +185 Asians: –50 Recruited athletes: +200 Legacies (children of alumni): +160
In 2009, Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and researcher Alexandria Walton Radford, in their book No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, examined data on students applying to college in 1997 and calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410 and African Americans who got 1100.
While the data and legal interpretation of Affirmative Action and anti-discrimination laws in the US are constantly changing today it has the largest real impact on Universities and Government.
I don't see how this is related to discrimination specifically?
If your problem is too many lawsuits why don't you mention hot coffee at McDonalds? Or the problem with drivers causing accidents and suing in China?
http://www.ibtimes.com/china-arrests-7-faking-car-crashes-cl...
At this point, I don't think it's arguing that. There's a critical mass of domain specific professionals in SV, pure and simple.
The argument is that if anyone wants to create a competitor to SV, they'd be playing catch up because there is already an established core in SV. You'd need to peel away a large number of folks already established there before that concentration is no longer as strong as it currently is.
There's a limited number of experts in the world. Wherever has the highest concentration is going to have an innate advantage in terms of appeal, regardless of cost, etc. Creating an affordable alternative elsewhere can't compete on that level.
"""being in a place where startups are the cool thing to do, and chance meetings with people who can help you"""
I think "the cool thing to do" isn't as relevant as it was 5 years ago due to some well publicized success stories and things like the shark tank etc. Startups are generally considered a more viable career option these days so that need (and thus the competitive advantage of SV) is quite a bit less than 5 years ago (imo)
Chance meetings...yeah I get it. It's also lessened to some degree due to social media and random chance on the internet (someone reading a tweet of yours and knowing how to help, help on HN/reddit etc.) but that's still a great point in favor of SV. It's also self-reenforcing.
So for arguments sake I'll offer the counter position to "move to a startup hub" namely "move to a place where you expect the highest density of your customers" (which should help with chance meetings as well)
The second alternative I'll suggest is...stay at a place you feel comfortable at especially if it has low living cost until you are ramen profitable given SV cost structures...then move.
[there's a lot of it depends here but those are just suggestions to kickstart a hopefully interesting discussion]
Based on empirical history of how successful startups have turned into $1 billion companies, it looks like the density & quantity of the hiring pool and investors are higher priorities than location of customers. In SV, you get a pipeline of fresh Stanford grads and also the ex-employees from Apple/Google/Facebook/etc. For investors, you have a bunch of them clustered on Sand Hill Rd. For B2C consumer facing internet businesses, there are no geographically concentrated customers to move to.
The prioritization of proximity close to the customers may make more sense for a lifestyle business[1]. E.g. you're developing a SaaS cloud service for surfing shops to manage their inventory of surfboard gear. In that case, it might make more sense to locate the headquarters in San Diego and it's a calculated tradeoff to rely on the smaller pool of programmers in that area. The startup CEO physically visits each surfing shop to see how the software is used and gets real feedback for new features. Investors would also be less of an issue because a lot of lifestyle businesses are bootstrapped to profitability. That said, YC and VCs don't invest in lifestyle businesses so their bias towards SV wouldn't apply.