Is Silicon Valley Still the Best Place to Start a Company? • Tomasz Tunguz

tomtunguz.com

11 points·ttunguz··8 comments

TL;DR: Not necessarily. It depends. If you care about venture funding, then yes, 35% of funding still is silicon valley. If you care about being acquired, then increasingly less so. If you care about IPOs, then yes lots of Silicon Valley-based IPOs. Basically, looking at this from an exits perspective shows Silicon Valley has an edge still.

Are those the metrics that matter though? Why does looking at this from a purely exits perspective matter?

I'm not really that knowledgeable about this. But why is funding limited by geography? Or is it a self fulfilling prophecy?

It shouldn't be, but it is. Lots of VCs won't invest outside their network and outside the range of people they can physically influence. Sometimes it has to do with sitting in on board meetings (which is increasingly less relevant). Some of it has to do with who they can pull in from their networks for leadership positions, most of which is geographically concentrated. But in an increasingly more remote-first workforce, I think that's becoming less relevant too.

Honestly I believe this article is written from a perspective that might become increasingly less relevant over time. To your point, geography matters now, but maybe much less so in the not-too-distant future.

Smart branding move you did with the title there. I hope it doesn't catch on though.

I came to read the article precisely because I was familiar with his work.

Not sure why FL was included in the charts?

Magic Leap, which has raised enormous sums of money ($3B according to Crunchbase [1]) is HQ in Florida. This might be skewing things.

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/magic-leap

They should have named the company Ti Kwon Leap.

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