If you don't take this two-sided approach to re-creating Silicon Valley's success, then you run the risk of blindly imitating the wrong things. Also, if you want to not only match but surpass SV, you need to be mindful of such weaknesses.
I have to admit that my sample size is too small to be scientific, but I am starting to suspect that SV startups actually have a rationality problem. Startup founders often have blind faith in aphorisms that have been adopted by the startup community and make decisions on the basis of these "old sayings" and programmer-lore biases while ignoring quantitative reasoning. I recently had an exchange like so:
"We need X so we can scale." (X doesn't run stably and they want me to fix it, but this will be very expensive. Y runs stably, but they don't like it.)
"What does scaling mean quantitatively for your business? Have you worked out those numbers and cranked that through Little's Law and figured out how much it will cost you to support n users?"
"No, we haven't done that yet, but we know we need X because Y would take too much RAM." (But when pressed, they can't quantify what "too much RAM" means with respect to business models.)
Well, I did the numbers myself, and it turns out that Y would just add about 40% to their equipment cost and get them up and running quickly while they're waiting for X to be fixed.
What shocks me even more: None of their investors or advisors had even asked them the question!