Parent commenter claimed that "the choice not to locate your company in SF is a sign of competitive intelligence". I argued against that, and in my opinion the available data appears to back me up on this.

Communication technology hasn't so far enabled, at least in the general case, geographically-distributed tech companies – otherwise we would be seeing an increasing trend of successful tech companies headquartered elsewhere. I don't think we are. Put another way, whatever advantage is conferred upon SF by physically housing an outsized share of tech workers is clearly giving it a competitive advantage that other locations have yet to overcome.

Yeah, my personal theory on this is that the short to medium term success of tech startups is mostly based on factors and advantages other than product quality and technical excellence.

Having a distributed tech team is not hard, but most startups aren't distributed because the VCs aren't distributed. They want face to face meetings.