Why is it hard to startup a company outside of Silicon Valley?

Re:Why is it hard to startup a company outside of Silicon Va... by electric on Thursday August 16, 2007 @11:58AM (#43052)

Club Penguin. It was a Web 2.0/virtual community play. Acquired by Disney for $350+ mil. I don't know if Plentyoffish qualifies as a Web 2.0 startup, but it is making a lot of cash. I could name a few more. Cheers.

PS. I agree with the original poster "The first mistake startups make is they need VC or angel funding to get moving," if by "get moving" s/he means get started. You might need it when you want to expand, grow, get serious, etc. but you don't necessarily need it at the beginning.

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Re:Why is it hard to startup a company outside of Silicon Va... by nabeel on Thursday August 16, 2007 @01:40PM (#43121)

Hot or Not. Made the owners enough free flowing cash, in the millions every year, that they certainly weren't even looking for an exit.

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Re:Why is it hard to startup a company outside of Silicon Va... by pg on Thursday August 16, 2007 @08:19PM (#43283)

Sure, there are a handful. But the fact that those few are famous on account of having taken no investment is evidence of just how rare it is.

Among successful startups, the ratio of those that took outside money to those that didn't is 100 to 1, maybe 1000 to 1. Where the threshold for success is going public, it's effectively infinite.

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Re:Why is it hard to startup a company outside of Silicon Va... by rrival on Sunday August 19, 2007 @11:11AM (#44088)

Someone at BarCampBlock yesterday suggested that in the past >15 years, vc-backed startups of all types accounted for 23% of successful exits, while focusing on tech-specific startups raises that number to 46%. It sounds possible, but a source wasn't provided - it'd be interesting to determine how successful these 'successful exits' were, and if the size ($) of the exit is correlated to the presence of VC. I imagine it would be.

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