...outside the Valley, most people have heard of neither FriendFeed nor Seesmic. ;-)

The big advantage of living outside the valley is that you're closer to real customers - people who don't live and breathe technology 24/7. That can help you or hurt you, depending on your target market. Could something like MySpace, AOL or PlentyOfFish have started inside the Valley, considering that they succeeded by catering to idiots?

There are plenty of nontechnical people in SV too. There are dentists and cooks and policemen here just like everywhere else.

AOL, incidentally, did not cater to idiots initially. Before the web it was something a lot of hackers used.

The problem with catering to idiots is that unless you're an idiot yourself--the particular kind of idiot comprising your target market--you have no idea what your customers want. Also, this approach would probably be too demoralizing to sustain for anyone without the record-label-executive state of mind, which is the opposite of the hacker state of mind.

>> Outside of the valley, something like this isn't possible.

We do have email, IRC, etc etc these days.

I was talking more about the fact that it took a few hours from seeing an opportunity, to finalizing the deal. Outside of SV, it would take a few weeks just to arrange a meeting. And chances are the company would end up passing on the partnership because they don't want to trust a fresh startup.

Agreed, but it's way slower at building trust. Especially compared to the opportunities people have in the valley to socialize outside of some deal-making session.

Not in my experience, the example given was a "link exchange request". These go on all the time over email, and work pretty well.

Perhaps it's just me, but I often prefer dealing with people over email/IRC/etc than face to face for a lot of things.

And the phone.