Fred over at WebBreakStuff has written an insightful post, expressing his opinion that in the new web worker world, you and your company don’t need to be resident in Silicon Valley. While strictly, this may be true, I’ve got to say I don’t fully agree. Here’s my take…
I agree 100 per cent on the concept that ideas are global. Absolutely. And if you work your little behind off to get your idea off the ground, you’ll probably end up selling it to Google. Perhaps not for the money YouTube got, but at least you’ll pay off the mortgage.
The tyranny of distance is a killer, especially if you’re more than a couple of timezones away from the hot center of the new web world, which frankly is Silicon Valley. No matter how connected you are (Skype, email, etc.) unless you have time to work to the hot center’s clock, you will struggle. At the moment, US PDT is 17 hours behind me (12:00:00 Monday October 23, 2006 in Australia/Canberra converts to
19:00:00 Sunday October 22, 2006 in US/Pacific).
Cost is a significant factor and the distance can kill you financially. Fred suggests flying in (among other things) to get to people in the valley. To come from Australia, that’d cost me around AU$3000 (US$2300) for the flight plus a couple of days in a hotel. Not to mention the >48 hours of travel it’d take, plus visa-related logistics.
Your work-life balance is shot if you try to keep up to Silicon Valley time. I work a normal day job while I incubate my ideas and prevail on friends and colleagues to get involved. At night I have a wife, daughter and non-work (as well as some work-related) commitments to deal with. I’d need a 36-48 hour day to work my day job plus deal with what I want to do for myself and acidlabs.
Now, it’s not that I’m not prepared to make sacrifices to make my ideas bear fruit and dreams come true. I am. I just think that unless you have a strong connectedness into the Valley, as Fred does with his colleagues at WeBreakStuff, you are pushing the proverbial uphill with a pointy stick.
I’ve also commented on the related post by Fred Wilson at his blog, A VC. Hopefully he’ll choose to respond.
