One is willing to go to the place of highest potential for success in order to... maximize one's potential for success. Come hell or high water. You do what you have to do.
So perhaps talent is not the right word, but it is rather motivation. And motivation may well be a larger determining factor than talent in the success of a startup.
I remain amused by the casual bigotry exhibited by so many Silicon Valley denizens that OF COURSE all the smart, motivated, ambitious entrepreneurs will move to the Valley. Most of them would be incensed if a colleague displayed a comparable level of bigotry about race, or sex, or national background, or the rest of the litany. But it's socially acceptable -- at least west of I-5 -- to dismiss 99% of the country as full of failures. "Sure, maybe they did great in AAA ball, but they couldn't make it in the Big Show."
Which has led to the Valley being a hothouse of artificially-compressed geniuses building products for each other instead of for the real world.
But not everyone is a brilliant 23-year-old willing to share a flophouse with three other geniuses while coding 20 hours a day. In the real world, people have spouses... kids... mortgages... elderly parents... heck, maybe they just like sweet tea! There are all sorts of reasons that they won't move to the Valley, even if they have plenty of talent to compete at that level.
I submit that looking for the best of the best among that 99% of the country is a heck of a good way to make money. It's harder, because you can't sit on Sand Hill Road and watch the universe rotate around you. But with some hustle and some brains, there's plenty of opportunity for non-Valley entrepreneurs, and non-Valley investors, to do very very well.
I'm not going to try to embed a picture here on HN, but check out the link and let me know if you want a button! (I think Fred Wilson would wear one; I doubt that Paul Graham would.)
It's not bigotry at all; it's just the logical conclusion from a set of premises. If Silicon Valley is provably the best place for a technology startup to be, then the people who want their companies to succeed the most will go there. The factors you mention are things that affect one's motivation to do anything it takes to succeed. No one is saying people who don't move to Silicon Valley are untalented. The comment you replied to specifically said that, so I don't see how the talent issue was brought back up.
> But not everyone is a brilliant 23-year-old willing to share a flophouse with three other geniuses while coding 20 hours a day. In the real world, people have spouses... kids... mortgages... elderly parents... heck, maybe they just like sweet tea! There are all sorts of reasons that they won't move to the Valley, even if they have plenty of talent to compete at that level.
In short, they have other priorities. (BTW - Lots of Valley folk are not 23-year-olds.) Maybe that won't matter, but ....
No one is saying that folks can't succeed elsewhere or that there aren't opportunities elsewhere. (FWIW, I've found that people who attack strawmen are fighting at the level that they think they can win....) Instead, they're saying that the valley has some unique properties wrt certain kinds of success.
If those properties or that kind of success isn't relevant or important to you, the valley isn't for you. There's nothing wrong with making other choices, but there are consequences. If you like the ones somewhere else, go for it.
So perhaps talent is not the right word, but it is rather motivation. And motivation may well be a larger determining factor than talent in the success of a startup.