Move to the Valley or die?

'Moving to Silicon Valley or die' is false.

There was a heated discussion on Linkedin this week on where ambitious young founders would move to if they are to build a new startup company.

The leading narrative was either the Bay Area or New York.

All the other places like Berlin, London, Paris, Tel Aviv would make you not ambitious enough.

Silicon Valley is an amazing place to build startups, don't get me wrong and I work with many founders coming from that ecosystem where capital, talent and big tech is at. However, I believe that the decision on where you want to build your startup company is far more complex and deep.

Founders might ask questions like:

- Where do I personally want to raise my family and kids?

- Is the environment that I'm building my company inspiring for me and my team? Maybe you get inspired by nature? or get inspired by the European Architecture?

- Where is my customer base? you might build a venture in automotive and it would make sense to be in Germany, or a robotics company and get inspired by the Japanese industry.

- What is the environment I want my employees to be in? will they have free healthcare? security?

The barriers to build companies today are changing. You can build from anywhere, you can use AI, host data on the cloud, and do remote sessions.

But Valley or die, is in my view a notion of the old startup world.

The world is big, go build wherever you want!