The success of a startup is commonly viewed to be a combination of the concept and the execution. Of course, the "concept" is rarely a singular thing---a compa

The success of a startup is commonly viewed to be a combination of the concept and the execution. Of course, the "concept" is rarely a singular thing---a company often needs an initial niche product to score desperate early adopters, and then it may need a more general vision to break into larger markets. Was/is Facebook a social network for college students? A social graph? A platform for social games? Silicon Valley seems like a good multiplier on execution, as well as a place where it is easier (and more expected) to increase the original product vision. VCs insist on the team trying to take over a $100B+ market, many top infrastructure engineers, mobile developers, UX people, and so on won't stay if they don't think the equity will be worth anything, and there is a huge amount of highly mobile web talent. More talent breeds more ideas, expanding the concept and improving the execution. Could Facebook have scaled their engineering team to handle 2x-5x the number of users every year (with maybe 1m users on day one of the company), with a huge portion of those users viewing the website every day, without being in a place with (a) tons of web talent and (b) a culture where leaving an established job to work at a web startup was reasonable? In terms of upper level management, half of Facebook's C-level executives appear to be ex-Google. Could Facebook have gotten that level of operational and advertising expertise in Boston? To answer your question directly, I suspect there are huge recruiting, operational, and business development challenges to running a large scale consumer web startup outside of Silicon Valley. That said, it is hard to know how that would impact any particular company, or any particular space (e.g., location-based services).