his point about the work ethic being a strong point rings for me. chris wanstrath is from cincinnati, ohio and pj hyett is from north dakota. the midwest would

his point about the work ethic being a strong point rings for me. chris wanstrath is from cincinnati, ohio and pj hyett is from north dakota. the midwest would be a great place to build startups, as long as you tailored them to the pragmatic mentality there. for example, what i'd like to do if i get the money to become an angel investor is start something like an incubator there, but do it differently. instead of buying a small amount of equity in a team to work on their cool idea for a location-based mobile social realtime group deal game platform service API framework, i would pay people a decent salary (which is still significantly lower than a startup salary in silicon valley) to work on building niche services for particular established industries. as they worked, they would gain equity that would provide dividends. i would position this company primarily as an alternative to college - you'd get paid in both salary and equity to learn to program, instead of putting yourself tens of thousands of dollars in debt to study amortized analysis of fibonacci heaps - which is awesome but kind of impractical at the moment. so instead of building a generalized web analytics platform and trying to compete in that large space, build a platform tailored to the construction industry, with feedback and metrics designed just for them. couple it with an ipad app for foremen and you have a product that will never be the next google, but can earn money from day one. if you can develop a reputation for building lots of profitable companies that serve real needs (something else midwesterns are big on), you could attract a lot of funding from investors in the area (they do exist) who are more interested in serving human need than earning lots of money.