If a small company wants to survive against the big guys, they've got to exploit market inefficiencies. It always surprises me when someone insists that techno

If a small company wants to survive against the big guys, they've got to exploit market inefficiencies. It always surprises me when someone insists that technology start ups can only exist in a small part of California or Massachusetts where they're competing directly for every kind of resource (people, space, etc.) with the richest companies in the world. There are huge universities all over the midwest that produce tens of thousands of engineering and computer science grads every year. In my opinion, any one of the Big Ten college towns would be a great place to build a company to last. Plenty of grads would stay close to family in the midwest if they could and it's easy to find cheap space to work. You'd miss certain parts of the startup infrastructure like specialized lawyers and ridiculous numbers of venture capitalists, but you'd also cut down on distractions from the hype machine.