<snip>The bottom line? It’s hard to quantify the COST of moving to a startup (months of distraction, expense, stress, loss of social network, etc)</snip> The c

<snip>The bottom line? It’s hard to quantify the COST of moving to a startup (months of distraction, expense, stress, loss of social network, etc)</snip> The cost / benefit thing isn't entirely monetary. It's one of those things where if you're crazy enough to just do it (move), it's something you can look back on and say "glad I did." At least in my experience it has been. It's also one of those things where if you really don't have much to "lose," there's a lot of room for gain. Moving, yeah, expensive. Getting robbed, yeah, sucks. Cost of living, yeah, ridiculous. But, I've viewed the experience as an extremely valuable extension of my University education. I've learned a lot: much more than I thought possible from the random spattering of techie-events I've attended. OSMCS 2007 is pretty much the reason I implemented Drupal on my site. :) And the social network here really is great. So while I'm not endorsing a full-fledged "move" to SV for startuppers, it is the 21st Century. Travel. Experience life while you're young and can have fun. After I founded my LLC, I "moved" it from Arizona to Utah (very temporary stopover there) to Cali in its first year. The portable nature of a web business has been one of the greatest things about the work. So my advice is: either go where you can participate in the synergy or go out and create some on your own.