"Beckman and Shockley ... selected the location in Mountain View, near Palo Alto, California. The place did not prove very successful: Shockley's colleagues at Bell Labs and RCA refused to move to a rural location with no long-distance phone service."<p>This anecdote is worth considering in light of YC's view that companies located outside of Silicon Valley are unlikely to be successful. It's easy to forget that SV was farmland not long ago.