How Being Outside the Valley Shrinks Your Brain

"There's two kinds of investors in this world. The ones who think big, and the ones who don't; the ones with a Valley mindset, and everyone else."<p>Perhaps there are startup founders with a realistic perspective on their contributions to the internet, and there are startup founders who believe their own marketing lines?

Shrinking your ambitions isn't the same thing as shrinking your brain. Living inside the valley means your surrounded by people whose insane ambitions are much more likely to have paid off. You only see the successful ones, because the failures either never make it in, or have left. In general, living anywhere else means you are surrounded by people whose insane ambitions didn't pay off, and who have achieved whatever success they have by being more modest.

I can't quite get a read on this guy. He seems smart, but he also seems very bitter about his experience in New York, and seems to think everyone's experience is the same.<p>New York's options for early-stage funding have been growing rapidly - there's a lot more options out there than Chris Dixon and Fred Wilson. And meeting whoever you want to meet is pretty easy. Not sure why this guy had such a different experience, but something feels off here.

There are two kinds of blog posts in this world: posts that are helpful and posts that take one person's narrow range of experience and try to build some grand theory of the universe.<p>The latter shrinks your brain.

Maybe it's because I'm outside the valley (grin), but I'm completely failing to see how a mechanical turk driven transcription service is gonna "revolutionize how people interact with audio and video on the web". It sounds like a nice service. I'm betting you could build a pretty kick ass lifestyle business off it (I wish I had thought of it actually), but revolutionary? err.. I'm doubtful.<p>Particularly when Google has already started to do search within audio and video files, and has started testing automated close captioning for youtube videos.

Inflammatory title, but it rang true with me.<p><i>One of the dangers that first time founders living outside of the Valley (like me) face is that our minds get poisoned and our ambitions shrunk by the parochial leaders</i><p>I think there's a healthy balance. In Scotland, things needed to be scaled back, explained/analogies made to things people already did or understood, conservative was the watchword. Here (the Valley) it's all 'wow, you can change the world, ask for $1M not £50k'. Neither is healthy.<p>Strike a midpoint: get an informed perspective with a realistic idea of an achievable v1 launch, don't raise millions and inflate beyond belief, and listen to the negatives. Get perspectives from an international viewpoint as well as the echo chamber -- but don't let others squash your dreams.

This all pre-supposes that you're shooting for VC funding.<p>You could argue that it's small-minded to think that's the only way to make a go of your big dream.

Interesting contrast with this thread...<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1210972" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1210972</a><p>Perhaps the issue with VCs pushing for the "1 in 20" exit is more of a silicon valley thing?