I think the author is missing the point. You can find people anywhere in the world to fund a website that "shows cat videos" as long as you don't approach investors with that thesis. And really, it's ok to fail anywhere, not just Silicon Valley. It's what you learn from it that counts. Sure, it's probably not ok to fail because you became a heroin addict (even in Silicon Vallye). But if you're a computer scientist in Utah that tried to come up with, for example, new encryption methods for banking software security but failed to get funding, does that make the technology itself irrelevant because your business failed?