Do you actually need to move to Silicon Valley?
I get asked this more than any other question by European founders. The answer they have usually heard is about ambition. People there think bigger, and they are not embarrassed to say so. Being around that changes what you think is possible.
That is all true. It just does not help you decide anything.
What helps is noticing that people say “move” but are usually asking two things at once. Should I go, and should I live there. Almost everyone asks them as one, and they have different answers. The first is yes. The second depends.
Take the first one.
The reason to go has less to do with San Francisco than with the way any field seems to work. When people get serious about something, it ends up concentrated in one place. Philosophy happened in Athens, where Socrates taught Plato and Plato taught Aristotle. Renaissance painting happened in Florence, where Leonardo, Michelangelo and Botticelli were all working within a few decades of each other. Film ended up in Hollywood.
Nobody planned any of that. It happens because once a place has more of the people who care about something than anywhere else, the next person who cares about it goes there too. Which makes it more of a centre, which pulls in more people. For startups that place is still Silicon Valley, and it has been for over fifty years.
Nobody thinks it is strange when someone leaves a small town for the capital to do the thing they actually want to do. Crossing a border is the same decision. It only feels bigger because there is a line on a map.
So there is a centre. The question is what being in it actually does for you. Five things, and I would keep them separate because they usually get treated as one.
First, you stop sitting on things. The problem with being far away is not that you do not have ideas. It is that you have them and never do anything with them. You think about a company for a year without starting it, and two years later someone builds it and you tell yourself you thought of that first. When everyone around you is acting on their ideas, sitting on yours starts to feel uncomfortable.
Second, you find out the people you looked up to are not a different species. When you are the most ambitious person you know, you have no idea how good you actually are. Most founders I meet are either underestimating themselves or overestimating themselves, and neither gets corrected at home, because there is nothing to measure against. Then you meet people who have built things you assumed were beyond you, and they turn out to be normal. They are not smarter than you, they have just been at it longer. That is when you start aiming at something bigger.
Third, you meet people you were not looking for. The useful things almost never come from the meeting you scheduled. Someone at the next table is building the thing you need, or knows the person you have been trying to reach for six months. That is what a few thousand people doing the same work within a few miles of each other gets you.
Fourth, strangers help you for nothing. People at the very top give their time to people who have built nothing at all. I watched a co-founder of a $50B company spend an afternoon with a group of early-stage founders, showing them around and answering every question they had. Almost everyone there was helped by someone before them, so they do it too, and the whole place moves faster because of it.
Fifth, everything happens faster than you planned for. Investors decide in days, not months, because they are competing with each other for the same deals, and someone who takes six weeks loses. That pace pulls everything else along with it: hiring, decisions, how quickly you find out you were wrong.
That is the case for going.
The second question, whether you should live there, used to have the same answer. I do not think it does anymore.
You can do most of the work from anywhere now. So having one foot at home and one in the valley has stopped being a compromise, and your background has stopped being the thing you need to overcome. It is now the thing you have that nobody there does.
It pays in three ways.
You can hire engineers nobody outside their own country has heard of. ETH and EPFL turn out people who would be fought over in Silicon Valley, and most of them have never had an American recruiter call them. The same is true in most European countries.
You can get a meeting with a company that would ignore an unknown American startup, because it is your home market and you know who to ask. At the beginning that is worth more than almost anything else.
And you can get attention nobody there can get. A country notices when one of its own is doing well abroad. Becoming the person your home ecosystem is proud of gets you press and support an American startup cannot buy. It also changes how investors at home see you. European investors take you more seriously once American ones have, and going is how that starts.
None of this is new. Israeli startups have been running this structure for so long that it is sometimes just called the Israeli model. Engineering and R&D stay at home, while the company incorporates in the US and puts sales, marketing and often the CEO there. A country of ten million people has produced an extraordinary number of large tech companies that way.
None of it starts on its own, though. It only begins once you have been there. You need people who know you, a few introductions that lead somewhere, and enough reputation that someone takes your call. You cannot build that from your desk at home.
Which is why the two questions have different answers. Go, and go early. Whether you move is a decision you make afterwards, with information you cannot get from here.
This is the problem I co-founded BridgeFellows to solve. We take founders from Europe's best technical universities to Silicon Valley for a week.