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Key Takeaways Think your city just needs more incubators and pitch nights to become the next Silicon Valley? The truth behind why that formula keeps failing might surprise you.
What if the key to real innovation isn’t imitation, but something far more local — and far more powerful?
Every founder has heard the advice: build like Silicon Valley, raise like Silicon Valley, think like Silicon Valley. If you’re building outside a major tech hub — or without deep pools of venture capital — that narrative can quietly make you feel behind before you’ve even shipped your product.
But copying Silicon Valley’s playbook is often one of the most costly mistakes a founder can make.
When you try to build your company as if you have unlimited capital, dense investor networks and a surplus of experienced operators, you end up optimizing for conditions that don’t exist. Progress slows. Resources get misallocated. And what should be your advantage — clarity about your market and constraints — gets replaced by a strategy that was never designed for your reality.
The better approach isn’t to compete with Silicon Valley. It’s to build a company that works because of where you are, not in spite of it.
After decades of investing in founders operating in resource-constrained regions — places rich in ideas but limited in capital and experience — I’ve seen what actually works. The founders who succeed don’t wait for a perfect ecosystem to emerge. They build leverage from local expertise, existing industries and focused relationships, then selectively pull in outside capital and talent when it matters.
That’s how real innovation takes root — not through imitation, but through adaptation.
Why the Silicon Valley playbook breaks down for most founders
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