Three steps program to be "in" altought you are "out" of Silicon Valley...

1. Blog, blog, blog. Do this for 9-12 months, show how you have industry and market insight, whatever your actual geographical location is... it's a small and smaller world after all, with blogs and mailing lists available whatever your exact physical location might be.

2. Connect (thru mailing lists, twitter, blog comments, and other "not being there" means) with SF locals and impress them with your understanding of your market/technology/space... again, build up your network and make sure you are relevant.

3. Go there. For a week or two, for an event, for a geek dinner, for an industry meeting, invest 4-5k to go in SF and meet with the people you had a chance to connect in steps 1 and 2.

This is what we have been doing for our startup, praized.com, for several years... it's paying back handsomely, but you have to be patient. We are now invited to events at hot megacorps (sorry, can't say wich one, my VP product dev would kill me!), met some great VCs with "back-home" connection (a canadian expat VC in the valley coming to Ottawa fairly often, that's quite close to home for us Montrealers) and even sponsored a geek meetup (the microformat crew) while I was in SF for Web 2.0 Expo last April.

Bonus #4 : connect with other industry folks not in San Francisco / Silicon Valley area. You might get some benefits from sharing your vision with other global partners, even if your only investement is offering them the best "local" beer when they are visiting your "off-center" location...

As you can gather from the general tone of this comment, I quite a contrarian to the "you-have-to-be-in-silicon-vallley" meme, but then again, I am the first one presenting in my city "how we can learn from San Francisco" at the local BarCamp event... YMMV, IMNSHO, TINSTAAFL, been there done that, but hey, I am rooting for this "not in SF" trend more than I should, and I like every minute of it!

You might have to work much harder being outside of a tech center, but if you build something great, people will initiate contact with you regardless of where you are. If your idea depends on having connections before it can work then you might want to try something else.

There are exciting and successful startups all over the world. There might be more concentration in SV, but I believe you can succeed anywhere with the right product.

I probably will not make it into YC being a single founder but I am a little different in that I have been working for years on my project and have 28,000 free users on the system.

I will likely pre-sell my product to my target market and fund myself that way.

I wish I could let this product go for the price of free, but it would get into to many hands, which would make it dangerous, if let's say it got into the hands of identity stealer.

Are you not moving because of school, financial reasons or other?

There's often an unspoken fear about becoming a smaller fish in a bigger pond around this issue.

Ever met an aspiring (like, they want to be Brad Pitt or Julia Roberts, not just a local star) actor/actress who's 35 years old but never tried moving to LA / NYC? You've got to wonder if they have some kind of subconscious reason holding them back...

I'm in no way implying that's going on here, just asking.

Family / financial reasons would also be right up there as to why someone would never make the leap! (I just moved to SF by the way... :))

Awesome! Thanks for the backing. We don't need the partnerships, we'd like them, simply because they would add to our bottom line.

My plan is hanging out here and hooking up with a cofounder, which is where I'm lacking.

If you've got a good team, you should be able to make it work wherever you are -- as long as you're co-located.

Why do you need to know execs from Google Adwords?