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!
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!