From Bezos to Walton, Big Investors Back Fund for ‘Flyover’ Startups
I live in SV and love the quality of here. Honestly though, the situation for early stage startups here is becoming untenable.<p>My theory is the following:<p>- Seed money is drying up (there&#x27;s legitimate data to support this) because it&#x27;s all being saturation in Series Alphabet companies that are all raising on legitimate growth or legitimate track records (but with zero growth and very good connections).<p>- The housing situation is atrocious, and the tech scene is getting older (read -&gt; having kids).<p>- This means employees are saturating towards Google&#x2F;FB&#x2F;Apple&#x2F;etc because that&#x27;s the only thing you can afford to do in the bay area. When you can afford pay hundreds and thousands of developers $500k all-in packages because your yearly profits alone can sustain the whole of the bay area (looking at you Apple) then it&#x27;s almost impossible to compete for talent in anything that isn&#x27;t Google&#x2F;FB&#x2F;Apple&#x2F;etc or a Series Alphabet with strong capital.<p>- The rest of the world has learned all of the failures and lessons of SV and caught up. And yes all of the &quot;inbound content&quot; you created was free consulting to the 5 man shop running out of Madison, WI who is now competing with 3 man Stanford drop-out of the mid 2000&#x27;s.<p>My bet is on this fund and other similar funds, like the middle market PE funds in tech (PSG, KKR, GSV, etc), Indie.vc, Venture for America, etc. This is the next big horizon in money making tech investing, not the next Instagram...those days are over.<p>It&#x27;s amazing how many tech companies no one here has heard of but are making very legitimate money and are based in very unconventional locations. Tampa Bay, Minneapolis, Charlotte (and the tech triangle), Knoxville, Orlando, Atlanta, Provo, Boise, St Louis, Denver...you name it. I think we&#x27;re gonna see many more Bandwidth.com&#x27;s, MailChimps, Kabbage&#x27;s, Outcome Healths, etc in the very near future.