[mgob]

Echoing other comments here, I think college towns make excellent startup founding locations. They often have plenty of access to graduating talent, and many have thriving tech scenes to begin with. Ann Arbor, Boulder, Waterloo, Champaign, Boston, and many other towns avoid the costs of SV while still allowing plenty of access to technical and financial resources. While markets in these towns might not perfectly mimic the larger national market, they have a similarly young-and-technically-proficient subset of the population as larger tech hubs, both in terms of talent and users.