My personal experience has been that you don’t need to be in Silicon Valley to do great things. While still living in Montreal, I made a number of contributions to open source projects which are now widely adopted (relayfs which is now in the kernel, and LTT which is used in a variety of places) and wrote a book for O’Reilly. Living in Montreal didn’t hamper this type of bleeding edge work.

A few years back I moved to an even more “remote” region, Sherbrooke, where I started my second startup (Kryptiva) using basically Sherbrooke-based angel funding. So even remote location doesn’t necessarily mean lack of funding.

What does seem to harm startups is the lack of the fertile breeding ground that can be made possible by the existence of local success stories along with what appears to be an ingrained fear of failure. I personally find this state of affairs somewhat disconcerting, especially given the local talent pool. And while I do see positive signs, I think there’s still some ways to go. FWIW, MontrealTechWatch is definitely one of the more positive signs for sure :)