For me, the great thing about the web is that it is geographically agnostic. This allows for building great businesses and communities without the need of geographical proximity. Meeting other like-minded individuals physically is great, sure, but the inability to do so shouldn't be an obstacle that hinders working with them and accomplishing great things together imho.
I haven't found that to be entirely true for me as an individual. The closest online friendships I have had typically involved a lot of live chat of some sort -- exchanges basically in real time when we are both online at the same time (whether via a chat system or ongoing email exchange or some such). When I moved from West Coast to East Coast, this damaged some relationships. Moving from night-shift to day-shift had a similar impact. I'm prone to insomnia and have had quite a few relationships with people in distant lands who happened to be online at the same time I was when I was up during night. When I start sleeping better again, it can be hard on the relationship. So while where I live is not the only thing which impacts this, it does have an impact.
I don't think it's just me. I've known a couple of Americans who worked with people in India who either kept odd hours to facilitate that (an entrepreneur/consultant) or routinely had their regular sleep schedule interrupted by middle-of-the-night calls (supervisor at a big company with a team in India).
Is that virtual proximity enough to build great communities? There's only one way to know, isn't it?
That's true, but I think the bottleneck for non-US startups is still access to customer use-cases, problems and painpoints and a advanced enough market that will take solutions. That and the capital to build the solution.
For example, where I live we have branches of MS, SAP, Morgan Stanley, etc. but they don't have the power to make tech decisions, those are made at home in the US. So I can't really sell them anything. So in less developed markets here in E.Europe, consumers and SMBs tend to be poor, multis are only local branches, so everyone tries to milk the government or large monopolistic organizations like the energy or telecom sectors (which used to be gov't).
That's exactly the same problem with latam. But Mexico has a geographical advantage, we're a short flight from USA and we tend to share their tech culture in virtue of being so close to them and having a lot of their companies around here.
All of this while keeping the operating costs at a fraction.
I'm curious on how american investors look at the outside market. If a big name like Spotify comes looking for founding, they will get it. But what about accelerator-level startups? would you invest on them even if they're not based on SV?
Ideas are transformed by people that share a common vison and provide different actions. With skype, a shared blackboard and leadership a team can be assembled in the a matter of minutes. If you are building a software product it can be developed in pieces that are uploaded into a server and with the right social marketing campanign you can put it available to customers.
We really find great projects that are built with great value from a complete distribuited team.
It is tru that the Silicon Valley hacker culture is a great drive, but having a bridge to fill the gap and reach the knowledge great companies can take advantage of the hackers culture and spread the development with great people seating in Mexico, China or Australia without any restriction.
This condition is allowing to have great companies all around the world, may be with a little help fromo somebody seating in the Silicon Valley
If geography plays no part, then on a per-startup basis, basing in Silicon Valley should not provide a statistically measurable advantage.