Bill Bither of Atalasoft has an interesting post on the pros and cons of “Starting a software company outside a startup hub.”

“Outside,” for him, means an hour and a half drive away from the centre of gravity, which in his case is Boston.

There is no software startup hub remotely comparable to Silicon Valley or Boston in Australia. So, if an hour and a half drive is a real issue, we may as well be on another planet. The nearest real hub is thousands of miles and a very long flight away.

Yet, it does sometimes seem there are some compensatory advantages of being well outside where it is “all happening.” Bither mentions a number of possibilities, some of which apply to being in Melbourne. Another is, I suspect, that you have a little more space to be independent and original in your thinking.  Whether you can take advantage of that to produce a genuinely fresh innovation is of course another matter.