Geography matters when it comes to the long-term success of a company, especially one dependent on network effects. While New York City is known as the financial capital of the US, Boston and San Francisco in my mind are the breeding grounds of technological innovation in the US, with Boston being the dominant place for deep tech/hardware and San Francisco the dominant place for software, broadly speaking. When looking at history, there are very few companies that have added tens of billions of dollars, or anything of that amount in a relative scale, that haven’t been a bike ride from world-class universities, which Boston and San Francisco have. Proximity to these schools offer a vital pipeline of talent that is indispensable to the growth of the company. In order to really accelerate in scaling up, a company must have the raw resources of talent, ideas, and determination in order to do so. Proximity to these things, which are often around the top universities, is immensely helpful. Software is eating the world, and companies need builders, as well as people that not only know how to write code, but also have the intuitive sense and comprehensive understanding for the intersection of tech and something that adds value to the enterprise or consumer. These people indisputably tend to come from the best universities.