Since most successful startups come from Silicon Valley, one may assume that this is a good region for starting up a company. But it is not only about starting up, finding a cofounder, developing a product and doing user tests. You can do this everywhere in the world. At one point, after reaching product-market-fit, every startup needs the capability and network to grow and scale up their business in a short period of time. See some popular examples here.
Access to venture capital is crucial. This is a list of the 2015 startup unicorns on this planet (companies publicly valued more than 1 Billion): Uber, Xiaomi, Airbnb, Palantir, Didi Kuaidi, Snapchat, Flipkart, SpaceX, Pinterest, Dropbox. Five of them come from Silicon Valley where lots of venture capital funds specialize on scaling startups.
Apart from good networking and fast access to capital, what do Silicon Valley startups do to grow so rapidly?
Although there is no one-size-fits-all growth plan, we'll offer a comparison of different stages of company sizes here. This may help to identify the main challenges of startup growth and offer some possible solutions - which at least worked out quite well for some Silicon Valley companies.
Stanford Class SC183C, 2015 by Allen Blue, Reid Hoffmann, John Lilly and Chris Yeh