The topic of why relocate to the Bay Area if you’re doing a tech startup has been beaten to death by people like Michael Arrington and Paul Graham. In some situations it’s simply not possible. The answer we found to compensate for all the things we lack in terms of networking and visibility for our startup was simple:

Parachute into the scene in Silicon Valley and hit every possible local event to make connections that are deep enough that they will persist once you leave.

Below is a video (bigger version) from the talk I gave yesterday at the Gangplank Headquarters discussing the lessons learned from a 31 day road trip to San Francisco I did this past holiday season for our company. It discusses everything from tactical details like how to pack to strategic concepts of different ways you can network as a complete alien.

BTW, the Gangplank guys are doing some great things in Arizona to help jumpstart our tech community. Their podcast site just went live yesterday, if you like startup podcasts check it out.

Slide deck from the talk available here as PDF (1.5MB). All images other than the ones I took are Creative Commons share & share alike license.