I Thought You Could Build Anything From Anywhere. I Was Wrong.

Five years ago, I believed the remote work gospel. Geography didn’t matter anymore. You could build a startup from Tulsa, launch a career from Topeka, create anything from anywhere with WiFi and determination.

Then I actually tried it.

I spent the last decade building The Cameron Journal from Denver/Boulder, then various other locations, always believing the next piece of content or the next connection would break through. I watched opportunities materialize for people in San Francisco, New York, and Austin while I pitched the same ideas from my home office.

The hard truth I learned: location strategy isn’t about where you live. It’s about where your opportunities cluster.

Some games can only be played in certain places.

The Unicorn Geography Nobody Talks About

Here’s what the data actually shows: San Francisco hosts 256 unicorn startups—more than any other city on Earth. New York comes in second with 119. Beijing has 51.

You can argue this is legacy momentum. You can point to remote work changing everything. But the numbers tell a different story: despite a decade of “work from anywhere” rhetoric, the most valuable companies still concentrate in specific places.

This isn’t about nostalgia for office culture. It’s about understanding where the actual game is being played.

The Connectivity Paradox

But here’s where it gets interesting. Size doesn’t tell the whole story.

Research on tech clusters reveals something counterintuitive: Atlanta ranked first in “wedge value”—the ability to spread innovation through networks—while Silicon Valley ranked only fifth, despite being the largest cluster.

A cluster’s connectivity matters more than its size for innovation spillovers.

Well-connected smaller clusters can have outsized impact because innovations originating there spread through firm networks to benefit other clusters. This challenges the assumption that you must be in the biggest hub.

You don’t necessarily need to be in San Francisco. But you need to be somewhere that connects to the networks where your industry operates.

What I Learned the Hard Way

After my MFA, I expected doors to open. Instead, they shut. Or they never appeared in the first place. I ended up back where I started: doing The Cameron Journal, trying to make a business of it, working from locations that made geographic and financial sense but not strategic sense.

The problem wasn’t my work quality. The problem was that I wasn’t in the rooms where decisions got made, where introductions happened, where someone could vouch for me because they’d seen me operate.

I was optimizing for cost of living when I should have been optimizing for opportunity access.

A software engineer earning $120,000 in San Francisco could maintain equivalent lifestyle quality on $61,000 in Tulsa. That’s compelling math. But it assumes your earning potential stays constant regardless of location.

The Three Questions That Actually Matter

After years of getting this wrong, I’ve learned to ask three questions before making any location decision:

1. Where do the people who can say “yes” to my opportunities live?

Where do the decision-makers, the capital allocators, the connectors operate? If you’re building a venture-backed tech company, that’s still San Francisco and New York. If you’re building a media company, that’s New York and Los Angeles. If you’re consulting with Fortune 500 companies, that’s where their headquarters are.

2. Does my specific career path require physical presence for advancement?

Be honest about this. Some industries still reward face time. Being away from the action means fewer promotions and missed opportunities. Corporate executives make key connections during informal office interactions. You can’t replicate that on Zoom.

3. What’s the half-life of my geographic advantage?

The window for maximum geographic arbitrage may be narrowing. As remote work normalizes, companies develop more sophisticated location-based compensation models. The $120,000 San Francisco salary becomes a $75,000 “work from anywhere” salary. Your advantage disappears. Suddenly, you aren’t living with high income in a low-cost of living location, you’re earning the median wage.

The Framework I Use Now

Location strategy needs to account for three factors:

• Strength of available resources — supporting industries, talent pools, infrastructure
• Your ability to access knowledge — can you actually tap into what makes this place valuable?
• Your capability to do something better than competitors — does this location give you a defensible advantage?

Companies that view location as just “finding cheap places” are playing tactical checkers instead of strategic chess. Many who jumped on the China manufacturing bandwagon now regret it.

The same applies to individuals.

What This Means for You

I’m not arguing everyone needs to move to San Francisco or New York City but I am arguing you need to be strategic about where you are and why. Is it the best place for you to grow?

If you’re building something that requires venture capital, you probably need to be where VCs are. If you’re building something that requires media attention, you need to be where journalists are. If you’re building something that requires Fortune 500 clients, you need to be where they make decisions.

Most of the people reading this, for whom I write for at The Cameron Journal, face this tension constantly. They see through the partisan narratives. They understand the gap between how we talk about remote work and the reality of how careers actually advance.

They know the honest answer isn’t always the comfortable one.

Each remote worker generates more than $80,000 on average to their new location’s economy. That’s real money. But it assumes you can maintain your earning power regardless of where you are.

For some people, that’s true. For most, it’s not.

The Shift I’m Making

I spent ten years trying to build something from wherever I happened to be. I optimized for lifestyle, for cost of living, for comfort.

Now I’m optimizing for opportunity density.

That doesn’t mean abandoning remote work or moving to San Francisco. It means being honest about which games require physical presence and which don’t.

For The Cameron Journal, I can produce content from anywhere. For consulting with founders on messaging and thought leadership, I need to be where founders are making decisions about who to work with.

The question isn’t whether remote work is real. It is. The question is whether your specific path to success requires you to be somewhere specific.

Most people won’t tell you the honest answer because it’s uncomfortable. It suggests that geography still matters in ways we’d rather it didn’t.

But after years of learning this the hard way, I’d rather be uncomfortable and effective than comfortable and stuck.

Location strategy isn’t about where you want to live. It’s about where your opportunities cluster.

And sometimes those aren’t the same place.