This morning I went to the Rochester Open Coffee Club meet-up, and while it was great meeting people here in my own town I've been talking to online, it's also horrifyingly depressing how much of the conversation still centered on Silicon Valley.

When I first set out on the Web nearly 14 years ago, we were told it was the future of business; that we would be able to do everything online and be part of a truly global economy. People would be freed from cube farms and able to work wherever they were and location would be completely irrelevant. And yet the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Profy is a truly global company. The writers live all over the U.S. The company headquarters are in San Francisco. The development team is in Siberia. I think we've made it work; up until Web 2.0 Expo last month, I'd never met Svetlana in person. It was amazing to have worked with someone for over a year, consider that person a friend, and yet never have met. And yet, I realized hearing about the companies here in Rochester, that we need to cultivate the area as a tech community much more.

The reason that Silicon Valley is so much at the forefront of the industry has absolutely nothing to do with the concentration of people there or the environment. It has to do with the fact that people are constantly tripping over each other, moving from company to company, and making contacts that lead to other contacts. There is no reason why things HAVE to be there, only that they have fostered a culture where it's not only acceptable, but also recommended to jump companies every couple of years. It's the incidental meet-ups that lead you to that next contact that facilitate development and foster the interconnected atmosphere that tech thrives on.

But for all its "tech hub" reputation, Silicon Valley is no different than anyplace else on earth. The reliance is still on meeting those people face-to-face in order to keep the industry alive there. And if more areas fostered that sort of community, I think we would see little mushrooms of activity springing up all over the U.S. and other parts of the world, and help everyone out in the end. Rochester has one of the fastest-growing housing markets in the country. We are moving out of the far-too-extended era where we relied almost exclusively on manufacturing to support the local economy. And we are ripe to foster a start-up culture of our own, only different. The mindset here isn't the constant migration to the newest, shiniest thing. Rochester is known for stressing company loyalty and quality products, and I wonder what companies could do here with a workforce unaccustomed to waiting for options to vest before moving on to the next possibility, and committing to building something and sticking with it.