Most Hacker Culture in the Northwest
bootload: "... I currently live in the Midwest, and the entrepreneurial and hacker culture is practically non existent out here  ..."Midwest of where?"Hacker culture in the northwest" - northwest of where?  To me north west is the Kimberleys ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberley_region_of_Western_Aus... inhabited for 40,000 years but hardly a hacker hotspot.But you raise a good point. In "Founders at Work", Evan Williams faced the same problem moving from Nebraska, west to Cal. (Ch8, p111)  ~ http://www.scribd.com/doc/7753680/Founders-at-Work-Stories-o... The move meant he worked at O'Reilly which turned out passed a word on to some people who Williams raised money from. Connections.So your geography problem is not yours alone. I live at the "artichoke end of the Startup world" and what bought this home to me was a visit by the creator of Majordomo (his first Perl program), Brent Chapman ~ http://www.greatcircle.com/gca/staff/brent.html at a local Perl Monger meeting while he was doing his MBA in Melbourne. The key point Chapman made about the difference b/w Silicon Valley and other Hacker hotspots was the ability to get things done, faster. Want a high speed connection? Next day, done. Need some legal work on IP? There is a higher concentration of people specialised and able to do the job. Proximity to connections translates to speed."... but what about the culture? ..."Read this article ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html and see what signals Portland and Seattle send off.