Cultivating Startups outside of the Silicon Valley

Like a lot of Software Developers I'd love to build the next big thing the TwitterBook of the future if you will. As part of my attempts to a) come up with a good idea and b) have the nous to get it up and running successfully I follow a lot of Venture Capital and Start up related blogs (such as Tech Crunch, A VC, Venture Hacks) and it occurs to me as I read all of these and try to scrounge other information and ideas from around the globe that if you're not located in the fertile VC fields of Silicon Valley that you're really pushing crap uphill when trying to get a project off the ground.

Several things have prompted this view, I see today a post on Tech Crunch discussing a Y Combinator event "Work at a Startup" which will be conducted in Mountain View. Then I see other discussions around the interwebz and I wonder how someone outside of Silicon Valley, let alone the US has any chance of getting good seed funding etc to take a business or idea to the next level.

I'd love to see events like the one above running down here in Australia. I'd definitely be interested in attending an event like that here in Melbourne. But then, are there really that many startups around here that people could work for.

What seems to be missing from here is the vibe that Silicon Valley has managed to create for itself. To people outside of Silicon Valley it has a mystical aura, it is where tech startups go to grow up. But what is it that it has that other places don't? I know a couple of people that have lived in the area and they all say it's just a giant industrial park, a mix of suburbia and campuses that sprawl all over the place without much character (and considering that they where accountants it must have been verrrrry lacking in character). So it certainly isn't its architectural charm or village atmosphere that does it.

I guess the real question we need to ask is how do we get the same "vibe" established in other areas of the world? I've got no idea.