It’s simple, really. On the East Coast, there is no culture for promote failure, and that’s a failure of culture if you’re trying to promote innovation. While it’s not totally exclusive to the east coast, seems to become more prevalent as you move eastward.

In fact, the system is designed to condemn failure from the ground up.

There are so many systems set into place to where it’s nearly impossible to go out and fail with confidence. Yes, I said it: we need to be failing with confidence. That’s what the East Coast is missing. It’s why companies like Facebook move out to the valley, and it’s why so many startup founders nearly all move to the Bay Area: so they can fail successfully.

When you go to most colleges on the east coast, for example, you have to get a good GPA in order to work for one of these big corporations. In order to do that, you need to make sure you’re playing everything by the book.

Good grades, good extracurriculars, and good, safe, choices.

Often the East Coast perception of entrepreneurship is that you have to go out and raise at least hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to ensure success of your startup before you’re even launched. Don’t forget about signing that NDA (this isn’t to say there aren’t pockets of places on the east not doing this, but there are many that are).

But that’s not how entrepreneurship works. If you aren’t failing, you are not an entrepreneur. Period. Entrepreneurs need to be failing fast, smart, and quickly. They need to be encouraged to do so.

That’s why many startups often look at what you have accomplished through previous experiences, portfolios, and referrals. They can see how you have learned from your failures through results, not by averaging your success/failures through a vanity metric like your GPA.

To keep with the college example, good entrepreneurs in college will sacrifice their schooling (GPA) to enhance their own education of what they really want to learn. They know not to confuse the two. They know it’s okay to fail. Entrepreneurs need to be able to bounce back from these failures.

This is where their environment comes in. If more college-towns follow the cultural shifts that Ann Arbor, MI, and Boulder, CO, have been leading the past 10 years, we’ll see an explosion of entrepreneurs coming out of college towns, regardless of the location. If you have an entire generation coming out of college that knows it’s okay to fail, you are going to see progress. Things like 1000 Pitches, The co.space, and Watson University are leading the way. Hackathon’s are at the very core the solution.

Fail fast, fail smart, fail quick.

If there is a culture of going to get a stable job at all costs so that you can be “successful”, there is no way you can teach entrepreneurship and build ecosystems of people pursuing their passions. There is no way you can large-scale disruption.

On the West Coast, it’s the norm to go out and spend some time in college to go fail, and fail fast. Stanford, Berkley, and others pumping out startup companies, and they’re staying there, too. Historically-speaking, this makes sense: California was built on the principles of the gold rush. Today, it’s not gold, but it’s still the principle of just keep building until you hit the right string.

Don’t worry about failure; You only have to be right once. — Drew Houston

Yes, there are business that do get started on the East Coast. But they’re all moving out west before they know it. Besides a few pockets of innovation, there is no culture for it, so there are resources for it, so there are no towns for it.

There is no way, at this point, Silicon Valley can exist on the East Coast. But, given a change of mindset, it could happen in an instant. It’s much closer than we think.

Let’s make it in an instant. Let’s fail together.