In this article Paul Graham lays out the antidote to startup poison as “a high concentration of smart, driven people who are interested in entrepreneurship and technology [where] the likelihood of bumping into someone who can help you increases drastically.

If you read the article Paul states that he thinks Silicon Valley is so far ahead that the only way New York could ever catch up is if Silicon Valley starts to fail, which it isn’t doing. So if New York is in such dire straights, where does that leave Houston?

I’m afraid we’re not in a very good position to succeed as a ‘startup hub.’ Since achieving ‘startup hub’ status is a long term proposition, what are some steps we can take to position ourselves well. We need to become known in these startup hubs. How do we do this? We need to connect with the established hubs and let them know that we are a valuable resource. Here are a few suggestions:

1. Attend Conferences – This is expensive but necessary. We need to be in Silicon Valley. This certainly isn’t something that many of us can just jump up an do, but maybe we can find some cost savings solutions. That leads me to number 2.

2. StartUp Bus like initiatives for conferences – I’m not sure if you’ve heard of the startup bus, but it is kind of like a startup weekend on wheels. A bunch of hackers hop on a bus and 3 days later they have created mvps and arrive at SxSW for the conference.

3. Contribute to open source initiatives – I mentioned this in my 5 part series on Hacking Houston. This is one piece of low hanging fruit that we can take advantage of.

Let’s brainstorm. What are some other ways we can connect ourselves to the Valley?