It was nice to see L.A. County having a good quarter for venture capital funding, but its $252.8 million total for the July-September period was still nickel and dime compared with the Bay Area's $2.45 billion. (Even if you account for all of Socal the total is $710.6 million.) Silicon Valley remains home to the big venture capital action and the reason goes beyond who happens to have the next great idea or widget. The reason - at least a part of the reason - is that Socal is not in Silicon Valley. Craig Johnson, managing director of Concept2Company Ventures in Palo Alto, told the NYT that he knows a lot of venture capitalists who still adhere to the 20-minute rule. That is, if a start-up company is not within a 20-minute drive of the venture firm’s offices, it will not be funded.

Mr. Johnson.. noted that the greater Los Angeles area also has a pool of talented engineers (working at aerospace companies like Lockheed, Northrop and Hughes) and great universities (notably Caltech and U.C.L.A.) and plenty of money to invest. “But in Los Angeles,” he said, “people are scattered across a wide area; everything is more spread out.” It’s harder for entrepreneurs to meet with one another and with investors, he added. And that means connections take longer, deals move slowly, fewer companies are formed. “Like a gas, entrepreneurship is hotter when compressed.” he said.

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Mr. Johnson explained that close proximity permits the investor to provide in-person guidance; initially, that may entail many meetings each week before investor and entrepreneur come to know each other well enough to rely mostly on the phone for updates. Those initial interactions are fateful. “Starting a company is like launching a rocket,” Mr. Johnson said. “If you’re a tenth of a degree off at launch, you may be 1,000 miles off downrange.”

This is not new. There are exceptions, but as a rule Silicon Valley venture capitalists are quite happy cutting Silicon Valley-only deals. Remember, these are really really rich guys and given the choice of driving 20 minutes to some tech start-up that they can keep an eye on all the time, or taking a plane to L.A. or Orange County and first dealing with a 40 or 50 minute car ride to the company - well, they'll take the 20-minute option. This is the challenge that local technology companies have struggled with over the last 20 years, and it helps explain why Socal, despite having a bigger tech community in absolute numbers, lacks the infrastructure required to make it a major tech center. It might be a tired excuse - if it weren't for those venture numbers.