Paul Graham, partner at early-stage investment fund Y Combinator and author of Hackers & Painters, argues in his essay How to be Silicon Valley that there are two essential ingredients for a place to successfully breed startups: rich people, and nerds. And because both groups are highly mobile, that is ALL you need. Fancy buildings don’t matter, because the crucial stage of a startup is when there are a few founders sitting around brainstorming, which can happen anywhere.

So if all you need are rich people and nerds, what attracts these two groups of people to any particular place? Well, Graham argues that above all, you need a world-class university - one that competes with the likes of Stanford and MIT - because smart people gravitate to where there are other smart people. And the second thing you need is a place where students will want to stay after they graduate and where rich people will want to live, a place with good weather and personality.

Charlottesville is an amazing place, and it would seem to fit the bill. Nicknamed The Hook, the town is best known as home to the University of Virginia, which was founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819. And C’ville was recently named the best place to live in America. The beautiful surroundings of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the college-town culture, an incredible music scene, great weather and a laidback atmosphere all help attract plenty of diverse, affluent people to the town. But for some reason, there are just not a lot of startups being created here. On this mashup by fourio, web 2.0 start-ups are mapped globally. There are none, until now, in Charlottesville. Why is that?

Simple. Charlottesville needs more nerds.

UVA’s graduate engineering school is ranked 37th nationally. Ouch. There’s the problem right there. Not great for a school that trades the Best U.S. Public University title back and forth with Berkeley and Michigan every few years. BTW, what’s Berkeley’s engineering school ranked? 3rd. Michigan’s? 9th. Double ouch. They’ve got more nerds.

UVA is in the middle of a $3 billion capital campaign right now which is targeting $150 million for the School of Engineering. Graham argues that to really change the landscape, UVA should take that money and recruit 50 top engineering professors with signing bonuses of $3 million each. It’s a bold move, but it would certainly change the playing field overnight and turn C’ville into a startup mecca.