I started my career the way many tech entrepreneurs did–as a management consultant and by doing a stint at a multibillion-dollar Silicon Valley venture capital firm. In my 20s, I was I was well on my way to a lucrative tech career. I happily pulled off all-nighters on a Tuesday or a 10-hour Saturday without flinching.

But my quick ascent ultimately led to my leaving Silicon Valley. I got an unsolicited job offer from a startup my VC firm had invested in (called Motricity) to be their head of corporate strategic development. It was an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up. My wife and I packed up and moved to North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park–where Motricity was headquartered at the time. We expected to be there for two years, three at most.

Fourteen years, three successful startups, and four beautiful children later, we wouldn’t move back to Silicon Valley for all the gourmet tech-campus lunches and artisanal coffee in the world. Best of all, we’ve learned we don’t need to, even to build a billion dollar-valued unicorn company. I’ve helped do it twice with Raleigh-Durham based startups, and a third is well on its way.

Startup success outside of Silicon Valley

Within three years at Motricity, I helped the company raise nearly half a billion dollars in funding and reach $100 million in annual revenue. Eventually, this led to a billion-dollar public market cap.

This would’ve been a natural time for my wife and me to leave Raleigh, but to our surprise, we’d come to love the place. One of the things that we really appreciated was that we found people to be less caught up in the race for material wealth and more interested in family life and community. While I had previously been on the fast track to joining the 1 percent club of San Francisco, it came at a significant cost to my personal life. I gained nearly 50 pounds and neglected my marriage during my time in Silicon Valley–both of which, sadly, felt “normal” relative to the people and world around me. It wasn’t until I left the West Coast that I realized just how damaging that lifestyle had been. Life in North Carolina proved that I could build a thriving business–and have a flourishing and healthy personal life at the same time.

So I took another leap of faith with another startup focused on enterprise communications called Bandwidth. Once again, I helped build a startup that surpassed $100 million in annual revenue (this time with positive profit), and it eventually reached a unicorn-level, public-market valuation of $1.5 billion. From Bandwidth, we spun out Republic Wireless, a business I cofounded, which provides smartphone service leveraging proprietary WiFi-first calling technology that enables some of the most affordable price plans in the U.S. market. Republic Wireless is also nearing $100 million in annual revenue.

From where I sit, this streak is proof that tech startups and the entrepreneurs who drive them can have long, rewarding, and–most importantly–happy lives outside of Silicon Valley. Here are some of their best practices.