Well since Virginia was the home to the first permanent English settlement, it kind of got to be the de facto most powerful state from the get-go. And it was ideally-positioned on the Chesapeake Bay with easy access to the James and Elizabeth rivers (and the other 150+ rivers dumping into the bay), making it ideally positioned as a hub for trade and inland exploration and settlement. Plus it was essentially right in the middle of the mid-Atlantic east coast, ultimately making it centrally located among the thirteen colonies.

The first permanent colony was established in Virginia in 1607, and when the first attempt to colonize Massachusetts bay failed a year later, Jamestown kind of became the primary focus for colonizing for the next few years. It wasn’t until 1620 that Plymouth, the second Massachusetts colony, was established. And by 1629 Virginia had stabilized enough to have been chartered as a royal colony and used as a base from which to establish the province of Carolina in the land to the south, then Maryland to the north in 1632.

Meanwhile more and more New England colonies were popping up, but they were all generally smaller and were all sharing the Massachusetts bay, while Virginia (and Maryland) pretty much entirely controlled the much larger Chesapeake Bay. Plus the land in Virginia was generally better for farming, and the winter weather was considerably less extreme than it was further north, making it easier for colonists to not die as much.

There’s lots more that more qualified people could talk about but generally Virginia had the benefit of being first, being ideally and ultimately centrally located, being big, having an early population advantage, having an early trade and exploration advantage, having fertile land that made other states dependent on Virginian agriculture, having weather that wasn’t that deadly, and so on.