I agree that the most critical weakeness of Silicon Valley is real estate costs. I find it hard to imagine Beijing as a serious competitor though. If it were going to be anywhere in China I would expect it to be Shenzhen.

Shenzhen is a very different thing. It's important but not a challenger to SV. Huge startups come out of Beijing because it's the hub where the top students, founders, investors and regulators are.

If you look at Fortune's list of unicorns, 3 of the top 10 are in Beijing. As they build, they're strengthening the founder/techie/investor ecosystem in the city even further.

http://fortune.com/unicorns/

By that logic, Boston's Route 128 would have continued to be the "tech alley" of America. [1]

Just having the talent, a silicon valley doesn't make. Its about the culture of collaboration and openness.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/the-valley-of-my-dreams-wh...

And yet Boston has some of the highest real estate prices in the country these days. (Fortunately you can commute out of it easier than in the Bay Area.) The Tech world doesn't begin and end with web/social/mobile.

I'd say the Research Universities, Medical Technology, Robotics, and Travel Technology that comes out of Boston is significantly ahead of Silicon Valley.

Automotive and related tech is quite small even with Tesla in the bay area. The number of automotive technology jobs is quite small. Automation technology from cars is picking up, but I doubt the number of jobs is very high in comparison to Detroit, Stuttgart, or Nagoya

There are a lot more aerospace outside of Silicon Valley with Aerobus and Boeing having little presence in California.

Google is #3 in cloud technology compared to Seattle/Redmond with AWS and Azure with significant marketshare advantage.

Amazon is 45% marketshare in US for online commerce. Logistics technology for them is mainly built in Seattle and Boston. Not much for Amazon going on in Silicon Valley. Alexa not made in Silicon Valley.

I'm still quite surprised people still believe Silicon Valley + SF lead in technology.

The list still has Theranos at # 14. Is it still relevant?

Beijing? Right with the Great Firewall, it's a ridiculous place to run a tech company. With the air pollution it's a ridiculous place to live. I lived for many years in Shanghai but ultimately moved because it was nearly impossible to do anything tech related that relied on standard tools such as Github or marketing venues such as Facebook, etc.

Well there are tons of interesting tech work done in China, targeting only Chinese market though :) its a self contained market

I can walk around and pay for everything with my cellphone nowadays in China, but can't really do that in Bay Area.

> I can walk around and pay for everything with my cellphone nowadays in China, but can't really do that in Bay Area.

Is this really that interesting though? Tell me when they have self-driving cars that are affordable enough for ride sharing.

That's just an example that i find interesting enough, that quite a few US companies tried to solve, but still have a long way to go.

As for self-driving cars, Chinese companies like Baidu are not unlike Google, and they are investing/researching heavily in these fields. The only twist is that self-driving in China would be a lot harder to solve because the roads are a lot messy there :) At the same time, many of these companies directly invests in US companies as well

>That's just an example that i find interesting enough, that quite a few US companies tried to solve, but still have a long way to go.

Because it's not a technical problem. Nobody cares about the ability to pay with their phone in the US when a credit card works so well and doesn't have a battery that dies.

Android and Apple pay work perfectly fine but almost nobody in my tech circles feels the urge to use them, let alone normal citizens. The credit card infrastructure in the US is so prevalent and reliable that there needs to be some serious perks to unseat the dominance.

Spoken as the incumbent. Of course it's a technical problem, as least as much as other SV companies. Hard tech hasn't been the edge for SV for many decades and it's getting even less important today. All the big companies has tried to tackle payments, but with lackluster results. What's "perfectly fine" for the US isn't in most of the rest of the world. Some of the more prominent startups in the UK, Germany and Sweden are payment related exactly because SV is weak in this area. There's a great opportunity for Chinese companies here if they ever decide to go outside their own borders.

It's almost as if different places have different cultures, social norms, and ways of doing things. Nah. That couldn't be it.

I don't see how that is adding anything to the discussion. If you want to be the leader you actually have to lead. You have to be the one that figures out "the future" and have the solution people didn't know they wanted before other people do. The "perks" of mobile payments should be fairly obvious to anyone who has experienced it, I suspect you and the parent just aren't one of those people. No one is going to stop the US to remain dysfunctional in infrastructure, but it still has a price.

My (admittedly snarky) point was that there are clear differences between countries in their preferences for payment systems that can't be chalked up to "dysfunctional infrastructure." And it's not a US vs. rest of world thing. Even across Europe there are clear differences in cash vs. debit card vs. credit card vs. etc. acceptance. And stored value cards (for use outside of transit systems) seems mostly to be an Asian thing. I have certainly used mobile phone payments in Europe where chip without PIN can sometimes be a bit of a pain because it's not part of the normal checkout process. In the US, I find just using a credit card is a bit easier even if I know a store accepts mobile payments.

Something like WeChat really isn't like cards though. It's more like cash, cards and bank transfers in one. Like if most everyone would accept Paypal for everything without fees and it was integrated everywhere (web, store, phone, chat etc).

Real estate costs in Shenzhen rose dramatically as well. It's not much better than Beijing now

What YC has to do - is classical very very early Symptom Ecosystem dissolution.i.e. SV (i know its too early to say so). Its very hard to disrupt such woven ecosystem due to inherent resiliency and there is higher chances it will survive but this is unprecedented . I checked few VC twitter feeds, they are leaning towards Canada ,very early ,very slow but still unprecedented.Networks are strong as long as the inflection point. One can watch this video i attached here to understand how ecosystem fails without the participation from value serving members and how quickly it may :by the way this is all facts checked. Here is vedio how ecosystems are fragile : http://bit.ly/2mqDdjf .

If there is a move of any importance into Canada (doubtful to me as a Canadian) it will not be to Vancouver with its outrageous real estate prices, and very few tech companies, but to the Greater Toronto/Hamilton area, which is where 90% of these types of businesses are. Amazon, Google, and IBM are all already here or around here [Google is in Kitchener/Waterloo]. Apple is here for sales/marketing only (at least when my worked there 6-7 years ago).

Facebook and EA have presence in Vancouver, and Amazon has some there, too. But I get the impression that Facebook and Amazon are merely interested in using Vancouver as a 'feeder' office for getting candidates long run into their Seattle offices.

In any case, the wages are lower here which means talent still continues to emigrate. Also -- the weather. I work for Google Waterloo and I suspect there are far more Canadians working for Google in Mountain View than there are here in our largest Canadian office.

I wouldn't underestimate the advantage that being on the West Coast provides.

Because?

I don't see Vancouver "happening" (at least not more than it already is). Being similar to places like Seattle or SF isn't a good thing if you want to compete with them, because you'll always end up behind them in a comparison.

Personally, I grew up on the west coast and would much rather go to another west coast city.

Toronto/Montreal is still much closer to large US populations in the US north east than Vancouver is to the US south west.

Timezones compared to Toronto for one

I generally agree with most of what you said and yeah, the weather and salaries are generally what attracts people to the bay area. You also get the bonus of being around the brightest folks from around the world and that provides great mentorship opportunities.

As the other child comment on your post said, I think it would be wise to consider how important Vancouver's more mild weather and being in the same timezone as SV would be beneficial for those looking to move out of the US.

> You also get the bonus of being around the brightest folks from around the world and that provides great mentorship opportunities

This is actually the biggest advantage for me. I moved to the Bay Area after school because I am a technical person, but stayed because of the culture (capital and lowercase) and the large numbers of very smart people. Have lived in NYC and Bremen, but the Bay is home. While the money and weather are great, it really is ready availability of top-tier folks. (In a coffee shop on Mission St., I literally tripped over a person I later came to realize is probably the single most accomplished programmer in a particular domain, not to mention a great person to talk art with.)

It's a little bit "сonspiratorially" from my side, but I feel like high real estate prices is a feature, not a bug - without it potential founders can have more resources to bootstrap and less dependency on VC - but when your personal budget is being eaten just by rent/cost of life - you have no other choice but to raise money

When adjusting for average income, Beijing is the most expensive city in the world.