Around 2001, a cohort of recent grads was working on an obscure experimental thing at Microsoft that never went anywhere. Half of the group went to Mountain View, and half stayed in Redmond. The first half are all millionaires now, and the second half are just well-off.

You can look at this from many directions. Did the natural hustlers hustle their way to Google, while the naturally complacent stayed put? Did the Googlers just go there because that's where their friends went, or because they thought it was cool? Did the Mountain View people catch the fever after the fact, and become hustlers, while the Redmond people absorbed the relatively relaxed culture there? Did everyone just go where they thought was best and then it turned out one of those places was saturated in money?