That makes no sense. Did Gordon Moore have insufficient job security at Fairchild, so be went and founded Intel? Startup founders are disproportionately from the upper middle class—people who have plenty of security in the US.
> Consider also that inside the United States many places have already tried to imitate SV and it didn't work there either, and yet, the economic, political and social conditions were identical.
Other places in the US can’t imitate SV because of freedom of movement. There are zero barriers to relocating from any part of the US to any other part. So people who want to do a certain kind of tech startup relocate to SV to maximize their chances. The economic and social conditions in the rest of the country don’t really matter. (Which is why government efforts to try and become the next SV are destined to fail.)
Why is American country music concentrated in Nashville? The musicians are from everywhere, (but they move to Nashville). The major record labels are in New York or LA, and so is the capital. What’s special about Nashville?
Silicon Valley and Nashville are best understood as markets. They’re markets for connecting capital to talent. If you want to sell your startup idea (or music act) to investors you go to where the biggest market is, for the same reason you sell your used laptop on eBay instead of somewhere else.
SV is all about critical mass, and you're pointing (probably not coincidentally) at the exact point in time where that ball started rolling downhill.
Exactly, although the people you're describing are just the founders. There are people in the startup scene who're employees, and for them, getting and keeping a job at a startup for a couple of years, say, is a good enough launchpad for their careers in the industry.
And there's a surplus of such people that needs to be employed. We're experiencing a glut of highly educated people worldwide and academia simply doesn't have the capacity to absorb them. I think I've read on HN recently that there's more funding for startups than academia overall -- and of course I can't find it again -- but here's an actual comment from HN just two years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15380625
>Of the cohort of PhD students I went through with, from a rough guess (I haven't taken exact count), the most common role is now "startup CEO", followed by "engineer at enviable company", followed only then by "teaching and research academic".
Startups are the new academia.
Aka risk taking. For SWEs clearly they've got job security, otherwise they wouldn't do it. Founders are usually well connected and have enough of a cushion to land safely if the startup crashes. Either way there's plenty of job security in SV.
> I'm in agreement with the exception of the word 'correct'.
I'll agree with you also! Unique is better.
> Consider also that inside the United States many places have already tried to imitate SV and it didn't work there either, and yet, the economic, political and social conditions were identical.
What? There's so much variance just between cities, let alone states. These things are not equally distributed across the US.
The glut of capital and the conditions that shaped Silicon Valley will likely not be paired again for the foreseeable future. That won't stop governments from trying by supplying one part of that equation.
If you want to take a healthy startup scene to prove that your country has the 'correct economic, political and social conditions' then I'm in agreement with the exception of the word 'correct', they are not so much correct as unique and replicating those conditions will come at a price that very few countries and their inhabitants would be willing to pay.
Consider also that inside the United States many places have already tried to imitate SV and it didn't work there either, and yet, the economic, political and social conditions were identical.