I’m surprised you missed “weather” and “sunlight”.

California’s weather is famously pretty good depending on location and preferences. More interesting to me is actually “how many sunny days are there”. Wikipedia has a list of cities by sunlight hours across a range of months [1]. San Francisco is quite sunny, and gets about 3000 hours per year. By contrast, Seattle is 2169 and has a pretty brutal cloudy period, if you care about this.

Total sunlight hours aren’t themselves what matters, because I’m not saying Tucson is a strict improvement. There’s some sort of threshold though for which each person says “this place is depressing” (see also Seasonal Affective Disorder [2]).

There are places that are pretty similar though: Barcelona, Lisbon, Rome, and probably others. They’ve historically faltered on a lot of “could be duplicated” items on your list. My bet is on Barcelona, as the most likely to break out.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_sunshine_d...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_affective_disorder

Redwood City's old entrance sign used to read 'Climate Best By Government Test' after all.

Did they take it down? (I used to see it when taking Caltrain, and I swear it said this as recently as ... 2013?)

Ocean access, proximity to Asia, and natural spaces are found up and down the entire West Coast. Access to nature is considerably better in Seattle than the Bay Area, for example. Most world-class universities on the West Coast are in California but Washington also has one.

The main advantage of California, from a tech perspective, is its large and mature ecosystem, which isn't intrinsic. San Diego does have uniquely perfect weather but that does not extend to the rest of the State and no one goes to San Diego for tech.

I would add parental leave, sick leave, overtime after 8 hours, requiring employees be able to sit, anti-SLAPP laws, assisted suicide, and a few other quality of life improvements at work to the list of things that can be duplicated elsewhere.

Several of those points, notably, “Mature, developed capital ecosystem”, is why Vancouver hasn’t developed into Canada’s SV.

Vancouver also has a pretty high cost of living from Chinese capital flight into real estate, no? Haven't been up there in a while.

IMHO, people think about the nature of capital ecosystems incompletely.

Why haven't other places duplicated SF / LA's ecosystems?

Not because they couldn't, but because they couldn't be better enough to justify the move.

However, "better" and "enough" are relative terms. If SF & LA are executing well, that's an insurmountable barrier due to network effects. But if SF & LA decrease their competitiveness, the relative difference also decreases.

And at some threshold, it does become possible for other cities to capture that business, network effects be damned.

One thing that other commenters may have not mentioned is the illegality of non-compete clauses in employment contracts. You can just ship yourself across the street to the competitor anytime you fell like it. That's not something that VA or TX has. And it's not just tech jobs that benefit from it. All people in CA enjoy that right and often flaunt it.

Aside: One thing that I've often wondered about is how Detroit pulled it all off. MI wasn't the friendliest state in terms of unions or weather back in the day. I've heard that the Miracle Mile was a big generator of Detroit's success as a lab of automotive fail-fast, but I've not thought that as the whole picture. Any good resources?

Virginia has everything from both lists, except for proximity to Asia.

One crucial item is not listed - weather. For people who migrate from all over the world, including places with even better weather, CA weather is a happy compromise. It is sunny for much of the year, there is rain in the spring months, the air is dry, and temperatures rarely swing to extremes.

Virginia certainly doesn't have that.

What's VA's stance on enforcing non-compete agreements? This seemingly innocuous thing really accounts for a lot of the Bay Area's success. Innovative, fabulously successful companies have been repeatedly founded and nurtured here because of the cross-pollination of ideas and competition engendered by CA's refusal to honor non-competes.

VA has a couple things going for it, as far as I can tell:

- Plentiful network connectivity and data centers (many east-coast data centers are sited in a couple spots in VA).

- A large government sector, including many agencies that are tasked with technical work for the federal government, and the educated workforce that goes with it. Perhaps it's a double-edged sword: the region is a bit too dependent on Government largesse. What is interesting is that most no-one talks about how the Federal Government has played an outsize role in nurturing nascent technology innovations and companies (via government contracts and outright funding via In-Q-Tel and such) in the Bay Area. It goes very much against the current ethos of employee activism against DoD projects. In this respect, the Bay Area and VA share a similarity.

Virginia does not have many of the things from both lists. Especially not a ban on non competes or even a fraction of the other pro labor laws.

I have family in the Northern Neck. Virginia definitely sees winter weather California doesn't!

But on the other hand, it does have proximity to DC...

Am surprised you didn't mention climate.

You mean the climate that is regularly on fire these days?

I think last year's Bay Area fires that blotted out the Sun for weeks have made a big impression on folks outside of the Bay Area (there's no doubt that Valley residents also got a rude awakening from that). Fires are a regular feature of life every summer, in every populated point along the coast in CA. Last year's fires were truly an aberration in that they burned huge swathes of Santa Cruz, which sits in close proximity to the valley proper: it's just over the ridgeline of the mountains that form the western and southern edges of the Valley.

In most years, the Valley barely sees any disruption from forest fires (although people who live on the periphery will disagree with me here).

Last year's fires have definitely cast a shadow over what the future holds, particularly for folks who have chosen to live in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The biggest disadvantage for SC people was a mildly inconvenient and somewhat dangerous drive down Highway 17 for access to SV proper, versus the advantage of beach access and housing that was a shade more reasonable in its cost. That equation has now changed, perhaps irrevocably, because of the fires of last year.

> Last year's fires were truly an aberration.

And, as climate change continues to get worse, they'll eventually be seen as unremarkable.

Mild climate