> The "next valley" will be highly decentralized and a lot of big cities will act as innovation hubs.I would like it if you were right, but I think you are discounting the critical factor of being able to be face-to-face with somebody. I live and work in Boston, and while it's not SF, I am within a forty-five minute public transit ride of most of my clients and almost everybody from whom I could conceive of needing a favor or an intro. Meeting a potential investor at a coffee shop because they had a few minutes and you happened to be in the area is the sort of thing you don't get with distributed communities, and as much as the I find the Valley to be personally kind of odious, that's an unmistakable advantage.
And this is a problem that technology, hype to the contrary, doesn't seem ready or able to fix. Video chat is not a solution. It may never be a solution. Being able to sit down and talk to somebody is not replaced by talking at a screen (and while I love the current crop of VR tech, I think it will be as effective as Second Life in terms of meaningful telepresence).