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Comment by beatpanda | Hacker News Reader

The thing that makes Silicon Valley a hotspot for tech is just a boatload of money controlled by people willing to put it into tech.

Literally any city could be "like silicon valley" if a bunch of rich people start a fund and hand out cash to people creating technology companies. Anything else is just window dressing.

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Its always been my opinion that not only are "entries" (funding) a necessary precondition, but also EXITS. Thats the magic momentum of SV; - Hordes of post-exit entrepreneurs funding the next generation of businesses and providing mentorship to the next generation of entrepreneurs. - A good number of capital sources who have had enough successes to keep rolling the dice.

Niklas Zennström of Skype founded Atomico, they're not bound to northern europe where they started, but they've been at it for ten years.

The king.com founders started Sweet Capital, which might be headquartered in Stockholm, but they obviously have an office in SV as well.

So even exit money from non-SV companies end up being reinvested in SV, instead of growing more non-SV companies, and that's just hard for other tech hubs to compete with.

Capital really is the big monopoly SV has vs. other places. I wonder if we'll see more geographic diversity as younger investors who are more comfortable with tele-work and tele-socialization get into investing. I feel like the next generation of angels and VCs might be more comfortable with a geographically diverse portfolio since they're more comfortable with actually using the Internet as opposed to just investing in it.

Don't discount execution though... I kinda see it as the chicken-egg issue -- that any city with a huge group of tech-smart people properly aligned (usual case: money) toward a good goal can make it another SV. Networking effects are huge in the startup scene -- smart people want to hang out with other smart/ambitious people and enjoy nice things and money only helps with that.

You also have to have people wanting to start businesses in that area. And you can't get that if people aren't free to start their own companies at night, while still maintaining their day job. Far too many of the places on the list still enforce draconian non-competes.

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