The Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the US Heartland: Steve Case | Hacker News Reader

The Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the US Heartland: Steve Case

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41 pointsmikece113 comments

About 3 years ago I left Silicon Valley after being there for 15 years. I moved to the suburbs outside of another major US city, near where I grew up. I had already been working remote, and especially during the pandemic it felt like a relatively future-proof decision to be outside of the SV network.

Frankly, now I'm not so sure I was right. No other place in the US (maybe in the world) has the amount and magnitude of technical talent and know-how, access to capital, or strength of network to compete with SV right now. Spend some time in SF, or Palo Alto, or Mountain View, and it's immediately obvious. Go to a cafe and people will be talking about tech. Your neighbor is probably in tech. Drive along the highway and you'll see billboards for tech products, and tech office buildings along the highway. Tech is deeply ingrained in the culture, top to bottom.

There is no other place in the US that is like this and the gap for SV is still only accelerating.

The billboards in San Francisco off Hwy 80 and Hwy 101 never cease to surprise me. I'll ask my wife, who was a middle school teacher, what a "Datadog" or "Salesforce" is and she never knows (or cares, which is fair enough). The tech culture is so ingrained that even the non-techies are oblivious to how deeply rooted it is.

I remember flying into San Jose airport for the first time and the posters weren't advertising restaurants, hotels, and tourist destinations but enterprise routers and firewalls.

Barracuda!

I've only been through Silicon Valley a handful of times, and the signage was one of the most striking things for me too. It's just an immediately visible indicator that the place is an outlier. I think, "wow, the density of software industry architects and executives and investors is so high here that it makes more sense to put up a billboard for them than one for consumers."

The only other place where I've seen something similar is in Washington, DC, where you'll get advertisements on the Metro for things like fighter jet engines, apparently aimed at congressional staffers and Defense Department executives.

If I had a dollar for every article about "the next silicon valley", I would be a VC myself by now...

Agreed. There’s a local area where some type of people refer to it as SV. It’s really bunch of satellite sales offices trying to hype things up.

Unless a lot of areas become a lot more hospitable to immigrants, it is very unlikely that they will become the next Silicon Valley —- or next anything really.

When you look at places like Ohio, for instance, that have been stagnating for decades, a huge reason for it is that the population of Ohio was once representative of the country and has increasingly become older and whiter than the general U.S. population. This is because very few people are moving to Ohio — immigrants and others from other parts of the country. Ohio has one of the highest rates of residents born in the state, which is a recipe for stagnation.

Say what you will about Silicon Valley, but it has long been a place where dreamers and immigrants could mix. Heartland cities and states that embrace immigration and net inflows of residents could very well become the next something. But that has to come first.

FTA :

I believe that if America loses its way and ceases to be the most innovative, entrepreneurial nation in the world, the most likely cause will be not having an immigration policy that is as welcoming to people as it has been for the past couple of centuries.

I doubt it. Look at the period from 1920-1960. Extremely entrepreneurial, extremely innovative, and tight immigration controls.

The talent is largely already here.

Considering many of that period were born from immigrants it's hard to make that argument.

It isn't black and white.

Children of immigrants are the real difference makers. They natively speak the language and understand the culture but also have the "immigrant" mentality instilled in them by their parents.

The periods where America was most globally dominant were not the periods where it’s immigration policy was most lax, if anything, the opposite is true.

Exactly. These young people have no idea what they are talking about and don't know American history at all, except what they've been propagandized to think. Immigration policy used to be very locked down, and now we have foreign agents encouraging our government to let them flood in unchecked.

As an immigrant who has been all around this country, I don't think it's the lack of hospitality to immigrants that keeps them away from places like Ohio. Immigrants don't go there for the same reason native-born Americans aren't moving there (and in fact, Ohio is a net exporter of domestic migration) -- it's perceived as not having economic opportunities.

Your cause and effect seems reversed; that is, Ohio is older and whiter because people have been moving out, and not that people are avoiding Ohio because it is older and whiter.

What data are you referencing? According to US Census Bureau, the diversity index in Ohio is up ~6%.

Diversity Index (61.1%, up from 54.9%).

Race and ethnicity (White alone 61.6%; Black alone 12.4%; Hispanic 18.7%; Asian alone 6%; American Indian and Alaska Native alone 1.1%; Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone 0.2%; Some Other Race alone 8.4%; Two or More Races 10.2%).

Born and raised in Ohio, not even in one of the 3 big cities. Child of a non-white immigrant. Grew up being friends with many other children of immigrants who have willingly stayed there. I left because the good tech jobs were on the west coast, not because I felt unwelcome. With crime and homelessness disproportionately increasing in the major coastal cities, I'd seriously consider a move back to the midwest at this point.

I think this whole west coast trope of the midwest being a bunch of insular unwelcoming old white people is overblown.

Well, I am a white guy from the Cleveland area. I do have a good sense of what northeast Ohio is like. I haven't lived there in 15 years, but I do visit several times a year. The amount of negative change in Ohio in that time is staggering. Columbus and a few other parts of the state may be doing well, but much of the state is in decay.

I don't think Ohio is unwelcoming from a people perspective, although around where I grew up is MAGA central, so I am not sure that it is super welcoming to immigrants or people who aren't white and straight. The people are generally friendly when they know you.

The politicians, however, are fairly insane, and since I left the state, they have allowed guns in preschools, outlawed abortion, blocked intracity rail to connect to their major cities (and don't invest in infrastructure beyond sprawl), have continued to hollow out their cities for almost exclusively sprawl building, etc. There is very little emphasis from Ohio policymakers on creating policy and infrastructure to attract people.

One big area that Ohio has cut in recent decades is higher education funding. What is a great way to attract immigrants and startups? Higher education spending. Research universities, in particular, foster and help create startups. This is one of California's secrets. An elite state research university in or near Cleveland would probably be a much better way to invest in the state than what policymakers have been doing.

In short, the people of Ohio are generally friendly if they know you, but the state isn't doing anything to attract immigrants or people from other parts of the country.

I selfishly hope that the software industry will continue its geographic diffusion and not be centered in any particular physical place anymore. I think it's possible, under the right conditions, to foster the same culture in virtual spaces, and I hope it happens.

Somewhere, Mark Zuckerberg is rubbing his hands and grinning devilishly whispering "soon..."

There are few reasons why Silicon Valley is successful:

1) weather (no tornados, no super humid days, no snow)

2) proximity of great places (Lake Tahoe, Monterey, Napa valley, …)

3) good universities (Berkeley, standford, UCSF, …)

4) immigrants (especially south asian) are more welcome

5) big companies like Salesforce, Google, Facebook, etc.

6) support network: it is ok to be poor entrepreneur and hassle even you are bad at that.

I do not know …

California’s non compete ban and laws protecting personal IP from employer’s claims.

7) diversity (not just about immigrants — age, culture, political, philosophical, work style, gender, ability) has unspoken benefits beyond the ones that are usually touted.

The diversity of Silicon Valley is very enticing not only for companies who just repeat the word as a marketing buzzword while not necessarily comprehending what it gives them (a lot), but also for young engineers, male and female, in their social lives, and having a huge diverse pool of potential partners to meet and mix with is something that appeals to our strongest drives as humans, and no dreary place is going to compete.

It also creates a comfort zone for creative people of all types and backgrounds, not only for their work, but also for their life outside of work and the lives of their family members, some of whom may actually have opinions about where they want to live.

It's hard to look at typical Silicon Valley workplace or the broader society around it and say that there is diversity of culture, political viewpoints, and philosophy.

Agree... The diversity runs about skin deep and that's it. Most people in their 20s and 30s are still children of rich/UMC parents. Very few people I have met in SV are from lower class families.

Socioeconomically - it's a wildly monolithic culture. Extremely capitalistic as well to where many people cannot fathom anything that doesn't fall outside the purview of capitalism because they've been taken so strongly by it and it's all they've ever known. You run into plenty of leftists/communists/socialists and what not too but they have no power or positions of authority... Usually just ICs or random people around Berkeley.

Young engineers don't move here because they want to date someone in a position of power or authority. They move here because they can work with, and date, interesting and attractive people.

I'd agree that the diversity of economic backgrounds seems limited. Although I'd caution that people tend to attempt to hide parts of their background they feel will make others and themselves uncomfortable, so your perception may be skewed by that.

They most likely move there either because some company offered them a pile of money or they want to start a company and there's more funding there.

Precisely. "It's the economy, stupid". Among the employed and single in Silicon Valley, estimates are that there are three men for every two. It's an awful place to date, even beside the fact that nobody moves anywhere for the dating pool.

If there were a ton of high-paying tech jobs in Chicago that needed people to be local, a whole lot of people would buy a down coat and gloves and just deal with the weather, lack of nearby mountains etc.

I like the Bay Area. I'm even going there on a trip in a couple of days. But, at the end of the day, most people aren't basing where they live on the climate and recreational options (though those may make a difference at the margin).

Yeah I would say so. South Asian immigrants are very welcome, huge respect (fear even) for IIT graduates. Like yes the H1B visa system sucks, but it's indentured servitude essentially (not slavery, I ate at a restaurant with literal slaves like they stole their passports human trafficking, it was a rip-off too, that owner was shit to everybody in sight). H1B is akin to actual indentured servitude where whites paid for travel to America (like traveling to the Moon) and then committed to working for 7 years for the privilege. And there were rules on both sides, there were obligations for both, subordination for one but liability for the other, not very different from apprenticeship (it could be an apprenticeship), huge opportunity, and frankly not that many complaints overall, given the circumstances. Never heard horror stories, though obviously there are some. H1B is that. There are H1B horror stories, but come on they're more sought after than American citizens generally. Well in the military-industrial complex, there is a priority on citizenship, but somehow I never applied for a job there. Just didn't occur to me...well one time, they shunned because my resume got destroyed in a lynching and subsequent torture. In particular standing up to torture, employers sense that like veteran discrimination basically. But I applied to very few jobs, because of being like conditioned or something not to. Not capable, guess I should have spammed. Despite applying to many universities (not crazy for the time, but 7, on the high end, more work), and having good game in the dating market. I still can't transfer good game into actual money like eg sales, or networking, no idea why...can't make the necessary adjustments, at least not yet.

I'm looking back on any discrimination against South Asians...I don't know. Well for one thing, one interesting loophole in discrimination, is that there is white guilt about discrimination, as a group they know it to be wrong and they don't like carrying it out in abstract. When there is a stereotype-breaker, they go for it completely. So Asia lies north of the equator, meaning South Asians lie closest to the equator, more light but also more heat meaning less clothing more exposure to light, so what do you get? Darker skin, particularly in Sri Lanka. Born under an equatorial sun, as Harriet Beecher Stowe put it in Uncle Tom's Cabin. So the deal is they are dermatologically dark, like Fitsch type 5 (a scale from 1 to 6 measuring skin darkness and tanning in response to sunlight, not truly synonymous but close enough to be useful), but they're Indoeuropean, always known to be the same language group as eg the English and Norse. Known kinship, and the intent was to accept them, and they invented 0 come on, super smart great at chess invented that too.

So by now the desire in principle to accept them in combination with them working like crazy--the most basic way to hack discrimination--and in addition, outpacing other minorities in certain fields--like there was a blogger on Wall Street who talked about being East Asian on Wall Street, and compared it to being South Asian saying it was rough because there were I think no managing directors (MD's as they're called) on Wall Street that were breakaway successes. Whereas there were South Asians there were. (I think Indians, the article said BSD Big Swinging Desi, meaning Indian, vulgar yes Wall Street can be vulgar, dude it's all about alpha), and it maps out to what I saw when I was picking which tournament I would enter (another option was chess, I chose algorithms instead). It's a way for whites to not judge based on the color of people's skins. And further in Freakonomics an Indian sociologist did some polls in housing projects, ended up not getting killed because while not African he was dark too, not black, like in a gray area. OK they considered him gray. So that's how he was privy to the economics of the street drug market, and the tournament aspect of it.

It's basically 1 and 5. Plenty of places have 2, 3, 4 (despite what people on the West coast tell themselves), and I'm not even sure what 6 is supposed to mean.

For all the soul-searching about why Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley, the overwhelming reason is because once you have a successful base for an up and coming industry, you will win by default moving forward. Once Silicon Valley became the initial bed for tech, tech talent moved there for the jobs, and new tech companies move their to follow the tech talent. Its a virtuous (or vicious for everyone else) cycle. That's it. Virtually every other reason is looking for patterns where non-exists.

The weather certainly helps, but I feel like that is more of a post-fact justification than an actual cause. People want to tell themselves that paying out the nose for a closet with 4 roommates in San Francisco is worth it because the rest of the US is a hellscape with weather unfit for human life. It's not, and with climate change, the California weather is becoming less and less attractive.

There may never be an "next" Silicon Valley other that Silicon Valley. But it won't be for any reason other than being a Mecca for an industry is reason enough to sustain itself.

Can you please tell me which places have 2, 3, and 4?

Im just trying expland my views and maybe visit them.

North Carolina easily fits the bill. Great outdoors, proximity to good universities, fairly diverse, at least in some of the major metros. A lot of places in the Great Lakes region are similar. Some of the nations best universities are in and around Chicago, Michigan, Pittsburgh, etc. Particularly in the cities, diversity is fair to high (Chicago, Minneapolis, etc). And much of the Great Lakes region is highly underrated from an outdoor perspective, particularly Michigan, and support year-round outdoor activities like beaches, hiking, skiing/snowboarding, sailing, biking, etc.

I knew you will mentioned North Carolina :) Will definetelly try to visit it.

Regarding Chicago and Michigan: I have to say “nope”. California is way way nicer to visit. There nothing even remotely similar to Palm Springs. Or Monterey bay. Or Joshua Tree. And I did have a couple of ackward situations with people saying “go back to your country” as way to start some disagreement.

North Carolina fits. As a native chicagoan I can tell you that the weather and proximity to interesting places is pretty damn bad. The midwest is flat as hell and generally the landscape is very similar throughout. Skiing in michigan is a joke, there's pretty much nothing to do outside during the winter.

los Angeles, san Diego, phoenix

After staying in SV for close to 2 decades and evaluating various other places to move to, I have ultimately chosen to remain in SV for the following reasons:

1. Decent weather - no snow, wind, storms. This is changing recently with wildfires, so may not last for long.

2. Density of tech talent - no matter what niche tech you are interested in, you will always find techies interested in that niche in SF - San Jose - Oakland triangle.

3. Job opportunities - there are actually 4 subfactors here. One is cultural - if your current gig fails for whatever reason, no one will look down upon you. Second - a new job can be found very soon, since you can compete with remote-first jobs with the added advantage of having exclusive access to companies insisting on RTO. Third - you have a variety of opportunities available, from pre-seed stage startups to behemoths. Fourth - if you are married to a non-techie like me, your partner can also find a new job relatively easily if they have to, compared to a lot of cheaper places where there were no non-tech lucrative jobs available. This was actually a surprising bottleneck for us when evaluating different places.

4. Immigration friendly - as a non-white immigrant, SFBA is a very welcoming place. That is not an exclusive advantage since any big city can compete on that front these days, but it also rules out a lot of cheaper places for us where it will be hard to integrate socially.

5. Non-competes - seriously, this is one of the biggest advantage of California for employees. I do not want additional constraints on my job mobility.

I think it's really as simple as having a big company hitting a giant IPO that creates wealthy individuals who go on to invest in smaller up and coming startups. E.g. Seattle has Amazon and Microsoft, Bay Area has Meta, Google, etc.

More importantly, the Bay Area has Stanford and Berkley pouring out new grads each year, a lot of them stick around.

If that were even remotely true then Silicon Valley would already be in Bentonville, Arkansas.

There are a ton of programmers in Bentonville, AR. I know some of them. The needs of Walmart are narrow, so it's not going to be the skunkworks-lousy valley, but for what Walmart does, it creates a community of IT contractors.

That's not what pyrito said, though. Pyrito claimed that the necessary and sufficient condition is a critical mass of rich people, a fairly doctrinaire application of "trickle down" economic theory. But we can see quite clearly that the Waltons, despite being fairly numerous, close in geographic proximity, and unbelievably rich, haven't triggered a Silicon Valley-like phenomenon.

I would be surprised to learn the Waltons actually live and spend much of their time in Arkansas.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-27/welcome-t...

Interesting! I assumed the kids or at least grandkids would have moved out.

This is what happened in Waterloo, Ontario with Blackberry. Of course the tech scene there is no where near as large as a SV and a couple others, but it's still weirdly big and concentrated given the size of the surrounding city. Every mid to large tech company in that area has a decent size cohort of ex-blackberry people.

Is it possible that the cause and effect are reversed? I thought RIM was established in Waterloo because Waterloo was already by that time a Silicon-Valley-like (or at least Pittsburgh-like) tech hub.

That could definitely be partly the case! After reconsidering it's definitely not fair to attribute the regions success entirely to RIM. It also probably has a lot to do with the University of Waterloo, which (being much more recently founded than other Canadian universities) has always had more forward thinking STEM programs and faculty, and also has much better IP protection for students than other schools in the area.

If you make a location unlivable, people won't live there in the future.

Conversely if there's a place that people visit for vacations, people will live there in the future.

> If you make a location unlivable, people won't live there in the future.

Yep

> Conversely if there's a place that people visit for vacations, people will live there in the future.

What.

The population of tropical islands, ski-resort towns, and Paris beg to differ.

Both of those statements are true of Venice.

>Conversely if there's a place that people visit for vacations, people will live there in the future.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/10/venetians-veni...

> if there's a place that people visit for vacations, people will live there in the future

meanwhile, in the real world:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-06-30/venice-is...

I think people need to understand the history of Silicon Valley to see why you need an ethos that comes from individuals

Not just a cluster of tech companies and VCs, which is already a high bar

An area needs a concentration of people made wealthy there, who have to be interested in becoming VCs right there. the state needs the same unenforceability of noncompete laws as california at a bare minimum. dumb things have to be heavily funded all the time, repeatedly, with little scrutiny. high profile failures have to occur.

You also need a culture of supporting non-conformists.

A culture where children are socialized into believing that things must only be done in a certain way because that's how it's always been done and doing it differently not just makes you immoral but makes you a bad person will invariably reduce the number of kids who will grow up trying to "think differently" when solving problems.

To an extent, but considering how well the Provo/SLC axis is doing in Utah, that doesn't seem to be a necessity.

God, what a nauseating read. I understand promoting companies in different parts of the country outside of the valley - as remote work has become a more realistic and desired thing among engineers, I think investors risk neglecting talent outside of their tiny little bubble.

But pining for, or attempting to establish, a new SV is ridiculous, and doesn't consider the history of things at all. Artificially creating a centralized hub of industry (which already has several centralized hubs) will do nothing but drive up living costs and make it harder for anyone not in STEM to live there. More realistically, this idea will fail altogether and these "investors" will have to settle for small, corn-fed cities with a few tech companies that they can own minority shares in.

These people already got their gold rush, why isn't that enough for them?

It's already in Shenzhen.

It was going to be, but the CCP seems determined to deprive their innovative companies of oxygen and happy to make state controlled companies the favorites.

That is only relevant if you assume state-owned enterprises can't innovate.

SV started off doing work for the military. Manhattan Project was an "state enterprise", so was sending people to the moon. If a state owned sector is deemed strategic, and we can sleep soundly knowing that China definitely considers information technologies (h/w, infra, s/w, ai) as strategic, it generally does well in competent nations.

The fact of stagnating sectors in planned and/or centralized economies always seems to boil down to self-defeating incentives, possibly merely as one symptom of general bureaucratic malaise. To wit, no one had to dangle the incentive of wealth in front of the exceptionally capable men and women who were active in research and development in US in the heydays of the cold war. The nongeek (mostly military) people who shepherded cagey super smart people like Feynman apparently went through a trial and error phase before they figured out how to manage them. And lucky for the creative types, the bureaucracy involved was very much aligned with them in finding super cool new things. That's why we have DARPA. If China has its own version of DARPA, they clearly have the brains, and Chinese are if nothing else exceptionally creative people, with a proven historic track record of hacking. What ailed them historically was a bureaucracy that failed to see in, or obtain strategic benefit from, the inventions.

-Bureaucracies have been a problem to date- for humanity. (Even clerics can be conceptually viewed as 'ministry of god' bureaucrats, which is precisely what most of them are.) We haven't cracked this nut yet and imho it is an important one that is impeding human progress: we need them to get things done at large scale and in continuity, but they inevitably end up being the tail that wags the dog of society and state. The problem is of course the human in the equation (knowledge base, specialized language, meta-interactions) makes them impervious to correctives and purges. Possibly AI will finally help us get over this structural hump.

Hotelling's law and Nash equilibrium can partially explain why so many "next silicon valleys" haven't panned out. It's also interesting that the valley is in a jurisdiction with such pro-employee laws.

For the purposes of having the next Silicon Valley, I'd wager the salient factor is pro-competition laws (such as California's ban on noncompetes), not pro-employee laws. It's virtually guaranteed that if California adopted French labor laws -- which are at least nominally very pro-employee -- and made hiring and firing burdensome, Silicon Valley will stagnate and many of those companies will go elsewhere.

Wouldn't Hotelling's law just predict that wannabe-SVs would try to copy every aspect of the original SV? I don't see how that alone explains their failure.

I'd attribute the difficulty of creating the next SV partially to capital/talent concentration being a coordination game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordination_game) - for any individual small developer, entrepreneur or investor, it makes sense to go where they have the best chances to thrive.

Rule of thumb: when you hear about any X as "the next Y", or "the Y of Z", it's fairly safe to assume that Y is in better shape than the commenters would have you think.

The objective evidence for Tulsa, Oklahoma having "quite strong momentum" is extremely poor. They are still paying people to move to Tulsa. There are still fewer jobs in Tulsa than there were in 1990, in the same 30 years that employment in Austin has tripled, and employment in Seattle has doubled.

https://tulsaremote.com/

[doubt]

if i were to bet, it'll be on a different continental plate

You need colleges.

You want the next Silicon Valley, pump money into the CS programs of area colleges.

And unfortunately, your best universities are not in the heartland and very few in red states. Silicon Valley has the luxury of educational centers, as well as large tech firms that can be used to seed the area with talent they create and attract. You would be hard pressed to find such a confluence of actors in the heartland.

You can argue the "best" point I guess but there are all the large state schools (which can give a very good education if you seek it out), Purdue, Notre Dame, University of Chicago... But probably more around the great lakes than further south.

Carnegie-Mellon, UIUC, Michigan/Ann Arbor, University of Wisconsin/Madison, Northwestern, Ohio State...

Purdue is great, but it's in Indiana and the social policies will continue to disincentivize both workers and investors. a quick list of reasons not to locate in Indian: * abortion ban * no renter protection * strict non-compete's allowed * school funding keeps getting worse

Well, it doesn't seem to be keeping a lot of companies and people from heading to Texas, especially Austin.

Austin is relatively close to California. Both Texas and California have huge populations. What does Indiana have?

Indianapolis is a three hour drive from Chicago which is the third most populous city in the US. Whereas Austin is over 1,000 miles from SF. (Once you're getting in a plane anyway, 1K miles vs. 2K miles doesn't make much of a difference.)

It has brutal winters compared to Austin.

For me, Austin's summers are brutal. Lots of people live in northern states where it snows. You get used to it. I would not in general make a decision about a job based on the weather.

Why not?

Why would anyone not consider climate when deciding on a place they'll be living?

Climate and geography are basically my number 2 and 3 for deciding on where to live, because I like to spend time outside. Number 1 is obviously security of shelter and other resources, including income to procure them.

Well, you may not want to live in Chicago for other reasons. (It wouldn't be my first choice.) But you certainly can have cities with snow that have a lot of recreational opportunities like in New England, Colorado, etc. But that may just be me accustomed to the fact that it will be cold and snowy at certain times of the year so I need to dress properly and have the right equipment to go out.

Sure, and I tried that. But I also tried only ever having to wear a hoodie or long sleeve shirt and I liked that more.

I also disliked having to deal with freezing temperatures and what the freeze/melt cycles do to basically every material, as well as road/sidewalk treatments like salt and other chlorides.

Austin summers are far worse than Indiana winters.

Austin is no where near California. I'm not sure how anyone could even come to such a conclusion. It's literally a 1800 mile drive to San Francisco. Major US cities that Indianapolis is closer to than Austin is to Silicon Valley:

- Atlanta

- Austin

- Boston

- Chicago

- Cincinnati

- Charlotte

- Dallas

- DC

- Denver

- Houston

- Miami

- Nashville

- NYC

- Philadelphia

- Phoenix

- Pittsburg

- Salt Lake City

I think they meant philosophically, not geographically.

Strict non-competes being allowed is probably the only factor that really matters there.

Jurisdictions that favor renters almost universally have higher rents and a poorer experience for normal renters who don't cause damage and pay rent on time. If you compare the average rents in Indiana[0], which is well known to favor the rights of property owners, against some states with roughly comparable population densities that are well known to favor the rights of renters, like Vermont[1] or Delaware[2], you can see that Indiana is only about 80% of the other two.

The near-total ban on abortion in Indiana is misguided and I believe local voters will move in a more moderate direction sooner or later, but you'll find that social matters generally do not hold as much sway as economic matters.

[0]: https://www.rentdata.org/states/indiana/2021

[1]: https://www.rentdata.org/states/vermont/2021

[2]: https://www.rentdata.org/states/delaware/2021

>Strict non-competes being allowed is probably the only factor that really matters there.

And, honestly, while this can be a big deal in other states--especially if you want to start a competing business--there seems to sometimes be a belief that people don't change jobs in other states. I've worked pretty much my whole career in Massachusetts and non-competes have never been an issue. The one time I had to sign one after an acquisition, it was reasonably scoped.

Mass has very recently, over long-time resistance from some local large employers, put somewhat weak garden leave requirements in place, however. While not ideal, it does mean an employer has skin in the game if they really don't want someone to go to a competitor.

I consider Rice and UT-Austin as two of the best universities in a conservative, red state. But they don't get a lot of respect from coastal elites because they aren't in NYC or SF.

And A&M.

But there is no density in Texas. Dallas, Austin, and Houston are 4 hours apart. There is virtually no synergy between them for a corporation other than existing under the same state laws. If these three were all half the distance from each other, and the weather was mild year round, and they were on the coast, it would be a different story.

I don't know that those two universities don't get a lot of respect. I have always heard good things about them, here in my elite coastal bubble.

As a counterexample, MIT is not in NYC or SF, and it gets respect.

For the universities you mention, maybe the (perceived?) sense of lower respect comes from picking up on outsider's suspicions that a Texas university may draw from the state, and thus may have a higher percentage of, you know, people who put tribe and faith ahead of logic and reason (which is not a swipe at all Texans, just more my personal opinion of the red voter types nationwide). Of course those suspicions may be unfounded.

Boston is an archetype of the "coastal liberal elite" city in the line of NYC or SF, so clearly it gets respect. ;-)

> people who put tribe and faith ahead of logic and reason

For many things, one man's logic and reason is another's tribe and faith. A red voter type might see blue voter types engage in all sorts of illogical policy behavior that, to the red voter, appears solely grounded in blue tribalism and orthodoxies that might as well be church doctrine.

And if you want to talk about university concentration, I'd guess that Boston/Cambridge as well as other locations within a 2 hour drive radius have about the highest concentration of universities (including ones with strong STEM programs) in the country.

Boston is very much in the category of "East Coast megacity".

There are a lot of universities with good CS programs scattered around the country. I expect if I took a list of the top 50 (or whatever) programs and put pins in a map. I expect you'd see some clusters that correspond to tech centers (Bay Area, Boston), secondary tech centers without an outsized academic presence, and some groupings of schools in areas not especially known as a tech hub.

Necessary but not sufficient.

4-5 of the top 20 CS programs are in the Upper Midwest, depending on whether you count Western Pennsylvania (I personally do — politics are solidly Midwest conservative; manufacturing is a major industry; ethnicity is largely German-American rather than British; religion is largely Catholic and mainline Protestant rather than Quaker and Congregationalist; and so on. Pittsburgh looks and feels more like Columbus than like Philly.)

If we define the Midwest as the plains between the Appalachians and the Rockies, Pittsburgh is clearly closer to the Midwest than the East Coast.

Pittsburgh politics are not midwest conservative, unless you include the heavy suburban regions which are not where the tech companies are.

No city is "midwest conservative", even in the heart of the midwest. Pittsburgh is 100% a Midwestern city.

It 100% isn't, born and raised. It's nothing like or Indianapolis. The topography and history are completely different.

Not northeastern != midwest. Pittsburgh has far more in-common with Baltimore than it does Indy.

The topography and history are closer to Baltimore than Indy? It's historically been part of the Rust Belt. It's considered part of the Great Lakes Megalopolis [0]. It's on the Western side of the Appalachian divide. Culturally it has far more in common with Cleveland or Columbus than Philly or NYC. The only reason it's even a question is because its in Pennsylvania, which contains Philly which is clearly East Coast. But cultural, geographic, and economic regions aren't defined by stat borders. If instead of being a part of Pennsylvania, there was a "Western Pennsylvania" and "Eastern Pennsylvania", no one would question lumping Western Pennsylvania in with the rest of the Midwest.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_megalopolis#/media...

https://www.post-gazette.com/local/neighborhood/2018/08/08/P...

A good read, or you can come ask the locals what they think - be prepared for a big argument :).

From your link "Map of the emerging American-Canadian megaregions as defined by America 2050."

Emerging - not historical.

Pittsburgh is not 100% midwest. We are not like Nebraska, at all. The further you go from Pittsburgh the divide grows starker. There is some in common with some great lakes rust belt cities. That's it. In any case, it's not 100%.

There's a ton of world class engineering colleges in the Midwest. The graduates all move to the coasts for jobs. It isn't a lack of colleges, its a comparative lack of jobs.

It seems that Silicon Valley is at least in part fueled by universities, notably Stanford and Berkeley.

So I'd expect a competitor would want to be near universities with a focus and strong record in engineering and technology.

I think the ethos of SV is startups and the notion of building something in your garage and connecting with other like minded people. Now its also BigTech and massive scale of solutions (which are predominately ad driven) and connecting with like minded people to do those things.

I don't think there will be a "next" SV. Just like there isn't a next Motown or various other things borne out of special sets of happenstance. Was there ever a "next" Hollywood?

This has been predicted for decades now, but always misses a key point for SV being so successful. The SF Bay Area is one of the most diverse places to live and work in the US. Your managers, colleagues, and the area are from very different backgrounds, and when you bring together this diverse set of people, you end up creating things that 99% of the world uses.

Outside of LA and the NY metro area, diversity drops drastically. So while there maybe a growth in research parks/tax advantaged zones to attract satellite offices and software startups, HQ’s are still going to be based where the diverse talent lives.

The second point is Americans simply are not pursuing the highest levels of education. Masters and PhD programs are filled with immigrants, and new departments are frequently established by hiring such highly educated people. And it turns out, it’s safer and more enjoyable for immigrants to live where they’re accepted and already have communities.

One can hope that America becoming more diverse in the future will cause other more diverse areas to be established, but that depends on the politics of the area. Educated people tend to not associate with right wing/republican policies, and these areas will have to embrace that and not just devolve to gerrymandering. And that means your neighbors and communities also have to embrace diversity.

Immigrants are pursuing advanced degrees because a) the immigration system incentivizes it and b) specific immigrant populations have specific experiences in living memory where education was the only path from medieval subsistence farming to modern industrialized life in the cities, and/or the only asset that Communists couldn’t effectively seize.

I don’t think it’s at all the case that CS PhD programs are causally responsible for Silicon Valley’s progress, except to the extent that brilliant people were also incentivized by immigration authorities or their families to be in PhD programs at some point.

If this were the only factor, Houston would be the most innovative tech city in the US.

Tech jobs != Silicon Valley The jobs may come (_may_), but they won't be the same jobs you get in the valley. They will be the backroom, grunt jobs that companies want to make cheaper - cost centers. Profit centers will stay on the coasts.

The Next Silicone Valley Will Be in the Metaverse. Change My Mind.

You will never become the next foo by trying to be the next foo. Instead you need to stand upon your unique merits.

The "Silicon Valley of Bar" never works as anything but campaigning to gullible and giving benefits to existing businesses for no real public gain.

Arguing for entitlement to runaway success based off of some misguided notion of equity is even worse (and by definition incoherent). Success being seen as a birthright is a fast way to stagnation and failure, demonstrated time and time again by fallen US industries like steel and automobiles. Success isn't guaranteed even with hard work and connections!

Detroit? maybe not the center, that place needs to be bulldozed and replace all the lead pipes, etc.

Immigrants who are the cream of the crop in their countries is the success of Silicon Valley. We just skim the top of the best from everywhere. And reward them.

Sadly, the next generation of these immigrants become Americans and will be raised in American public school system. It shows. Sad, but true. That’s why we keep importing immigrants to keep running faster to stay in the same place. Hint: make schools centers of academic learning again for little humans.

The only way to emulate Silicon Valley is to aggressively pursue merit and academic excellence of relevant subject matter. At the end of the day, the stock in trade of tech is IQ. The rest is just entertainment.

Ruthlessly discourage and weed out all the distractors and hobby degree pursuers(like phD in history of social justice wars or post grad degree in open air drug den architecture etc). A hard core tech valley should focus on STEM, value high achievers and reward them while simultaneously protecting them from the turkeys who want to bring the elephant down.

We better get the formula right in SV too because that culture is disappearing. There is shame in the valley for being too successful thanks to the hoard of foxes that jumped and jumped…couldn’t reach the sweet sweet inviting grapes..and hence found them too sour.

Of course, there is a flip side to this. The tech bros should stay in their lane. Just because they have a structural engineering degree doesn’t make them experts on housing policy. There are people who studied that. VCs and investors should stop trying to meddle with local politics. Bro, you can’t solve homelessness because you can train an AI. Also..AI art is NOT art. That’s making a mockery of the artists who spent years honing their craft.

There is an almost borderline selfishness amongst the tech elite..like that of a child who wants all the candy for themselves. As a society, if we don’t give dignity to all and value everyone..that society will slide and crumble.

It is not that tech bros are paid obscene amounts. It’s just that artists and service providers and even politicians(channeling Singapore model which we should all probably emulate) aren’t paid enough. There is no need for scarcity and hoarding(that comes from a scarcity mentality) here.

Maybe SV could also learn something with some in the tech sector learning to stay in their lane and allow others to shine in their strengths and abilities. Everyone wants their little pool of limelight. It’s light. There is enough for everyone.

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