This topic has been coming up on this site for the past decade. Every time it does there are a lot of people who say Silicon Valley will never be beaten. I call this way of thinking "California exceptionalism".<p>Put another way:<p>"Nobody will ever need more than 640k."<p>Since the days of Fairchild, the bay area has had an advantage in finance, and of course VCs who didn't want to invest in anyone more than a bike ride away. The level of attitude is really kinda astounding.<p>California was the golden state... but that was 50 years ago when it had a pro-business government and was disrupting the US industrial base, and attracting high tech talent and companies in the process. Now it is eating itself, drowning in debt and getting ever more desperate due to decades of bad government.<p>In our industry things have changed. The need for VCs is dramatically less. You don't need to build servers and software from scratch, you can rent servers in the cloud and build on open source foundations.<p>There are always going to be more smart people outside of SV than there are in it. And TBH, I don't think the SV startups have been really innovative for the past couple decades. It's like after the dotcom boom everything became an "app" (instead of a "dot com" eg website).<p>For example you aren't building Intels and Apples anymore. you're building Googles (Which <i>might</i> become an Apple, if one of its moonshots turns into a product, but it isn't yet, it hasn't weaned itself from search and search's days are numbered.) You're building facebooks and ubers and airbnbs. It may not look like if if you've not been thru a couple bubbles but those companies are more flash in the pan than solid. Facebook could be more properly called a fad.<p>The difference is they aren't really technology companies. Google invented page rank, but almost nothing fundamental since. Facebook hasn't invented anything really. It's just a popular content site. Uber and AirBnB are business models, not technology inventions. Of course they all require and depend on technology investment, but they are not based on technological innovations like Intel and Apple are. (And don't even get me started on Amazon which is really a combo of Walmart and U-haul-for-computers. They actively oppose innovation.)<p>And for some high tech industries, Silicon Valley is not the center. The disdain upon which californians look at bitcoin is a good example. It's kinda a "not invented here" syndrome.<p>It's like we're the internet, you're AOL at its peak. You rule the roost right now, but you don't get it.