SV has Stanford, which seems to be a unique factory of technical talent. NYC has Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania,

SV has Stanford, which seems to be a unique factory of technical talent. NYC has Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale to draw from, and the associated financial support from the world's finance hub. Seattle has UW and the wealth blast radius of Microsoft. Seattle is just weird. Not really fair to describe as flailing. It probably shouldn't exist as a major tech center. Amazon and Microsoft growth occurred because of disastrous miscalculations by established businesses. There isn't any magic chemical in the rain water that creates our tech industry. It's the gravitational influence of the growth in a very few companies. Also, it seems like most of the dividends of that growth are going into the creation of a skyline in Bellevue, rather than VC funds. Maybe if we had SF's inability to build, investors would bet bigger on startups.