The single unique thing about California, and therefore SF/Silicon Valley/the Bay area is that by long standing public policy, non-competes are unenforceable fo

The single unique thing about California, and therefore SF/Silicon Valley/the Bay area is that by long standing public policy, non-competes are unenforceable for employees like you, making it a very liquid market for talent. This Wikipedia item is on the front page right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12372315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12372315 i.e. the "traitorous eight" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight ); we wouldn't even be here discussing all this if Shockley had been able to keep his dissatisfied employees from working in the brand new field of semiconductors when they could no longer stand working for him, ditto when they left Fairchild Semiconductor to e.g. start Intel, which besides the microprocessors was the first company to commercially sell DRAMs. On the other hand, Texas Instruments managed to be a leader in all of the early stages of all this while based in Texas, even created the standard TTL logic family used by just about everyone to make computers until microprocessors became capable enough. And in several stages Motorola was competitive without as far as I know having a significant Silicon Valley base.