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I think any Canadian cities like Toronto or Vancouver or Dublin, Ireland are best contenders for the title and here is my reasoning for it. You need to wait for

I think any Canadian cities like Toronto or Vancouver or Dublin, Ireland are best contenders for the title and here is my reasoning for it. You need to wait for about a year to get a H1 visa to work in SV or work in the same firm for over a year elsewhere to get an L1 visa. So essentially SV today is a representation of diverse global talent who could get the visas, which is a very limited demographic. Historically SV did have an information advantage but if information were truly open, which I think is what the world is moving towards, I would assume any country with access to true diverse workforce without any limitations on workforce mobility will have an upper hand. And you already see accrual of talent to some extent in these cities. Nowadays whenever top 5 companies hire new talent from countries other than US, they usually bring them directly to one of these cities outside US. Competitors open up shop in the same cities because of easy access to talent. I can see a world where ideas and startups increasingly coming from these above cities. And for the same reason, I don't think any of the Chinese cities pose a threat to SV. If anything Chinese cities can produce a Chinese version of the product but it will be hard to produce a global firm without access to diverse global talent.

xiphias 9y ago
Diversity was never really important for a good tech company, just extra-hard working smart people. And from the Awesome machine learning papers it looks like Asia already has enough smart people, Chinese tech companies have higher growth than U.S. companies, we, who don't live there are just not feeling it yet.
- padiyar83 9y ago
  Sure, but a smart Chinese researcher can move to Vancouver or Toronto very easily, so does a researcher from Bangalore or Buenos Aires or St. Petersburg, but its harder for a firm or a research lab based out of say, Shanghai or SV even, to have access to the same type of global talent. Remember China is not Asia, China only has access to 20% of population, and also isn't that migrant friendly from what I have read (could be wrong here), so I assume the rest of the world put together would have better chance of success in competing with any Chinese city or even SV. Again I base this on the premise that access to information is freely available for everyone across the world. For example a person living in, say, Argentina, has the same access to ML coursework as someone who lives just across the street from Stanford. I think its an increasingly safe assumption to make, given the direction the world is moving towards, with MOOC and OMSCS type of degrees etc. I sincerely feel other things considered equal, access to human capital becomes a tie breaker.

xiphias 9y ago

Diversity was never really important for a good tech company, just extra-hard working smart people. And from the Awesome machine learning papers it looks like Asia already has enough smart people, Chinese tech companies have higher growth than U.S. companies, we, who don't live there are just not feeling it yet.

padiyar83 9y ago
Sure, but a smart Chinese researcher can move to Vancouver or Toronto very easily, so does a researcher from Bangalore or Buenos Aires or St. Petersburg, but its harder for a firm or a research lab based out of say, Shanghai or SV even, to have access to the same type of global talent. Remember China is not Asia, China only has access to 20% of population, and also isn't that migrant friendly from what I have read (could be wrong here), so I assume the rest of the world put together would have better chance of success in competing with any Chinese city or even SV. Again I base this on the premise that access to information is freely available for everyone across the world. For example a person living in, say, Argentina, has the same access to ML coursework as someone who lives just across the street from Stanford. I think its an increasingly safe assumption to make, given the direction the world is moving towards, with MOOC and OMSCS type of degrees etc. I sincerely feel other things considered equal, access to human capital becomes a tie breaker.