People do move. Silicon Valley itself is a product of people moving to the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Of the eight founders of Fairchild Semiconducto

People do move. Silicon Valley itself is a product of people moving to the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Of the eight founders of Fairchild Semiconductor, only Gordon Moore was from the Bay Area. Large, successful companies create the conditions for attracting employees to new locations. Both Seattle and Austin are examples of this. Earlier, IBM had a practice of locating in small to medium sized cities like Kingston, NY, Rochester, MN or Sunnyvale, CA. In the '50s and '60s the aerospace industry was highly mobile, with engineers moving from the North and East to the South and West.