To rephrase your question: Was Alan Turing going to start a company that would have rivaled HP or Intel? I think the answer to that is no. Would Turing have put

To rephrase your question: Was Alan Turing going to start a company that would have rivaled HP or Intel? I think the answer to that is no. Would Turing have put an unknown school like Stanford on to the map? Again the answer is no. There have been some amazing technology entrepreneurs in England like Sir Clive Sinclair who were just as good as their counterparts cross the ocean. The thing is that there was no ecosystem to really support folks like this. Although to be fair in America there were some amazing companies outside of Silicon Valley that never grew an ecosystem that became larger (a good example might be IBM).