There is no way that money alone would be sufficient to recreate a Silicon Valley. Of course, it would help, but some of the other obstacles are daunting. * No

There is no way that money alone would be sufficient to recreate a Silicon Valley. Of course, it would help, but some of the other obstacles are daunting. * Non-competes. Within the U.S., California is by far the state least inclined to enforce non-competes. This happened as a historical accident, well before Silicon Valley arose. Getting another jurisdiction to adopt a similar attitude toward non-competes would involve, not money, but politics, which is far messier and more uncertain. The existing large companies in a given state generally perceive, rightly or wrongly, that it is in their interest to have non-competes enforced as vigorously as possible. This, in turn, has two effects detrimental to competing with Silicon Valley: (1) employees often can't go off and start a competing company in their area of expertise without a two-year waiting period, and (2) the really ambitious among them may get around this by moving to California (often Silicon Valley), where their non-competes are unenforceable, thus furthering the Valley's lead. * Specialized insfrastructure. Whatever a hardware or software computer startup needs, it has access to in the Bay Area. Legal services, financing, management expertise (useful as a startup gets bigger), and above all the hardware and software engineers skilled in even the most arcane (but sometimes needed) technologies. This sort of infrastructure cannot simply be bought, it must be grown. * Many of the metro areas that conceivably might be able to make a run at competing with Silicon Valley (i.e. those that are not economic basket cases) already have a different industry that is their specialty, and have no good incentive to try and supplant that industry for a clone of Silicon Valley. And without the other industry being supplanted, it's unlikely that the density of computer/web startups will even approach that of Silicon Valley. With all this to overcome, one billion dollars doesn't seem anywhere near sufficient. Silicon Valley will eventually be rivalled by a metro area that specializes in something related but not quite head-on to what Silicon Valley does. For example, it's conceivable that Seattle, with its focus on more consumer-oriented software and web companies (such as Amazon), could gradually ooze its way into having a bigger share of the more purely web-based startups (such as Google). But that's very different than trying to create a Silicon Valley rival from nothing.