About 3 years ago I left Silicon Valley after being there for 15 years. I moved to the suburbs outside of another major US city, near where I grew up. I had already been working remote, and especially during the pandemic it felt like a relatively future-proof decision to be outside of the SV network.
Frankly, now I'm not so sure I was right. No other place in the US (maybe in the world) has the amount and magnitude of technical talent and know-how, access to capital, or strength of network to compete with SV right now. Spend some time in SF, or Palo Alto, or Mountain View, and it's immediately obvious. Go to a cafe and people will be talking about tech. Your neighbor is probably in tech. Drive along the highway and you'll see billboards for tech products, and tech office buildings along the highway. Tech is deeply ingrained in the culture, top to bottom.
There is no other place in the US that is like this and the gap for SV is still only accelerating.
The billboards in San Francisco off Hwy 80 and Hwy 101 never cease to surprise me. I'll ask my wife, who was a middle school teacher, what a "Datadog" or "Salesforce" is and she never knows (or cares, which is fair enough). The tech culture is so ingrained that even the non-techies are oblivious to how deeply rooted it is.
I've only been through Silicon Valley a handful of times, and the signage was one of the most striking things for me too. It's just an immediately visible indicator that the place is an outlier. I think, "wow, the density of software industry architects and executives and investors is so high here that it makes more sense to put up a billboard for them than one for consumers."
The only other place where I've seen something similar is in Washington, DC, where you'll get advertisements on the Metro for things like fighter jet engines, apparently aimed at congressional staffers and Defense Department executives.
I remember flying into San Jose airport for the first time and the posters weren't advertising restaurants, hotels, and tourist destinations but enterprise routers and firewalls.
Frankly, now I'm not so sure I was right. No other place in the US (maybe in the world) has the amount and magnitude of technical talent and know-how, access to capital, or strength of network to compete with SV right now. Spend some time in SF, or Palo Alto, or Mountain View, and it's immediately obvious. Go to a cafe and people will be talking about tech. Your neighbor is probably in tech. Drive along the highway and you'll see billboards for tech products, and tech office buildings along the highway. Tech is deeply ingrained in the culture, top to bottom.
There is no other place in the US that is like this and the gap for SV is still only accelerating.