The Valley attracts talent only because that’s where all the startup jobs are. If you don’t want to work in startups, or if startups would branch out and stop glomming on to single locations, this would equalize more.
It's really more the established tech companies that draw the talent out here. In this generation, that's Google/Apple/Facebook; before that, SGI/Tandem/Sun/Cisco/Oracle/Yahoo; before that, HP/IBM/Ampex/Shockley/Lockheed/Stanford. They're the ones with generous relocation packages, a national brand name, and the ability to give an attractive offer to anyone in the world.
The startup ecosystem feeds off of that and California's outlawing of noncompetes. Employees get bored at working at a big company and have an idea for some way to employ the technology they've learned towards another industry. There's ample angel investors & VC floating around because of the profitability of previous companies. Oftentimes they have a spouse at one of the big companies who can continue to provide stability & health insurance.
The list of famous companies out here that can trace their ancestry back to one of [Shockley, Ampex, Stanford, IBM, HP] includes Fairchild, Intel, AMD, NVidia, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Atari, Dolby, Oracle, Salesforce, Memorex, Seagate, Apple, General Magic, Radius, Claris, E-Bay, StumbleUpon, Uber, Danger, Android, Nest, Be, NeXT, SGI, Cisco, Sun, Tandem, Siri, Yahoo, Google, Odeo, Twitter, Square, YCombinator, Netgear, Netscape, LoudCloud, Ning, a16z, Instagram, Whatsapp, Paypal, Slide, Yelp, Palantir, YouTube, LinkedIn, and likely many others. That's using a definition of "trace their ancestry back" as "a founder previously was an employee of or student at one of the other organizations in the set." Pretty much the only major Silicon Valley companies that are not included are the various YC companies (Reddit, AirBnB, Dropbox, Stripe, etc.) and Facebook, all of which would be if you extend the definition of "ancestry" to include "seed funder was in the set". (YC is in the set via Stanford => Yahoo => YC, Facebook's first investor was Peter Thiel, who got his BA and JD from Stanford.)
The startup ecosystem feeds off of that and California's outlawing of noncompetes. Employees get bored at working at a big company and have an idea for some way to employ the technology they've learned towards another industry. There's ample angel investors & VC floating around because of the profitability of previous companies. Oftentimes they have a spouse at one of the big companies who can continue to provide stability & health insurance.
The list of famous companies out here that can trace their ancestry back to one of [Shockley, Ampex, Stanford, IBM, HP] includes Fairchild, Intel, AMD, NVidia, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Atari, Dolby, Oracle, Salesforce, Memorex, Seagate, Apple, General Magic, Radius, Claris, E-Bay, StumbleUpon, Uber, Danger, Android, Nest, Be, NeXT, SGI, Cisco, Sun, Tandem, Siri, Yahoo, Google, Odeo, Twitter, Square, YCombinator, Netgear, Netscape, LoudCloud, Ning, a16z, Instagram, Whatsapp, Paypal, Slide, Yelp, Palantir, YouTube, LinkedIn, and likely many others. That's using a definition of "trace their ancestry back" as "a founder previously was an employee of or student at one of the other organizations in the set." Pretty much the only major Silicon Valley companies that are not included are the various YC companies (Reddit, AirBnB, Dropbox, Stripe, etc.) and Facebook, all of which would be if you extend the definition of "ancestry" to include "seed funder was in the set". (YC is in the set via Stanford => Yahoo => YC, Facebook's first investor was Peter Thiel, who got his BA and JD from Stanford.)