[perl4ever]

I have no disagreement with your final sentence, but I still take issue with attributing purported value created by people in the vicinity of SF with SF itself and concluding that the key to that sort of success is how SF is run.

Delaware, a state of somewhere around a million people, has "over half" the companies on the S&P 500. That's like $15 trillion in market cap. That's a reasonable sized stock market for a billion people in the wider world. Should we conclude that everyone should emulate Delaware in how they organize their society? If they did do that, should we expect that the rest of humanity, unleashed, could produce $15 trillion in value for every million or so people? If they can't, does that mean they're inferior or failing to follow the example of Delaware? Not to put too fine a point on it, what about the Cayman Islands?

Edit once more: and, "SF engineers" and "SF money"? Come on!

[renewiltord]

Are you saying I'm attributing Silicon Valley's achievements to SF? I wasn't intending to do that. I was talking about solely SF companies because that illustrates the point on its own, but we can make it the SJ-SF-Oak CSA if you'd like. But that sort of blows Europe's tech companies out of the water. I wanted to keep it in the range of comparison.

[perl4ever]

I didn't write "Silicon Valley", and I didn't notice you saying "Silicon Valley", until now.

Maybe you could clarify with some examples of the companies you're talking about, in SF, that mostly draw on local talent and resources.