Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas
This general topic seems to come back into focus on a regular basis on HN (last time, 1 week ago). People have been leaving SV in numbers for the 30 years I&#x27;ve been here, always citing traffic &amp; cost of housing as the primary reasons. Though this time, you could add decriminalization of petty crime. Nonetheless, the population growth remains net positive.<p>The fundamental design of the Internet was to be robust against various forms of damage to the network. I see Silicon Valley as a similar type of system. It is not difficult to look back 40 years and see how at each inflection point, The Valley&#x27;s constituent technologies, and the companies they spawned, led the rest of the world and scaled The Valley up.<p>- In the 1980s, Silicon Valley&#x27;s Intel lost it&#x27;s dominance in DRAM production to Japan. The economic impact was dire, and yet<p>- In the early 1990s, networking and workstations emerged from the likes of SUN and Cisco. They carried through until global competition stole their wind, and it was on to<p>- The late 90s and the .COM boom. And what a boom it was, Amazon, Google, followed by another death knell for myriad .COM corpses. Promptly engendering<p>- The 2000s birth of social media. MySpace faltered, then LinkedIn, then Facebook, then Twitter, came up and are still going strong on the foundation of<p>- 2010s open source platforms. Still mind-blowing: At one point WhatsApp had 40 software engineers and 400,000,000 users. At 3 years old.<p>I&#x27;ve heard about the exodus from California, usually citing so many thousands or 10s of thousands of people leaving. But looking a the net population changes, Santa Clara County is down 5,000 from 2018-2019. Alameda, San Mateo, San Francisco are all up.<p>Silicon Valley is a system that regenerates from one generation to the next, and so far, always bigger and more influential than the last.