The reason I think other melting pots for technology will emerge is simple — mobility within the United States is easy but the country has an external border, one that’s nontrivial to move across.

As it stands today, money and knowledge can flow through borders much more easily than people can, so the money and culture will go to them. There’s a few reasons for this:

• Outside of very exceptional cases, the US decides who to let in to the country effectively at random. For FY 2015, 172,000 people applied for high skilled worker visas (H1B) but under half of those were let in, as determined by a lottery. Moreover, there’s very few channels for immigrants to start companies here, historically a source of strength and pride for the American dream. So there’s a decent number of smart people who wanted to come here, weren’t let in and would love to go to a similar environment somewhere else if one existed.
• Not everyone wants to live in the U.S. — some have families while others seek a slightly different way of life, not necessarily orthogonal to what it takes to succeed in technology. With information becoming more accessible, things that used to require moving to another country are now a Google search or email away.

Now let’s see what it would take to export what makes the Valley unique to other parts of the world.

1. Resources: If American investors find potential outside the country, they’ll invest — it’s the capitalist, free market, American thing to do. The big VCs all have a presence outside the country and as the market saturates here, they’ll look to go wherever it takes. Israel, for example, is emerging with a healthy startup ecosystem, helped along in part by U.S. investors.
2. Critical mass of technologists: This is the hard to shift, but we’ve kicked off a fundamental shift in communication that makes it inevitable. If the US were to shut its borders and deport every foreigner who works in tech here, they would likely disperse to their home countries because of the lack of an obvious second-best place for everyone to go to.
   Given this scattering effect, what still makes me optimistic is that the internet has opened up knowledge historically locked into small geographic areas such as the Valley to orders of magnitude more people. What used to be the two lonely programmers in Tel-Aviv or Berlin is becoming 20 because of open access to information, and that makes them much more likely to build products that matter. I think three routes are possible:
   - We’ll see a more uniform worldwide distribution of technology given our improving communication channels.
   - America makes a significantly more compelling case and easier to live here.
   - Another city/country emerges as a more inviting place. Some are trying (e.g. Canada’s Start-up visa program) but none are close to emerging as a clear winner yet.
3. Culture: Culture may be the hardest to export, but there are plenty of ambitious, smart, risk taking individuals around the world, who need encouragement and backing. With the rise of the internet, mass-media distribution from movies like The Social Network, the Valley’s culture and its inspiring success stories are more visible than ever across the world. America does not have a monopoly on disruptive culture and by definition cannot seek to. Other countries [3] are taking baby steps towards it but ultimately healthy economies tend to converge to an open knowledge economy [4] where everyone brings their unique skills to the market.

All of this applies to people within the United States who are less mobile for other reasons, but I think the effect is going to be stronger outside the border.

In a few decades, we may remember Silicon Valley’s crowning achievement to be exporting its unique change-embracing culture to the rest of the world. This is not a zero-sum game, everyone can be better off in the process of the Valley disrupting itself.

Further Reading:

[1] Balaji Srinivasan on Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit, which I think is a very ambitious version of this line of thought, but has some great underlying thoughts.

[2] Yishan Wong’s answer to Silicon Valley: Why has Silicon Valley proven difficult to copy? for a look at the genesis of the Valley and how the mystique can be rationalized.

[3] Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle: Dan Senor, Saul Singer.

[4] Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.