Surprised no one has mentioned the gravitational effect these hubs have -- Sacramento will never really blossom in the tech industry because so much talent gets sucked into SF.
But as plane ticket prices go down, those areas get larger and larger. It's worth saying: "Pittsburgh, this is time sensitive! Boston will eat your lunch by default, so make your moves quickly."
Also, if plane trips get cheap enough, look at how the Hong Kong / Shenzhen area fares. Plenty of money and tech talent, and China's pushing a lot of VC money (although, who know where that ends up). If plane tickets get below the price of a video game console before an American city pops up as a cheap-dense-livable-tech-hub, HK/SZ will probably gobble them just due to order-of-magnitude advantages (4x the VC, 30x the population of SF, with preposterous numbers of PhDs, at some point the advantages will compound into something like SF but 100x more powerful).
Could be good, but Hong Kong is massively expensive and mainland China is censored, with slow int'l data connections, presumably because they have to scan for words like "Panama Papers." Goodbye Google, Facebook, real news... well you can have (need) a VPN, but that could also be attacked at any moment. You also kind of end up having to be a member of the Party, and are reliant on fickle gov't approval. Which makes one think that for quite a while China may be only for Chinese. Hong Kong, we'll see.
So, obviously that is the core issue -- a tiny correction is that very few Chinese people are members of the communist party, less than 7%, and there is no expectation that foreigners join considering they have not been allowed to be members of the party since 1956.
But as plane ticket prices go down, those areas get larger and larger. It's worth saying: "Pittsburgh, this is time sensitive! Boston will eat your lunch by default, so make your moves quickly."
Also, if plane trips get cheap enough, look at how the Hong Kong / Shenzhen area fares. Plenty of money and tech talent, and China's pushing a lot of VC money (although, who know where that ends up). If plane tickets get below the price of a video game console before an American city pops up as a cheap-dense-livable-tech-hub, HK/SZ will probably gobble them just due to order-of-magnitude advantages (4x the VC, 30x the population of SF, with preposterous numbers of PhDs, at some point the advantages will compound into something like SF but 100x more powerful).