IMO, what's hampering Silicon Valley innovation right now is the outrageous cost of living. It's hard to take a leap when you have a million dollar mortgage. Startups still happen of course but only with significant capital backing. But I'd wager the pace has slowed significantly.
I wish a “remote hub” concept would become popular. Where you work remote but need to be close enough to come in once a week or for big meetings. This would allow people to move a little further away and would possibly allow areas right outside the bay to become an extension of Silicon Valley.
If you only come to the office once a week and otherwise live outside of the valley, that gets a lot harder to do.
I live in the south bay and already feel the pinch, as most of the meetups I'd want to go to are in San Francisco, about an hour's drive away. When I worked in SF, it was no big deal to stick around for a meetup or a drink. Now it's 1/2 a day's outing.
I ignore 99% of such events, and keep communication almost exclusively online. Am I missing much? (I'm an engineer, though, not an entrepreneur.)
I meet founders, some of whom will eventually be household names and others not. I've kept up email correspondence with a few of my fellow user group managers and I try to take them out to lunch when I return.
Probably will be in SF in April if any HN'ers want to hit me up, especially those interested in the No Code space.
In particular here though I was just talking about better commuter trains and (the existence of) HSR, neither of which is really dependent on density.
NYC subway is only efficient because Manhattan is so dense, and much of areas around it are reasonably dense.
Commuting from further away, like a couple dozen miles into NY or NJ, becomes massively more burdensome, because a train has to go all this distance, and the station is not close to home. Of course, you can spend this hour or two reading, or maybe writing or even sleeping on the train, unlike driving.
Think about this, a house that costs i. The low two digits to build is being sold for $400,000 in sunnyvale because of the crunch and the wages that bigCo SC firms put on the situation...
There is an enormous opportunity here.