He notes that the industrial revolution spread quickly because there were geographical areas with middle class populations and cultures that let people keep the large sums of money they made. He also notes that the culture necessary for large numbers of start-ups is not present in many areas.
IMO, we're no way near the railroad stage of the start-up revolution. I think we're in the early renaissance. The valley is like Venice in the 1400s. It's a very localised concentration of merchant traders and a culture of what we now call "modern values", meanwhile the rest Europe is living in the "dark ages". It wasn't until the plague spread across Europe and gave the surviving working classes more influence that the culture started to change. Even then, it's another 300 years before society really starts to change.
Looking at Europe in the 1400 hundreds you might well have thought that Venetian style modernism would be a very localised revolution and that these new fangled "banks" would only ever be established in small areas.
Start-ups are not the "railroads" of the industrial revolution. They are the "banks" of the industrial revolution.