The central dogma of SV is perhaps that you need high talent concentrations to scale. ‘If you can’t hire 500 engineers in a quarter when you hit takeoff you’re ngmi” belief system. Even with a lot of trad companies moving away from Bay Area for scale out, the belief in talent concentrations is still very high. The “SF is so back!” endemic meme underlines the strength of this dogma.

Crypto ecosystems are a clear counter-example. Outside of big events like Devcon no SV-style concentration exists anywhere. The implications of this have not yet sunk in. I’m convinced it’s not a special case. Any kind of digital tech can be effectively produced by decentralized talent networks. SV is addicted to single-geography concentrations for 2 reasons: 

1. Investors are rich and lazy and want their investments down the street 

2. Boomer/GenX managers don’t know how to manage virtually and don’t want to learn

Crypto capitalizes differently and has millennial leadership so broke free of the dogma

Delver at contraptions.venkateshrao.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

I think this pattern also came from projects that did early token/ ICO fundraising pre 2019 that were comparatively pretty geographically distributed