Why I Believe Talent Is Everywhere, Not Just in Silicon Valley

The whole idea that a fifty-square-mile patch of land in Northern California holds some kind of divine monopoly on human ingenuity is, and has always been, utter nonsense. It’s a myth. A fantastically successful, self-perpetuating, multi-billion-dollar piece of marketing, but a myth nonetheless.

I’ve been in and around the writing and editing world for a couple of decades now, and I’ve seen trends come and go. I’ve seen buzzwords born, live a glorious mayfly existence, and then die a quiet death in a corporate memo. But the Silicon Valley mystique? It’s had a staying power that’s almost admirable, if it weren’t so fundamentally flawed.

It’s a comfortable story, isn’t it? That all the brilliant minds, the “10x engineers,” the visionary founders, are all drawn to this one magnetic pole. It simplifies things. It gives venture capitalists a convenient, geographically constrained hunting ground. It lets big tech companies build their gleaming, spaceship-like campuses with the confidence that the best and brightest are just a kombucha-on-tap away.

But it’s a lazy narrative. And frankly, it’s insulting.

It’s insulting to the software developer in Lagos who’s building a fintech solution that will change millions of lives. It’s insulting to the biotech researcher in a lab in rural Germany who’s on the cusp of a breakthrough. It’s insulting to the self-taught coder in a small town in India who spends her nights learning machine learning from YouTube tutorials and is about to build something the world has never seen.

Talent isn’t a mineral deposit. You don’t find it in veins, clustered in one specific geological formation. It’s more like the air. It’s everywhere. You just have to be willing to look.

The Echo Chamber of Homogeneity

The biggest problem with this hyper-concentration—this belief that one place holds all the keys—is the intellectual and cultural echo chamber it creates. When everyone comes from a similar background, goes to the same handful of universities, reads the same tech blogs, and socializes in the same overpriced coffee shops, what do you get?

You get groupthink.

You get a thousand different apps for delivering artisanal dog food but a startling lack of innovation in solving problems for, you know, the other 99% of the world. Problems like clean water, or sustainable agriculture, or accessible healthcare. It’s a bubble. A very, very well-funded bubble.

I remember talking to a founder a few years back. Super bright guy. He was genuinely convinced his new app, which used AI to recommend wine pairings for your takeout pizza, was going to “make the world a better place.” I just… I didn’t have the heart to tell him. The conviction was so pure, so utterly devoid of perspective. That’s the echo chamber in action.

Breaking out of that requires diversity. Not just the kind of diversity you can check off on a corporate HR form, but true diversity of thought, of experience, of perspective. And that kind of diversity, by its very nature, is distributed. It lives in different cultures, different economic realities, different climates, and different languages.

The kid who grew up on a farm in Nebraska is going to approach a problem in logistics differently than someone who grew up navigating the subway system in Tokyo. The woman who had to build a business from scratch with no funding in São Paulo has a grit and a resourcefulness that you can’t teach in a Stanford MBA program.

This isn’t some feel-good platitude. It’s a strategic advantage. Companies that get this—that really, truly get this—are the ones that are going to win. The ones who are building distributed teams, who are hiring the best person for the job, regardless of whether they’re in Palo Alto or Poland.

The Tools That Broke the Geographical Chains

So what changed? Why is this conversation even possible now in a way it wasn’t, say, twenty years ago?

Two words: the internet.

I know, I know, it sounds ridiculously obvious. But think about the implications. The digital infrastructure we have today has completely decoupled work from location. High-speed internet, collaboration tools like Slack and Teams, cloud computing, version control systems like Git—these aren’t just conveniences. They are the great equalizer.

They’ve leveled the playing field. That developer in Lagos? She can contribute to the same codebase as a senior engineer at Google. That researcher in Germany? He can collaborate on a paper with a team at MIT in real-time. The barriers to entry—the physical, geographical barriers—have been obliterated.

And the pandemic, for all its horrors, was the catalyst that forced the entire world to finally, belatedly, wake up to this new reality. Companies that had resisted remote work for years were suddenly forced to embrace it. And guess what? The world didn’t end. Productivity didn’t plummet. In many cases, it actually went up.

It turns out that when you let people work from a place they’re comfortable, in a community they love, without a soul-crushing two-hour commute, they actually do better work. Shocking, I know.

This isn’t just anecdotal, either. The data backs it up. We’re seeing a fundamental shift in how work is done and how talent is sourced. A recent report from Upwork’s Research Institute highlights how a huge percentage of hiring managers are increasingly utilizing flexible talent, looking far beyond their local zip codes. It’s not about finding cheap labor; it’s about finding the right labor, the best skills, which are rarely just down the road.

The Rise of the “Everywhere” Hub

Because of this, we’re witnessing the slow, beautiful diffusion of innovation. It’s not about Silicon Valley dying; it’s about dozens of other places coming to life.

You’ve got burgeoning tech scenes in places like:

And that’s just scratching the surface. The list goes on and on. Every city, every region, is starting to figure out its own unique flavor of innovation. It’s not about trying to be the “next Silicon Valley.” That’s a fool’s errand. It’s about being the first Austin, the first Tallinn. It’s about playing to your own strengths.

This decentralization is the most exciting thing to happen to the global economy in a generation. It spreads opportunity. It allows people to build amazing careers and companies without having to leave their homes, their families, and their cultures behind. This isn’t just a trend; it’s a structural realignment. Global consulting firms have been tracking this for a while. An analysis by McKinsey, for instance, pointed out that the potential for remote work is massive and concentrated in high-skill, high-wage sectors like tech and finance, which directly enables this geographic distribution of opportunity.

Think of it like a biological ecosystem. A monoculture—like a vast field of a single crop—is incredibly fragile. One disease, one pest, can wipe the whole thing out. But a diverse rainforest, with thousands of different species interacting, is resilient. It’s adaptable. It’s robust. That’s what the global talent landscape is becoming: a rich, resilient, and incredibly vibrant rainforest. And it’s so much more interesting than a monoculture crop of hoodies and stock options.

A Personal Plea: Look Further

So if you’re a founder, a hiring manager, a VC—anyone in a position to give someone a shot—I’m asking you to do one thing.

Look further.

Look past the resume that says “Stanford University.” Look past the address that says “Mountain View, CA.” Look for the spark. Look for the passion. Look for the person who has built something amazing with the resources they had, not the resources they were given.

That person might be in a bustling city you’ve never heard of. They might be in a quiet village connected to the world by a satellite dish. They might not speak English as their first language. But they are out there. And they are brilliant.

The talent was always there. It’s just that now, finally, we have the tools and—maybe—the mindset to see it. It’s not just in Silicon Valley. It’s everywhere. You just have to be willing to open your eyes.

And honestly, why wouldn’t you? The future of your company might just depend on it. It’s not about finding a diamond in the rough; it’s about realizing the whole world is filled with diamonds, and we’ve just been looking for them under one, single, solitary lamppost for far too long. It’s time to broaden the search. Big time.