O’Mara is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Washington and Stanford research scholar (urban history and the globalization of the high-tech industry).

She writes: “Silicon Valley resulted from a combination of powerful local institutions, savvy real estate development choices, immense capital investment by the Cold War military-industrial complex, and the simple good fortune of being on the right side of national economic and demographic trends. The repeated failures of other places to replicate that success – much less seize Silicon Valley’s high-tech mantle – attest to the trickiness of getting this formula right. (…snip…)

“You need lots of money that can be spent (somewhat) recklessly. Military grants and contracts provided the capital needed for Valley pioneers like Hewlett-Packard to survive in their earliest, leanest years and created a demand for sophisticated technologies before there was a sizeable commercial market. As military contracts declined in the late 1960s, private venture capitalists and angel investors rose to take their place, giving smart but untested people repeated opportunities to innovate and develop new products.”

In contrast to “The Wave” phenomenon of people not being “from” the area, O’Mara writes that SV actually has a higher percentage of home-grown vs. attracted talent:

“Seattle has excelled at attracting talented people; its high proportion of college-educated residents attests to this. It hasn’t done as well at producing them. The people who went to college here make up a relatively small part of the tech workforce. In Silicon Valley, Stanford and Berkeley pulled talented students to the Bay Area from across the country and the world. Many of the builders of the Valley, from Hewlett and Packard to Google, are products of local universities. A region’s students are essential to its future economic success.”

While she admits that Seattle has a “true regional advantage” in terms of recently having aggregated (as it were) piles of VC money, she concludes that it won’t be another SV perhaps because (most simply put) history doesn’t repeat itself exactly.

But building on “core competencies” in turn helps build a city’s or region’s strengths: “Silicon Valley succeeded not because of the ’silicon’ but because it was doing something that complemented existing regional strengths.”

In the end, that’s a comforting perspective for those of us in what sometimes looks like the penumbra of SV’s magic glow. Reminds me of Shakespeare’s words of wisdom (verbatim), “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, which we ascribe to heaven. The fated sky gives us free scope — only doth backward pull our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.”