High-Tech Challengers to Silicon Valley

Is Silicon Valley losing its long established reign over U.S. and global high-technology? Bruce Katz, director of the Brookings institution's Metropolitan Policy Program and co-author of the new book The Metropolitan Revolution, thinks so. Here's Derek Thompson reporting on Katz's recent talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival:

San Francisco has indeed overtaken Silicon Valley as the nation's leading center of venture capital financed start-ups, attracting some $7 billion dollars in venture capital investment in 2012, or one in four of all of venture investments, compared to $4 billion or 15 percent, for San Jose. New York and Boston have also emerged as major centers of start-up activity, much of it in urban neighborhoods. (In a future post, I'll use more detailed zip code data to get at this "urban turn" in venture capital and start-up activity).