What made Silicon Valley into the successful startup hub of today? It was the forced high density of people with extremely high levels of skepticism and IQ by Frederick Terman. To build anything fundamentally new, you need to questions things that other people think they know and then see patterns where they don't. Most of the times you'll come up with answers that are the same as those of others and be right. Very few of the times you'll come up with answers that are different from those of others and be right. But the problem is that only a few of these are good business ideas. Because of this, you need people that habitually question things are then good at finding patterns. And this exercise does not stop after the idea. A startup is just a sequence of things that have not been done before. So you need people to continue this exercise when they start working on the startup. A startup will not succeed if it cannot succeed at all the steps in the sequence, all of which require high levels of skepticism and IQ. But very few startups are actually able to get to this density. What Frederick Terman did was to bring together these special startups that had achieved this high density by creating a light industrial park. The Stanford Industrial Park allowed companies that were working mainly on electronics research. For these companies, it was necessary that they only had people with high IQ and high skepticism. Moore's Law forced these companies to either continue with high levels of these traits and continue innovating or go out of business. Terman through the industrial park kept these companies together and these companies kept these people together. These people then kept hiring similar people in their existing companies and when they started new companies. The people who started the successful electronics research companies of today like Intel and AMD can be linked directly to people who started the first few companies in the Stanford Industrial Park. When the software revolution started, people brought to work for companies in and near the Stanford Industrial Park were the ones best positioned to build on it with the extremely high density of people like them near them. But just because people can start successful companies does not mean all of them will. A lot of people who are capable of starting successful companies never do because they lack the ambition. The biggest part Terman played in creating the Silicon Valley of today was the concentration of people with such high ambition through the industrial park. Because ambition of individuals is often the average of the ambition of their peer group, this high concentration of ambition is what keeps the Silicon Valley going by making people there continue trying to build things that are great. The high concentration of skepticism and IQ was what created the Silicon Valley and the high concentration of ambition is what keeps it going.