The Year in Tech 2022: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

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WHAT’S NEXT FOR SILICON VALLEY?

by Maëlle Gavet

Over the last 20 years, Silicon Valley has benefited from a once-in-a-lifetime alignment of advantages. American primacy, the ubiquity of cheap capital, the arrival of the smartphone (among other widely adopted tech innovations), and perhaps most significant, a benign regulatory environment have all conspired to create a historic concentration of wealth and power. The titans of the Valley and their heirs have been free to roam far ahead of lawmakers, watchdogs, and tax codes.

But that might not be true for much longer. Despite the fact that many public tech companies saw their valuations skyrocket during the lockdown and that the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated mass adoption in e-commerce, ...