> speculative "we don't even know if this is technically possible, much less if there's even a market for it" that Silicon Valley was founded on

yes and that's the entire point of Silicon Valley.

It's also why you can't have another Silicon Valley in Europe or Asia where almost no one is willing to suspend belief and reality like this.

I've been invited to meetings and conferences from places in Sweden, Amsterdam to Thailand, and investors in all of those places balk at the kind of mindset you need to invest in startups. They are more comfortable with loans than investing. They lose confidence faster or require a higher ROI than would make sense. SV is really special and the reason why the best talent from all the over the world gather there.

VCs become rich not because they are smarter and better than Warren Buffet but because they are willing to place bets that Buffet would never take on.

You’re right, but your argument also has a lot of survivorship bias in it. There are rich VCs. There are also VCs that lose their shirts making bad bets. You just don’t hear about those as much.