How to make the next Silicon Valley in Bellingham

I am in process of reading a great series of blog posts by Dug Song, a well-known genius in the security space that I have crossed paths with a bit while I was working at a company that was then named Hiverworld.  Dug lays out the failure of Ann Arbor to attract enough venture capital and top notch startups to make the city competitive with Boulder, Palo Alto, Berkley, etc.   Dug has a point of view I would almost like to steal verbatim to help grow Whatcom County and Belligham (except for the fact that I don't do skateboards):

"Yes, I'm actually from the Internet, having lived most of my adult life online. And to paraphrase a Radiohead song:
" I'm a geek. I'm a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here? I don't belong here." After 15 years here, and seeing a ton of friends and companies come and go, I'm at a crossroads, trying to determine if I should keep my family here. While I've proven most of my family and friends wrong by staying this long, I can no longer ignore the giant sucking sound as the best, brightest, and most amazing people I've met here continue to be siphoned off to the coasts - and with them, the culture and community I've loved.  figure I have two more years to figure this out, before my 3-year old son starts school. So I've embarked on the ruthless execution of a completely self-serving agenda to fulfill my own nobrow, capitalist-pig hierarchy of needs by then:

a skatepark, and art/skate/punk culture
hacker culture and community
startups"
 
In trying to understand the commercial market for startups in Ann Arbor, Dug quotes a brilliant article by Paul Graham ("How to be Silicon Valley") where Graham describes what it takes to attract brilliant young people and the risk-taking entrepreneurs that drive wealth and growth in a few select cities across the nation:

"Nerds will pay a premium to live in a town where the smart people are really smart, but you don't have to pay as much for that. It's supply and demand: glamour is popular, so you have to pay a lot for it. Most nerds like quieter pleasures. They like cafes instead of clubs; used bookshops instead of fashionable clothing shops; hiking instead of dancing; sunlight instead of tall buildings. A nerd's idea of paradise is Berkeley or Boulder."

Graham ending quote makes me believe there is real hope for Bellingham to attract talent away from Berkeley and Boulder: 

"For all its power, Silicon Valley has a great weakness: the paradise Shockley found in 1956 is now one giant parking lot. San Francisco and Berkeley are great, but they're forty miles away. Silicon Valley proper is soul-crushing suburban sprawl. It has fabulous weather, which makes it significantly better than the soul-crushing sprawl of most other American cities. But a competitor that managed to avoid sprawl would have real leverage. All a city needs is to be the kind of place the next traitorous eight look at and say "I want to stay here," and that would be enough to get the chain reaction started.