Deepak Kamra has a story to tell of how global venture capital investing works.

The firm at which he’s a partner, Canaan Partners, is rooted in Silicon Valley on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, the very center of venture capital. But it has opened an office in India in the past decade and also has offices in Israel and Connecticut.

Canaan Partners was the original backer of the now-ubiquitous Web dating service Match.com in the United States. “Now we’re also investors in the world’s leading social-dating network. It’s called Zoosk. In India, we’re leading investors in the largest matrimonial service (Bharat Matrimony). So there’s a different cultural twist, right? There’s a basic example of how you can see the same themes. People want to fall in love and get married. But in India, you call a matrimonial service. The objective is to get married in three months,” Kamra says. Kamra, born in Delhi and educated at Harvard Business School, is himself a personification of the international nature of Silicon Valley.

It’s a story of how particular investments work across the cultural boundaries of a flattening world. But it’s also an example of how many leading venture capital firms are reaching beyond roots in Silicon Valley to the world. They’re opening offices in countries like Israel, India, and China. Even those firms who remain focused on the roughly 20 miles surrounding the Stanford University—the VC epicenter between San Francisco and San Jose—say the companies they back are looking to go global more quickly than they have in the past.

“The Silicon Valley has been and will continue to be the spiritual leader of entrepreneurship and venture capital,” says Tim Draper in an email exchange with Portfolio.com. His firm, Draper Fisher Jurvetson has funded Yahoo and Feedburner among others. And Draper’s father and grandfather in the 1950s and '60s helped invent the venture capital model that grew particularly hearty in Northern California hills. Still, Draper adds, “We need more venture capital in many parts of the world.”

Venture capital arguably began on the other side of the country in 1957, in Boston, with a $20,000 investment by the dean of Harvard University into Digital Equipment Corporation. Boston is still an important center of venture capital, running second to Silicon Valley as a home for venture capital firms and as a center of startup investment.

But within a decade, by the late 1960s, the model had mushroomed into something much bigger in the climate of Northern California. While the fertile hills and valleys north of San Francisco were sprouting a world-renowned wine industry, those south of San Francisco attracted a new gold rush of entrepreneurs and those willing to back them. Venture capitalists backed companies for a share of equity in the company, making money for themselves and their own investors, called limited partners, when those companies went public or were sold to other companies.

Silicon Valley had everything. Brainy would-be entrepreneurs either teaching at or graduating from Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley. Investors willing to take a flyer on ideas that could go bust or make billions. The science associated with the defense industry that grew up in California during World War II. And, finally, it had early success stories like Hewlett-Packard that could be used as an example for those who followed.

By the end of '60s, the first of several buildings at 3000 Sand Hill Road had been built. More than four decades later, the area accounts for roughly 40 percent of venture capital deployed internationally.

Venture capitalists say what has grown up here is an entire ecosystem—lawyers, investors, inventors, hungry entrepreneurs—and an attitude that tolerates failure and encourages entrepreneurs to get up, dust themselves off, and try again.

For decades, the success of Silicon Valley has been undeniable. Venture capitalists’ investments have spawned some of the world’s most recognizable brands. Apple, Google, Intel, Cisco, Yahoo, eBay, and dozens of other household names were born and nurtured here. Companies originally backed by venture capitalists employ 12 to 13 million people, and those companies’ revenues account for 20 percent of U.S. GDP.

But the model is changing, say Draper and others. Venture capitalists and the companies they fund are looking beyond the small circle around Menlo Park more often and with an eye to replicating the success of the Valley in other parts of the world ready for entrepreneurialism, risk, and reward.

Draper’s firm founded the DFJ Network, an alliance of some 140 venture capital firms worldwide who help each other vet deals and joint investments called syndication. Among the companies the network has backed is Baidu, China’s dominant search engine. So Silicon Valley is the home of funding both for China’s biggest search engine and Google, the search-advertising giant that has been at loggerheads with the Chinese government over censorship since this spring.

Other firms, like Silicon Valley giant Sequoia Capital have opened offices in far corners of the world. Sequoia has seven offices— one at 3000 Sand Hill Road with local offices scattered in international settings, from China to Israel.

“I think there’s a universal grammar about our pursuit that transcends borders and boundaries and time zones and cultures,” says Michael Moritz, general partner at Sequoia, who oversaw his firm’s investments in Yahoo and Google, among other tech highflyers.