Moritz says his firm’s expansion was organic. Sequoia just followed the companies it funded into new parts of the world.

If a company Sequoia backed in Silicon Valley was to be a significant player, it would eventually turn to world markets, Moritz says. “It was going to have half of its business outside the United States, or at least half of its business outside the United States,” he says. That applies even to one of the most famous companies Moritz backed early, Google, which made him a personal fortune and pulls in 53 percent of its revenue from international markets. As its companies went global, so did Sequoia.

A global scale, though, didn’t change one thing about the venture capital business, Moritz says. “Whether you’re working in Mumbai…or Beijing of Menlo Park, it’s an intensely local business where having the contacts and network and associations and relationships is vital,” he says. So as Sequoia opened its offices in foreign countries, it made sure the people it hired for those offices as partners in the firm were deeply connected to the location where they would work.

Like Kamra and countless others, Moritz is also a living example of Silicon Valley’s global nature. He was born in Wales and educated at Oxford and the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dixon Doll, a three-decade veteran of the venture business and co-founder of DCM, a firm with some $2 billion under management, puts the way his firm manages its offices abroad simply. “There’s just no way that any firm, I don’t care who it is, can be successful and find the best deals in a place like China by remote control anymore,” he says.

Not every firm is interested in opening offices abroad. Even some of the largest firms are keeping their eye firmly on the home front and Northern California in particular. That doesn’t mean, though, that their businesses aren’t international in scope.

Erik Straser, partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, points out that you wouldn’t have had to go far from Menlo Park to run into the most successful new global company of the past decade. Google is in nearby Mountain View.

“As early stage investors say: ‘Would we have to be in other geographies to produce our financial return?’ The answer to that is no,” Straser says.

So does that mean the $2 billion Mohr Davidow has under management is devoted exclusively to the United States? Well, not exactly, because the companies it invests in are looking to global markets very early in their existence.

Straser, for instance, oversees investments in companies engaged in cleantech, and those companies are working on a global scale. They’re looking to come up with solutions to energy, to construction materials, to the very stuff of industrial development. And that’s very much a global pursuit.

Ammar Hanafi of Alloy Ventures says he and his partners are also focused on companies close to its downtown Palo Alto headquarters within walking distance of the Stanford campus. And he, too, expects the companies he funds in the Valley to have an international focus. But he’s also a firm believer in the future of Silicon Valley.

“I pride myself on being a pretty rational guy,” he says. “But I’m a professional optimist, right? I mean, I wouldn’t be a venture capitalist if I wasn’t a professional optimist. But I do believe in the Valley. The place knows how to reinvent itself and react very quickly to the demands of the marketplace, and capital and talent flows very freely.”

Kamra of Canaan Partners, though, says having offices abroad gives his firm access to all kinds of deals it might not have otherwise had. And it also allows for his firm to consider smaller bets on smaller companies, because you can take a company public in India, for example, without having to grow that company as large as you would domestically.

He says his firm is even considering whether to get into microfinancing—very small investments in tiny companies—in India. The economics of such investing just wouldn’t work in the United States, because the returns wouldn’t be large enough to justify the risk of that investing.

So is the future for Canaan and others far from the Valley where they grew up and grew strong?

Not exactly, Kamra says. His firm still makes 75 percent of its investments in the U.S. market. And Silicon Valley remains a global center for entrepreneurs and those who support them, like venture capitalists.

“I mean, it’s a pretty exciting place to be,” he says. “It’s sort of like being in New York or London if you’re in finance, and it is where the greatest minds tend to congregate.”

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Kent Bernhard Jr. is News Editor of Portfolio.com