In the 60s or 70s, IBM made all their plastics, worldwide, for their machines near Boulder, where SparkFun is based.
As a result of that, when IBM moved production elsewhere, much of the talent stayed in the area - now there are a lot of high quality smaller companies with injection molding and other plastics experience etc. in the area.
Another area in business where the high rents and "you need a VC" mentality would have worked against real world success.
CO attracts high quality people - although the housing prices skyrocketing is going to affect whether the younger people who are less financially established, will come in the same numbers as before.
> although the housing prices skyrocketing is going to affect whether the younger people who are less financially established, will come in the same numbers as before.
It's been mindblowing how much housing has gone up over the Front Range even in the last ten years (median price of a single family home in Boulder is now over $1M whereas ten years ago I think it might have been a third of that). Much of the affordable housing for northern Colorado means being all the way up in Larimer or Weld county if you're interested in a single family home. I think this is only going to get way worse, with a number of companies like Google and Amazon significantly growing their footprint around Boulder and Denver.
Weld county is affordable because it there aren't a lot of jobs there. As people move further and further out for cheaper housing, traffic gets worse and worse. The Front Range is basically like Nebraska: You can basically build in any direction without geographic limits. It that happens, the traffic will be worse than LA as people zig zag across the Front Range to commute to their jobs in different suburbs.
As a Boulder resident (renter), I think Front Range cities need to have a pro-growth mindset to allow people to live closer to their jobs. We shouldn't repeat the same mistakes as LA and Silicon Valley.
> As a Boulder resident (renter), I think Front Range cities need to have a pro-growth mindset to allow people to live closer to their jobs. We shouldn't repeat the same mistakes as LA and Silicon Valley.
Bingo! My near-miss with Boulder is what got me interested in how cities (don't) work in the US and the people interested in fixing them. It's a pretty interesting movement, with people all over the ideological spectrum, from environmentalists to libertarians. Since it's local, I think it's possible to make more of a difference than with national politics.
> although the housing prices skyrocketing is going to affect whether the younger people who are less financially established, will come in the same numbers as before.
But at least you can just go East here. The towns surrounding Boulder--Superior, Louisville, Lafayette, Longmont, etc.--are great places to live, costs are far lower than in Boulder proper, and your commute is still only 15-30 minutes. I live in Lafayette and commute into Boulder; it takes 20 minutes and it's mostly on 2-lane roads going past farmland.
And as an added bonus, when I'm missing a part for one of my electronics projects, I can always stop by SparkFun. :)
It strikes me as something of an "own goal" that the "green belt" in Boulder has had the effect of putting a lot of people in that area out of reach of public transportation or bicycling as viable transportation options, requiring more cars and parking and traffic and pollution. Instead of growing out a little bit (god forbid they build 'up' or 'in'), people just drive even further out.
The green belt worked in Boulder's early days before many people commuted in. Unfortunately, Boulder's anti-growth mindset these last few decades has priced people out, forcing them to "jump the gap" in the green belt. I think the green belt is a really good thing for Boulder to prevent sprawl (and traffic), but it needs to be coupled with a pro-growth mindset.
There are shifting attitudes in Boulder as NIMBYs get more competition from younger people like myself. I hope it isn't too late because at this point, Boulder is in danger of turning into Aspen or Santa Barbara.
I get the reason for it and it makes sense to me - but the unintended consequences are causing problems. Oregon has a similar thing, the 'Urban Growth Boundary', but those expand over time so that cities can expand.
Agreed, I gave up on bicycling when I moved outside the Boulder green belt. Boulder has a ton of cyclists but, for whatever reason, refuses to build proper bike lanes. The major roads in/out of Boulder barely have shoulders in places. California, by contrast, has proper bike lanes everywhere--seriously, even Central Expressway in the bay area is safer to bike on than any of the major roads going in/out of Boulder.
I switched to a motorcycle as a result, and while it doesn't have the health benefits of bicycling, it's a good way to commute.
It must depend on where in Boulder you live and work. From my perspective in South Boulder, there are many bike lanes and bike paths. I don't even have to touch asphalt to get to work.
Having grown up in a place with its share of economic hard times, and having lived in Italy for many years, the idea of "too many pesky jobs" is... absolutely mind boggling. Like something from another planet.
This is definitely true. I first moved to Boulder in a crappy small apartment, but when I wanted to buy a house, I moved way out east and commuted. With the housing market the way it is, I was able to sell that house in 3 years with a big profit and buy a house much closer back to Boulder.
Yea it was, but the down payment we were able to make from the huge profit we made from the last place meant the monthly payments were only a few hundred bucks more a month.
If the area grows, the commute won't be that good in the future.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, a lot of people in the Bay Area moved from the core Silicon Valley cities to some of the outlying East Bay cities like Dublin, Pleasanton, and Walnut Creek, where they could afford larger homes. The commute from those cities to the major job centers is much worse than it used to be.
Hey neighbor! I'm in Lafayette as well, over by the library. 20 minutes to Boulder, Longmont, or 30 minutes to Denver. It's a great location.
Agreed, it's awesome here, though the prices are going up pretty quickly. That said, so are the restaurants down Public! Great new options. :)
Did SparkFun re-open its retail business then? When I was there last summer on a tour, the retail storefront wasn't open. The facility is great, though.
Also: Don't forget TinkerMill in Longmont, a great hackerspace that doubles as an incubator. I just met someone today who is bootstrapping an educational toy company out of TinkerMill. The local start-up community is really quite vibrant.
Sparkfun has not had to compete talent just yet. Wait until the competition for talent in Colorado reaches SV level. Sparkfun will have to stop relying on "I want to work at a cool/fun/relaxed place badly" and start paying market rates for talent.
Take a look at their crazy application process. It's built around how badly labor wants to work there. This strategy doesn't work in SV anymore.. Good candidates want to get paid, not have "fun times" at work. Sparkfun's talent strategy is built on concepts that are well over 15 years old.
A cooperative[0] is usually operated and run for the mutual benefit of it's members. So for example, a credit union co-op provides services by members, and for members.
Since Sparkfun provides the majority of it's services to non-members, it's unlikely that it would fit the bill of a co-op.
Which isn't to say that Sparkfun is a coop -- I don't think it is, just a bootstrapped company where the equity has stayed within the hands of founders/employees.
Silicon Foo is a meme for non-technical types used to communicate some sort of software renaissance by a city. It makes them picture the AmaGooFaceSofts of the world opening up offices to rescue their economy. Or maybe they picture the next UberLyftAirbnb will happen in Fooville.
Of course it makes us want to vomit because we take it literally and know that isn't what's going to happen.
The Bay Area[0] is the Emperor of building software (business and consumer) and it will always be that way. The Bay Area's primary business is the building of software and thus software is created there for software companies as well.
At the rest of the Silicon Hopefuls, just getting a handful of legit tech companies that want to build software specific to that city's primary economies (oil, real estate, defense contracting, lumber, etc.) would do A LOT of good.
Disclaimer: I don't live in the Bay Area. I live in Silicon Foo where talented software builders either run away or work remote for Bay Area companies.
0 - Citizens of other very large cities: please don't have your egos bruised. Your cities matter, too. Ok, you know I'm really just talking to New Yorkers who have a hard time not being the best at everything.
Not pertaining to OP's article, but when reading fluff pieces about some "next silicon valley", it's always strange seeing them use the opening of a Google or Amazon satellite office as some kind of validation of their claim.
Do they really not understand what the valley is about?
Maybe this is just a lot of lying with graphics, but it has always bothered me that Colorado has been a tech center on and off for decades, while California is nothing but truck drivers and secretaries. Yet it seems like Colorado is the last place people look for tech talent.
Having worked here for the last two decades, since I arrived in '94, I've never had real trouble finding a computer programming job.
(I don't count the time period when all I knew was Visual Basic and was re-training in another language while job-hunting, because really, that was on me.)
Historically speaking silicon valley so named for hardware: HP, Fairchild, Intel, AMD, SGI, etc. Not sure what % of the economy is hardware vs. software these days.
St. Louis here. The startup scene here are also trying to copy the Silicon Valley model, instead of trying to be something unique and different. It is frustrating.
I work at another Boulder company just down the road from SparkFun, also founded by a CU student in his dorm room, which has been successful without VC investment. Boulder is an odd hybrid of new tech companies and more traditionally bootstrapped companies like SparkFun.
There's plenty of VC-funded startups in Boulder, too. The main pedestrian mall downtown, Pearl Street, is flanked by tech companies on the 2nd/3rd floors, above the retail shops. It feels quite similar to University Ave in Palo Alto, back when I lived there in the 90's.
Perhaps the biggest difference is that where Silicon Valley is geographically locked-in and there's no cheap office space to be had, in Boulder you can go East a little bit and the price of office space drops dramatically. Taking SparkFun as an example, it's not on Pearl Street, it's several miles outside of town in an industrial park.
As such, Boulder gets to be both a micro-size Silicon Valley and a more normal commercial environment as well. It's also just a great place to live, housing costs are reasonable (relative to California anyway), there's tons to do, and it's a good place to raise a family.
I don't know, that place has actually tracked SV in a lot of ways, from a good university, to a concentration of smart people, to some good VC's, to being a nice place, to ... rampant NIMBYism that has driven housing prices up to nearly 700K (Zillow).
Tell me about it... I'm sick and tired of the trope that Boulder is just white people from the coasts when it's actually wealthy people from the coasts, and Wisconsin.
You know what's funny? Six or seven hours south is Santa Fe/Albuquerque NM. Both have nearby national laboratories, colleges, and (some) technical businesses. They're also generally affordable. Pretty much anywhere in NM would just kill for more business and has some technical workforce. I'm also sure it'd be relatively easy to convince people to move there.
We ended up in Bend, Oregon rather than Boulder and are happy. Prices are lower (for now) and traffic is nonexistant IMO. But there's something wrong with the development patterns in much of the US that means those things will get worse over time unless we do things differently.
Seconded. But the big problem with NM is there's no first-world healthcare here, which makes it a tough place to live if you're older. Okay that's an exaggeration. There is good healthcare but not nearly enough for the population since doctors and nurses can make a lot more $$ elsewhere. So getting a PCP is very hard, ordinary appointments take weeks, and specialist appointments take months.
I have a brother that lived in Los Alomos, the National Labs are no where even close to Santa Fe or Albuquerque and the Universities there are not comparable to CU. When the Lobos join the Pac-12, that's a good way to know that they are comparable. Housing in Santa Fe is not exactly cheap either. Also, NM is an acquired taste and is not for everyone. The labs were kinda put there because of the remoteness of the place. I mean, Los Alomos is at about 7500 feet, 2 beers and you are knackered. That said, I do love NM and it's wilderness; I'll take my enchilada Christmas style ;)
Sports teams seem to correlate pretty well with donor funding, grant funding, and general population. It's not a hard and fast rule, but it's not a bad metric
> I mean, Los Alomos is at about 7500 feet, 2 beers and you are knackered.
Oh FFS. When you're visiting, sure. But not after you've lived here a few weeks and your body has built more red blood cells. That's why cyclists come here to train -- it's legal blood doping.
Two years ago I moved from Albuquerque to Denver, explicitly for work related reasons. The difference in available engineering jobs is night and day.
ABQ is a starkly beautiful midsize city with an unusually high number of nuclear physicists. That's necessary but far from sufficient for being a tech center. And as far as I could tell, the city's ideal is for a relatively small number of relatively large employers, not in hundreds of 5-20 employee firms.
Besides, if you're interested in working for one of those firms, let alone starting one, Denver's only six or seven hours north.
That's why I think Abq could be a budding tech hub with relatively few changes. There are some phds in the neighborhood and at least one good, affordable engineering college (Socorro/NMT). I'm guessing it's governmental policies (or lack of tax incentives) and a lack of at least one tech billionaire that likes the place keeping it down.
I mention that last part as I think Zappos being in LV has pulled some tech interest into LV.
Albuquerque does have reasonably good Internet infrastructure and the cost of living is low. But most of the tech employers are government contractors that require a security clearance, which is a turnoff for some. (If you lose your startup job and you don't have a clearance, you're screwed.)
We also have this good news/bad news airport situation: The airport is in the middle of town and it's VERY easy to get in and out of quickly. OTOH there are few direct flights anywhere -- the Bay area being a notable exception.
How is it possible they have few direct flights? It's an international airport. Anyway, that's the sort of thing that would change if it became a tech hub. I imagine that's all supply/demand. The infrastructure is already there.
Supply and demand. There are plenty of direct flights to hub cities (Dallas, Houston, Denver, Chicago, etc) but Albuquerque itself is not a hub city. So a trip to e.g. Boston from Albuquerque is an all-day slog.
As for the "international" aspect of ABQ, that's mostly wishful thinking. There might be a few flights to/from Mexico, but that's about it.
Unaffordable housing is how local homeowners loot the vast sums of money chasing tech talent. If housing is affordable, you can assume that the high-paying jobs aren't there. If you start to prop up the job market there, it'll quickly become unaffordable once folks realize that its a tech hub.
I recently moved from Silicon Valley back home to northern Colorado. And now I read the comments local newspaper articles and it's all about how bad the traffic congestion is and how housing prices are ridiculously high. It's all relative, I guess.
SparkFun is based in Niwot between Boulder and Longmont, so the cost of living would be much cheaper there. Much cheaper than Boulder and obviously cheaper than Silicon Valley.
Colorado has its own problems and housing costs are rising, but there are plenty of places to live here that are affordable. Even if you live in Denver, I think you get a better value for your salary than in SV.
Do any of you modern Colorado people have an opinion of Colorado Springs these days for startups or tech or really anything?
I went to school there (CC) but that was back in the early 90's so I'm not exactly up on things, but I've long considered reconnecting with the area, finding an excuse to open a satellite office or something.
In my memory the Springs was pretty sleepy and outside of the small little hippie commune liberal arts college was mostly comprised of retired or military or both.
Does Colorado Springs figure at all in Colorado's business/tech scene?
Not really. It's too long a drive from Denver/Boulder, so people end up moving north. It's got some stuff, but the Academy is really the only 'big' uni. and they don't really interact with local businesses as they are commissioned officers still. Different vibe from 'open' higher education.
It's a military town first and foremost, there is a tech scene but most of it seems to be adjacent to defense/aerospace. Seems like a bit of a different world that the rest of tech sometimes.
My knowledge is pretty out of date, I imagine it has exploded into a national security apparatus city as well by now.
I was just at Colorado College's graduation (go Tigers!) and spoke with friends and professors about this. Seems like right now the only people choosing to work in tech in CSprings are doing it because they don't want to move away from an established lifestyle or because they want to contribute to the local ecosystem. If you're looking to open a satellite office, Boulder or Denver would be much better bang for buck.
I lived in COS for 15 years, and recently bailed and moved to Boulder.
COS had the good seeds of a tech hub prior to the dot com melt down. Lots of cities did.
But what I think helped drain the potential was 9/11 and the uptick in defense contracting. All the engineers went to one of several contractors and all the non-engineers who would get involved in startups left town because they couldn't find engineers who would take the risk.
It's a great town if you want to work on the fringes, or commute to Denver, or work in government contracting. Since none of those three fit my needs I packed it up and moved to the Broomfield corridor (I couldn't afford Boulder proper).
Meh. The STEM side is really good, can't speak for the rest though. Also, ahem, there are 4 campuses, haven't you seen the billboards and the A-Line? /s
Maybe the STE, definitely not the M! Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard the students are even more burnt out at UCD. I have no idea what UCCS is like though.
The physics dept at CU-D is an utter flaming shit-show currently, fwiw. Hard-pass.
I don't know about the Math at Boulder, but I haven't heard much fair or negative about it. Not enough data to make any conclusions.
AMC is alright, but it's post-undergrad/grad-school only, so anything you hear has that flavor added. Lots of med-y students though, few researchers in small labs (<3 grad students/PI).
CU-CS? No idea, never talked to anyone that graduated there or is there now. Guess that means it's not super good or super bad then, again, not enough data.
Wow, that's a massive (and inaccurate) generalization. Not only have I worked with many CU grads that were passionate and intelligent but a couple of them did incredible work with NASA, Google and IBM in their undergrad/grad school work and were responsible for some very important equipment going into space. I myself am not a CU grad (go Lobos) but I have respect for some of the very talented people that CU has graduated.
Sparkfun has not had to compete talent just yet. Wait until the competition for talent in Colorado reaches SV level. Sparkfun will have to stop relying on "I want to work at a cool/fun/relaxed place badly" and start paying market rates for talent.
Take a look at their crazy application process. It's built around how badly labor wants to work there. This strategy doesn't work in SV anymore.. Good candidates want to get paid, not have "fun times" at work. Sparkfun's talent strategy is built on concepts that are well over 15 years old.
I agree with this comment as it applies to the general tech ecosystem here, but Sparkfun might actually be exempt from this because it is legitimately a very cool place to just be around... But that said yeah, it is very apparent that too many companies here are coasting on the general area's appeal. We're just starting to hit the point where that won't cut it anymore, and I think a lot of companies that have gotten by on quality talent at cut rate prices due to the lack of competition and the inherent desirability of the area are in for a serious rude awakening.
Salaries are already starting to rapidly increase (more than they already were) in Boulder just with the announcement of companies like Google moving large offices here and it's been very disconcerting to see companies resort to the same tactics used by Bay Area companies to circumvent paying people (company commuter busses so you can live in more affordable areas, $500 ski passes instead of $5k raises, free food, etc etc). This area can't really even bank on the usual scam of promising big exists since those are much more rare in these parts. Watching the economics of the whole situation has been very interesting, especially when you see that they're only going to make many of the social problems we're dealing with much much worse.
There are a shocking number of older tech companies around Boulder (say 10+ years old) that haven't gotten the memo about the market value of engineers. They've somehow gotten away with paying engineers $80k/yr, and now they can't even hire a new grad for that.
I've certainly had several hiring discussions that were going great until we hit salary. I make good money but nowhere near crazy money, yet these hiring managers weren't even in the same ballpark.
Sparkfun has not had to compete talent just yet. Wait until the competition for talent in Colorado reaches SV level. Sparkfun will have to stop relying on "I want to work at a cool/fun/relaxed place badly" and start paying market rates for talent.
Take a look at their crazy application process. It's built around how badly labor wants to work there. This strategy doesn't work in SV anymore.. Good candidates want to get paid, not have "fun times" at work. Sparkfun's talent strategy is built on concepts that are well over 15 years old.
The headline posted here is misleading; the actual article says "Colorado Doesn’t Need to Replicate Silicon Valley to Have a Prosperous Startup Industry"
When I graduated with my CS degree, I knew I wanted to be a part of startups, so I decided to move to either SF or Boulder. And I'm so, so, so glad I picked Boulder.
My company operates in several cities and it's great to have options like SF, NY, DC, etc. where there's a ton of activity and a ton of $$$, but most of the time, we just don't need it. Most of the time we want a place to actually enjoy our work. We frequent Boulder & Austin since we have investors in both locations.
I agree and like this article but the midwest needs to adopt a few things the valley did right. 1) Hand out more equity to early employees and create a flywheel of entrepreneurs who build and finance other businesses. 2) Get rid of the non-compete culture. Standard form in Chicago is 18 months. This is unenforceable in Cali. 3) Put value on youth. We still live under a manufacturing seniority mindset. One woman once told me "I can't wait to turn 30 so I can be taken seriously". The midwest has all the talent and ingenuity it needs. It has a unique perspective and is relatively inexpensive to live in, but the rules need to be revised to favor competitiveness.
At the end of the day, it's about access to capital. My wild hypothesis is if some angel investor said, "I'm going to invest 10 billion dollars in funding startups but you have to relocate to Colorado/midwest/anywhere for the first 5 years", then in the next 5 years that city will definitely "have a prosperous startup industry". Yes, you can be successful bootstrapping but it seems so much easier once you have funds to use for hiring/marketing/scaling/etc. (Note: I've never raised any amount of capital before.) In addition the "we've raised money" badge also signals legitimacy to potential employees, customers, partners.
In any good sized city there are venture capitalists and angles willing to fund SOMETHING. A number of them do not care where you are physically located (unless physical location is important) and will fund you wherever you are.
There is a lot more money in the valley for some reason, but there is still plenty in any great large city if you have a great idea. It is the okay ideas that they cannot fund in other places (note some seemingly bad ideas take off you will see more of that in the valley if this is worth it or not is an open question)
Friendly amendment: it's about access to capital relative to local costs. Arguably OP's point is that he had access to enough capital relative to his local costs in Colorado to afford to bootstrap, whereas he'd have needed VC to hit the same ratio in the Valley. Turned out well for him, and has worked for others like him.
"I'm going to invest 10 billion in startups but you have to relocate" is basically what Tony Hsieh did in Las Vegas, and it... based on how rocky that got, I think it's about more than just access to capital.
It begs the question of why we (generally) feel like tech startups need to think/behave differently than traditional businesses.
"Startups" in the sense of new businesses have been around for centuries (arguably longer). But recently, the popular image of most tech companies is raising large amounts of money to grow/scale really quickly. If anything, shouldn't the fact that engineers understand how to leverage technology lead to higher profitability and lower need for capital than all the brick-and-mortar businesses that came before us? Like the SparkFun founder says, as an engineer, I started a company that I knew how to build and implement on my own.
It is mostly a question of terminology. Around here, "startup" is defined as hyper-growth, because YC chose to define it that way and HN came from YC. In other places, it can have a more flexible definition. So while most of the audience here will absolutely agree that you don't need VCs or insane growth to start a business, on HN, that would be coined as a "lifestyle" company, not a "startup". (And in my mind, more power to anyone who goes that route.)
Good point on the terminology. My main (and relatively early) experience has been that there are good lessons to be learned from both sides (like sustainable growth and profit models on the "non-startup" end, and rapid innovation/marketing on the "startup" end)
Boo! No, don't move to Colorado! It's terrible here! Too much snow! White people all the way to Nebraska! The views are over-rated! Skiing is too expensive! Beer is all just hop-juice or Coors! Terrible food! Nothing but Papa Jonh's and stoners! Stay Away!
I think they're just being sarcastic and saying as many things as possible to scare people away from their beloved state, by throwing out a bunch of stereotypes about it.
I think they might have been sarcastic there, but I wouldn't want to live in a neighborhood where white people were the supermajority. I grew up outside NYC and live in New Haven now and I get totally freaked out by rural areas where you don't see a black person for weeks. Just feels off.
I'd say it goes hand in hand with the bit about "terrible food". OK, "terrible" is hyperbolic, but I'm specifically avoiding places that are as white as snow because of food.
I'm looking at moving, and one hard requirement for me is that the suburb I'm moving to have an Asian population of at least 15%, specifically for food-related reasons. I live in the northern suburbs of Dallas, which have fairly high Asian populations. I want a large amount of Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, regional Chinese, Indian, etc. food wherever I live, and if a place is 90% white, I'm not going to get that. I'd also like a Hispanic population above 15% too because I love me some tacos, but I'm willing to forego that as long as a nearby suburb is >15% Hispanic.
I've narrowed down my search to the suburbs of Los Angeles and Las Vegas; specifically, Torrance (or Irvine) and Spring Valley, respectively, and ethnic makeup is one of my most important criteria.
Sushi Zamai on Spruce St. in Boulder is also good (or it was 10 years ago). My understanding at that time was Sushi Den and Zamai shared the same cargo plane for their daily fish deliveries.
You may have saved me! I recall talking to someone when I first moved, and they mentioned the best BBQ in the area was at a Lakewood Whole Foods. I felt a narrowing doom sync in.
As a QA Engineer (living in Broomfield, 9 miles east), the number of cold calls I am getting from recruiters for tech positions in Boulder is averaging 4/week. This number has been steadily rising the past 3 years. Boulder may not be SV, but as Nate says, it doesn't have to be. It is it's own beast and it is, by my eyes, succeeding.
Yeah the startup scene is pretty rag tag and unprofessional in a lot of ways, but in other ways it far exceeds any capabilities you'll find in California or anywhere else for that matter. Boulder doesn't really need a model, they are sort of pushing a bunch of envelopes uphill all on their own.
"In those beginning stages, I never would have been able to pay for warehouse space in the Bay Area while waiting for investors to commit"
You'd be crazy to start a warehouse in Silicon Valley -- run your development and operations there, but when you're ready to move out of your garage into a real warehouse, put the warehouse (and product assembly) in Tracy or someplace like that that's an hour's drive away and much more affordable.
I don't think you need to replicate Silicon Valley. Why would you want to? It has serious problems that are not going to be easily addressed.
Also, it isn't a given that money has to continue to concentrate in a few places. This is not some force of nature we are watching. It is human activity. Sure, human activity gets influenced by factors outside of our control. It is easier to "go with the flow" of various things than to swim upstream. But we have a lot more ability to choose to do something else if we don't like how this is going than most creatures have.
I don't like how articles (like the Wired article that inspired this post) just seem to presume all we can do is document the trend and make our peace with accepting it. That is crazy. If people think this is a terrible, corrosive trend, then why not write articles that give push back to the trend (like this one does) instead of just documenting it like a runaway train we cannot stop?
VCs can go invest money wherever they want. Rich people have far more mobility than others. They don't have to limit themselves to a handful of places. Nor are other people simply doomed to curry favor with them. Most of their so-called money isn't actually in the form of money per se. They own stocks or real estate or whatever. Money has to circulate like blood in order to stay alive. They need things to invest in. It isn't in their best interest to let it sit in a vault rotting.
It is absolutely not a given that these trends have to continue in this same direction. Humans can say "Oh, we don't like where our behavior is taking us. Let's consider other options." It isn't a Greek Tragedy where the more you try to resist your fate, the more doomed you are to entrench it as the only option.
Related: I run an engineering team in Dallas, TX and moved to Colorado recently. Where would you look for high quality, heavily growing firms in the area? I'm only interested in running large teams - otherwise I get bored. Eg: CTO or Managing Director style roles.....
A lot Bay area startups have opened offices around the Boulder area. I'd look there as a starting point if I were you. There's a big tech sector just south of Denver but its mostly filled with more established type companies.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadAs a result of that, when IBM moved production elsewhere, much of the talent stayed in the area - now there are a lot of high quality smaller companies with injection molding and other plastics experience etc. in the area.
Another area in business where the high rents and "you need a VC" mentality would have worked against real world success.
CO attracts high quality people - although the housing prices skyrocketing is going to affect whether the younger people who are less financially established, will come in the same numbers as before.
It's been mindblowing how much housing has gone up over the Front Range even in the last ten years (median price of a single family home in Boulder is now over $1M whereas ten years ago I think it might have been a third of that). Much of the affordable housing for northern Colorado means being all the way up in Larimer or Weld county if you're interested in a single family home. I think this is only going to get way worse, with a number of companies like Google and Amazon significantly growing their footprint around Boulder and Denver.
As a Boulder resident (renter), I think Front Range cities need to have a pro-growth mindset to allow people to live closer to their jobs. We shouldn't repeat the same mistakes as LA and Silicon Valley.
Bingo! My near-miss with Boulder is what got me interested in how cities (don't) work in the US and the people interested in fixing them. It's a pretty interesting movement, with people all over the ideological spectrum, from environmentalists to libertarians. Since it's local, I think it's possible to make more of a difference than with national politics.
Here are some good ones:
* http://www.sfyimby.org/ & https://www.yimbydenver.com/
* http://www.strongtowns.org/
* http://marketurbanism.com/
But at least you can just go East here. The towns surrounding Boulder--Superior, Louisville, Lafayette, Longmont, etc.--are great places to live, costs are far lower than in Boulder proper, and your commute is still only 15-30 minutes. I live in Lafayette and commute into Boulder; it takes 20 minutes and it's mostly on 2-lane roads going past farmland.
And as an added bonus, when I'm missing a part for one of my electronics projects, I can always stop by SparkFun. :)
There are shifting attitudes in Boulder as NIMBYs get more competition from younger people like myself. I hope it isn't too late because at this point, Boulder is in danger of turning into Aspen or Santa Barbara.
I switched to a motorcycle as a result, and while it doesn't have the health benefits of bicycling, it's a good way to commute.
They've done a lot right there, it's the housing that's completely broken thanks to people like Mr. "No more jobs":
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/business/how-anti-growth-...
Having grown up in a place with its share of economic hard times, and having lived in Italy for many years, the idea of "too many pesky jobs" is... absolutely mind boggling. Like something from another planet.
"I'm here! Lock the doors!"
In the 1990s and early 2000s, a lot of people in the Bay Area moved from the core Silicon Valley cities to some of the outlying East Bay cities like Dublin, Pleasanton, and Walnut Creek, where they could afford larger homes. The commute from those cities to the major job centers is much worse than it used to be.
Agreed, it's awesome here, though the prices are going up pretty quickly. That said, so are the restaurants down Public! Great new options. :)
Did SparkFun re-open its retail business then? When I was there last summer on a tour, the retail storefront wasn't open. The facility is great, though.
Also: Don't forget TinkerMill in Longmont, a great hackerspace that doubles as an incubator. I just met someone today who is bootstrapping an educational toy company out of TinkerMill. The local start-up community is really quite vibrant.
Take a look at their crazy application process. It's built around how badly labor wants to work there. This strategy doesn't work in SV anymore.. Good candidates want to get paid, not have "fun times" at work. Sparkfun's talent strategy is built on concepts that are well over 15 years old.
Since Sparkfun provides the majority of it's services to non-members, it's unlikely that it would fit the bill of a co-op.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative
Which isn't to say that Sparkfun is a coop -- I don't think it is, just a bootstrapped company where the equity has stayed within the hands of founders/employees.
Of course it makes us want to vomit because we take it literally and know that isn't what's going to happen.
The Bay Area[0] is the Emperor of building software (business and consumer) and it will always be that way. The Bay Area's primary business is the building of software and thus software is created there for software companies as well.
At the rest of the Silicon Hopefuls, just getting a handful of legit tech companies that want to build software specific to that city's primary economies (oil, real estate, defense contracting, lumber, etc.) would do A LOT of good.
Disclaimer: I don't live in the Bay Area. I live in Silicon Foo where talented software builders either run away or work remote for Bay Area companies.
0 - Citizens of other very large cities: please don't have your egos bruised. Your cities matter, too. Ok, you know I'm really just talking to New Yorkers who have a hard time not being the best at everything.
Do they really not understand what the valley is about?
Maybe this is just a lot of lying with graphics, but it has always bothered me that Colorado has been a tech center on and off for decades, while California is nothing but truck drivers and secretaries. Yet it seems like Colorado is the last place people look for tech talent.
(I don't count the time period when all I knew was Visual Basic and was re-training in another language while job-hunting, because really, that was on me.)
My life is a veritable cornucopia of remarkable urban experiences so I have to get back to that now.
There's plenty of VC-funded startups in Boulder, too. The main pedestrian mall downtown, Pearl Street, is flanked by tech companies on the 2nd/3rd floors, above the retail shops. It feels quite similar to University Ave in Palo Alto, back when I lived there in the 90's.
Perhaps the biggest difference is that where Silicon Valley is geographically locked-in and there's no cheap office space to be had, in Boulder you can go East a little bit and the price of office space drops dramatically. Taking SparkFun as an example, it's not on Pearl Street, it's several miles outside of town in an industrial park.
As such, Boulder gets to be both a micro-size Silicon Valley and a more normal commercial environment as well. It's also just a great place to live, housing costs are reasonable (relative to California anyway), there's tons to do, and it's a good place to raise a family.
I don't know, that place has actually tracked SV in a lot of ways, from a good university, to a concentration of smart people, to some good VC's, to being a nice place, to ... rampant NIMBYism that has driven housing prices up to nearly 700K (Zillow).
Your metric of comparison is a sports conference?
Oh FFS. When you're visiting, sure. But not after you've lived here a few weeks and your body has built more red blood cells. That's why cyclists come here to train -- it's legal blood doping.
ABQ is a starkly beautiful midsize city with an unusually high number of nuclear physicists. That's necessary but far from sufficient for being a tech center. And as far as I could tell, the city's ideal is for a relatively small number of relatively large employers, not in hundreds of 5-20 employee firms.
Besides, if you're interested in working for one of those firms, let alone starting one, Denver's only six or seven hours north.
I mention that last part as I think Zappos being in LV has pulled some tech interest into LV.
We also have this good news/bad news airport situation: The airport is in the middle of town and it's VERY easy to get in and out of quickly. OTOH there are few direct flights anywhere -- the Bay area being a notable exception.
As for the "international" aspect of ABQ, that's mostly wishful thinking. There might be a few flights to/from Mexico, but that's about it.
EDIT: Here's the list of nonstop destinations. Looks like there aren't any direct international flights, period. http://www.abqsunport.com/flightsairlines/destinations/
Colorado has its own problems and housing costs are rising, but there are plenty of places to live here that are affordable. Even if you live in Denver, I think you get a better value for your salary than in SV.
I went to school there (CC) but that was back in the early 90's so I'm not exactly up on things, but I've long considered reconnecting with the area, finding an excuse to open a satellite office or something.
In my memory the Springs was pretty sleepy and outside of the small little hippie commune liberal arts college was mostly comprised of retired or military or both.
Does Colorado Springs figure at all in Colorado's business/tech scene?
My knowledge is pretty out of date, I imagine it has exploded into a national security apparatus city as well by now.
COS had the good seeds of a tech hub prior to the dot com melt down. Lots of cities did.
But what I think helped drain the potential was 9/11 and the uptick in defense contracting. All the engineers went to one of several contractors and all the non-engineers who would get involved in startups left town because they couldn't find engineers who would take the risk.
It's a great town if you want to work on the fringes, or commute to Denver, or work in government contracting. Since none of those three fit my needs I packed it up and moved to the Broomfield corridor (I couldn't afford Boulder proper).
I don't know about the Math at Boulder, but I haven't heard much fair or negative about it. Not enough data to make any conclusions.
AMC is alright, but it's post-undergrad/grad-school only, so anything you hear has that flavor added. Lots of med-y students though, few researchers in small labs (<3 grad students/PI).
CU-CS? No idea, never talked to anyone that graduated there or is there now. Guess that means it's not super good or super bad then, again, not enough data.
Salaries are already starting to rapidly increase (more than they already were) in Boulder just with the announcement of companies like Google moving large offices here and it's been very disconcerting to see companies resort to the same tactics used by Bay Area companies to circumvent paying people (company commuter busses so you can live in more affordable areas, $500 ski passes instead of $5k raises, free food, etc etc). This area can't really even bank on the usual scam of promising big exists since those are much more rare in these parts. Watching the economics of the whole situation has been very interesting, especially when you see that they're only going to make many of the social problems we're dealing with much much worse.
I've certainly had several hiring discussions that were going great until we hit salary. I make good money but nowhere near crazy money, yet these hiring managers weren't even in the same ballpark.
My company operates in several cities and it's great to have options like SF, NY, DC, etc. where there's a ton of activity and a ton of $$$, but most of the time, we just don't need it. Most of the time we want a place to actually enjoy our work. We frequent Boulder & Austin since we have investors in both locations.
There is a lot more money in the valley for some reason, but there is still plenty in any great large city if you have a great idea. It is the okay ideas that they cannot fund in other places (note some seemingly bad ideas take off you will see more of that in the valley if this is worth it or not is an open question)
"I'm going to invest 10 billion in startups but you have to relocate" is basically what Tony Hsieh did in Las Vegas, and it... based on how rocky that got, I think it's about more than just access to capital.
"Startups" in the sense of new businesses have been around for centuries (arguably longer). But recently, the popular image of most tech companies is raising large amounts of money to grow/scale really quickly. If anything, shouldn't the fact that engineers understand how to leverage technology lead to higher profitability and lower need for capital than all the brick-and-mortar businesses that came before us? Like the SparkFun founder says, as an engineer, I started a company that I knew how to build and implement on my own.
I'm looking at moving, and one hard requirement for me is that the suburb I'm moving to have an Asian population of at least 15%, specifically for food-related reasons. I live in the northern suburbs of Dallas, which have fairly high Asian populations. I want a large amount of Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, regional Chinese, Indian, etc. food wherever I live, and if a place is 90% white, I'm not going to get that. I'd also like a Hispanic population above 15% too because I love me some tacos, but I'm willing to forego that as long as a nearby suburb is >15% Hispanic.
I've narrowed down my search to the suburbs of Los Angeles and Las Vegas; specifically, Torrance (or Irvine) and Spring Valley, respectively, and ethnic makeup is one of my most important criteria.
http://www.sushiden.net/
You'd be crazy to start a warehouse in Silicon Valley -- run your development and operations there, but when you're ready to move out of your garage into a real warehouse, put the warehouse (and product assembly) in Tracy or someplace like that that's an hour's drive away and much more affordable.
Also, it isn't a given that money has to continue to concentrate in a few places. This is not some force of nature we are watching. It is human activity. Sure, human activity gets influenced by factors outside of our control. It is easier to "go with the flow" of various things than to swim upstream. But we have a lot more ability to choose to do something else if we don't like how this is going than most creatures have.
I don't like how articles (like the Wired article that inspired this post) just seem to presume all we can do is document the trend and make our peace with accepting it. That is crazy. If people think this is a terrible, corrosive trend, then why not write articles that give push back to the trend (like this one does) instead of just documenting it like a runaway train we cannot stop?
VCs can go invest money wherever they want. Rich people have far more mobility than others. They don't have to limit themselves to a handful of places. Nor are other people simply doomed to curry favor with them. Most of their so-called money isn't actually in the form of money per se. They own stocks or real estate or whatever. Money has to circulate like blood in order to stay alive. They need things to invest in. It isn't in their best interest to let it sit in a vault rotting.
It is absolutely not a given that these trends have to continue in this same direction. Humans can say "Oh, we don't like where our behavior is taking us. Let's consider other options." It isn't a Greek Tragedy where the more you try to resist your fate, the more doomed you are to entrench it as the only option.