1/ People often ask if it's worth it for companies to have an HQ in Silicon Valley. Real estate is crazy expensive here, salaries are astronomical as a result, there's heavy rush hour traffic, and so on. Why do companies put up with this?? One answer: an abundance of top talent.
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2/ To take a data-driven approach, I used LinkedIn to count the number of people with different job titles in 4 metro areas: Houston, Atlanta, Toronto, and SF. Each of these has roughly 6 million people, so I would expect them to have similar amounts of tech talent.
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3/ Caveat: a) this is not *super* scientific and b) these are searches from my LinkedIn account, so maybe the numbers will vary for different users. Regardless, I believe the numbers paint a strong picture.
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4/ HOUSTON DevOps = 270 VP of Engineering = 798 Customer Success = 294 iOS Developer = 71 Sr Data Scientist = 73
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5/ ATLANTA DevOps = 924 VP of Engineering = 657 Customer Success = 1232 iOS Developer = 214 Sr Data Scientist = 125
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6/ TORONTO DevOps = 946 VP of Engineering = 515 Customer Success = 1094 iOS Developer = 386 Sr Data Scientist = 181
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7/ SF DevOps = 2959 VP of Engineering = 4194 Customer Success = 5229 iOS Developer = 1020 Sr Data Scientist = 1350
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8/ What this data suggests to me is that SF has 5x-10x more tech talent per capita compared to other big metro areas. There's more competition for that talent, but the large supply is invaluable -- especially for unusual roles. E.g. SF has 29 video codec engineers; Houston has 0.
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9/ As long as there is so much tech talent in this area, I think Silicon Valley will remain a great place for a startup's HQ. However, I also believe the advantage will diminish over time as more & more tech talent emerges in other areas -- or moves there because of living costs.
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Also lends to the theory of “right company right place.” Want to build a simple SASS app heavy on sales? Can more easily get away with it elsewhere. Something on cutting edge where you need nearly every engineer that understands x? Hard to do anywhere else.
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