Another Silicon Valley myth deconstructed
October 31st, 2007 by Benjamin KuoI ran across a blog posting recently from Jason Caplain, a VC in North Carolina, talking about an entrepeneur’s complaint of developers leaving the region for Silicon Valley. Jason, while talking about NC, had a few good points which he uses to rebut the entrepreneur–a few of which could equally apply to Southern California.
The great entrepreneurs, with the great ideas and the ones that are willing to part with the right amount of equity shouldn’t have a hard time attracting development talent. There is a ton of tech talent here with the local universities (NC State, UNC and Duke) and larger companies like Cisco, Red Hat, IBM and SAS right in our backyard.
Here, of course, there is Caltech, USC, UCLA, UCSD, UC Irvine, Harvey Mudd, not to mention a slew of other schools with strong engineering and technology programs. Plus, a huge developer base of technical and business talent at the more established local companies here (Broadcom, Qualcomm, Overture, etc.).
There is a huge cost of living advantage to being here in NC compared to Silicon Valley.
While we are much more expensive than NC in terms of cost of living, housing and cost of living in Southern California is more affordable than Silicon Valley.
More importantly, the cost for development talent here in NC is a lot cheaper than Silicon Valley. What this means is that it can be cheaper to build a company here.
I believe this is somewhat true in Southern California as well; from my experience, developer costs and salaries are definitely lower here in Southern California versus the extreme competition for talent in Silicon Valley. For the employees, it actually works out pretty well–salaries might be lower, but so is cost of living, and the quality of life (sun, surf, sand, etc.) more than makes up for the differential.
In any case, it’s interesting to see the perspectives from another high tech region.
