"Why weren’t top-tier VC firms spending time in Ann Arbor, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Columbus, Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis?"
Because you want to sleep close to your money.
"The answer, we concluded, had everything to do with timing. In the first few decades of the Internet, you had to be physically close to your technology. That technology, the talent that built it, and the ecosystem that maintained it was in Silicon Valley."
C'mon. You didn't need to be close to your technology. PCs and servers and backbones can be installed anywhere.
You wanted to sleep close to your money. But now you're willing to loosen the leash a little if it gives you more bang for the buck.
On the flip side, in the Internet's nascent days, you HAD to get an in person meeting with the VC before convincing them to part with a 5 or 6 digit sum of money. Skype was not really possible on a 56k modem.
Well of course you had to meet in person to get business done.
What's happening is that the word is getting out to the engineers: SV is too expensive a place to be, even at GoogleMicroUberAmazon pay rates. The gold rush is over.
> SV is too expensive a place to be, even at GoogleMicroUberAmazon pay rates.
Sample size of one, but this is true for me. I'd really like to come back to CA, but I make 6 figures already, and a 3600 sq ft house is only like $400k here. I don't see what SV has to offer except a larger market for opportunities, but I'm in my mid-30's, so I'm worried that I'm not really a target demographic for SV employers.
Pretty sure at Uber and Google pay rates (esp. Uber, but also Facebook), SV is what I'd describe as affordable.
Microsoft and Amazon, not so much, to say nothing of the majority of other tech companies that aren't well known as the top paying three companies out here.
It boggles me why California doesn't push for tech development in the cheaper parts of the state. Plenty of places in NorCal could siphon off the Amazon and Microsoft pool as well as attract other outside talent.
It turns out that living in SF or Palo Alto is a big part of their recruiting pitch, believe it or not. The social signaling of saying you work in SoMa means so much in materialistic Bay Area social life.
Because you want to sleep close to your money.
"The answer, we concluded, had everything to do with timing. In the first few decades of the Internet, you had to be physically close to your technology. That technology, the talent that built it, and the ecosystem that maintained it was in Silicon Valley."
C'mon. You didn't need to be close to your technology. PCs and servers and backbones can be installed anywhere.
You wanted to sleep close to your money. But now you're willing to loosen the leash a little if it gives you more bang for the buck.