Colorado doesn’t need to replicate Silicon Valley
sparkfun.com
sparkfun.com
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.
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. :)
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!"
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.
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.
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:
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).
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/
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.
Your metric of comparison is a sports conference?
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?
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).
My knowledge is pretty out of date, I imagine it has exploded into a national security apparatus city as well by now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do they really not understand what the valley is about?
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
"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.
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)
"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.
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.
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.