Pui-Wing Tam of the WSJ wrote a really nice piece highlighting some cases of tech entrepreneurs who recently moved to the Bay Area in order to grow their businesses more effectively. The article underscores the benefits of certain locations for certain industries and talent (LA for film production, Memphis for music, etc). From social networks and financing expertise to sales and infrastructure, certain places have unique advantages regardless of communications technology advancements. (Hat tip to Sherkhan K.)
From the October 5th piece,
“Matt Sanchez was just the kind of entrepreneur that the new wave of the Web boom was supposed to spawn: one untethered by geography, able to locate his company anywhere there was broadband Internet connection and a good idea.
But two years after the Yale University electrical-engineering graduate and two friends formed VideoEgg Inc., Mr. Sanchez found that he was spending more days in Silicon Valley than at the company’s New Haven, Conn., headquarters. So, in December, he and four employees packed up a 12-foot U-Haul van with their servers, whiteboards and desktop computers and moved West. Since settling into an airy office in San Francisco, the Web-video-technology company has snagged some venture funding, hired an additional 22 people and signed deals with Time Warner Inc.’s AOL unit and Internet firms such as Bebo Inc…
The start-up influx is helping to revitalize Silicon Valley. Many of the new companies are moving into offices that had been left empty by the tech bust of 2000. They are also ramping up their hiring and creating jobs. Mobius, for instance, now employs 14 people in its Sunnyvale headquarters, up from one a year ago. Overall, 278 companies in the San Francisco Bay Area got either first-round or seed financing in 2005, up from 250 in 2004 and 216 in 2003, according to research firm VentureOne. The start-ups have also fired up the tech social scene — Meetro founder Paul Bragiel recently helped to launch a bowling league for start-up executives, for example — that helped to incubate so many companies and contacts during the 1990s dot-com explosion.”
