1. Several high class feeder schools in the area including but not limited to Stanford and UC Berkeley. Note the feeder schools have robust CS programs but also renowned business and law schools.
2. A robust banking sector in San Francisco (for access to Old Money).
3. A bunch of New Money investors (Sand Hill Road gang etc) that you can wine and dine in-person.
4. California has a ton of high tech businesses besides just plucky Web startups.
A lot of supposed Silicon * regions have one or two of these things but rarely all within a two hour plane ride of each other (if not closer). Austin is nice and all but Silicon Valley (the nine-county Bay Area) is a megaregion with a population of over 7 million people with another two million in the combined statistical area. It's got twice the population of the San Antonio and Austin MSAs combined. That just makes for a much larger pool of we-don't-need-to-relocate employees for start ups or new efforts for existing companies.
It sucks Silicon Valley is so damned expensive but some other regions just being cheaper isn't going to pull away many startups. Despite bitching about taxes companies really like the fact non-competes are basically void in California. They incorporate and "headquarter" in tax havens anyways.
To be sure, the Bay Area has such a deep reservoir of tech talent, money and infrastructure, not to mention the climate and the ocean, that it won’t be easily knocked off its perch.
Every town on the planet with an internet connection and a chamber of commerce has named itself Silicon Prairie (at least three of them), Silicon Bayou, Silicon Gorge, Silicon Water, Silicon Alps, Silicon Glen, Silicon and on and on.
I should approach him about the possibility of making this the next Silicon Valley so I can be inundated with job offers without having to move.
Isn't every beach covered in silica?
Regardless I like that the article represents a possible shift in public narrative. Even though I question the moral reasoning and long-term sustainability of shifts like this occurring with a (if not the) dominant motivation being tax avoision.
Edit: As a poor proxy, checking the most recent 200 levels.fyi entries for ", CA |" finds 37 entries when I checked, vs 12 for TX. Wikipedia says the San Francisco CSA has 9 million people, vs 2.2 million for the Austin MSA. There's lots of issues with that analysis (first, I think CA programmers are more concentrated than TX programmers), but to my surprise, it implies the the bay has more programmers, but Austin has more programmers per capita?
Do people have suggestions for better data, or better analyses of data?
Regardless of your personal ideology on the topic, there are too many benefits for all parties involved to ignore remote work as a lasting trend.
Lisa Simpson: Anything that's the "something" of the "something" isn't really the "anything" of "anything".
I'm hesitant to say things won't change because folks who say that are usually wrong, but if I had to put money on it, I wouldn't put more than $1k (1:1) that by 2027 tech company capital deployed net 2022 is higher in Austin-Round Rock-Georgetown MSA than in the SF Bay Area.
Until Texas, or Washington State, or other relevant jurisdictions ban non-competes, California will continue to have a key edge, despite its varieties of political and social dysfunction.
Nothing lasts forever.
I’ve lived all over n America and I can’t see it. It would beat “no other alternative” but that’s about it.
It seems to me that, until UT Austin catches up with Stanford and Berkeley in its ability to churn out tech talent, we can apply Betteridge's law of headlines here (i.e. "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.").
If anything, the biggest threat to Silicon Valley's dominance seems to be the post-COVID trend of remote-friendly tech employers. That has already benefited Austin, but not exclusively so.
EDIT: Xerox PARC apparently shouldn't be included in that list. Its founders were Jack Goldman and George Pake, neither of whom were alumni of the companies or universities I mentioned.
and dare I say politics. For various reasons, including the rather diverse nature of tech workforce due to a substantial number of immigrants and even otherwise, the tech workforce is generally liberal or are at least centrist moderate. Texas is not an ideal home for most of them.
And finally if Mexico can get its act together and (some city there) become a replacement for Shenzhen, access to Mexico will be huge.
It's not perfect. There is at least one thing on my mind that could hold back Austin, but it's not anything you mentioned.
That stereotype is about a decade out of date.
Texas is very much like New York, California, Washington, Nevada, Oregon, and most other American states: Blue large cities surrounded by red elsewhere.
And the hilarious part is how insular the Bay Area is - home of the "fly over city" mentality.
There is also this gravity effect of SV. People move to SV to get a tech job, so thats where the majority of them are. But from talking to folks, there is a real lack of available talent, so companies are forced to look elsewhere. From my own experience, there are not a huge number of available candidates in other areas either.
