Most of us in the Bay Area realize how important Silicon Valley is to the region’s health and wellbeing. The Valley has spawned many successful startups over the years, attracting highly skilled, highly paid workers, venture capital, and strong demand for housing. But just how dominant Silicon Valley is in the tech sector is surprising even the experts. And it bodes well for the long-term future of our Bay Area housing market.
Entrepreneur and former MIT research director Branko Gerovac examined the S&P Technology 1500 – the largest public technology companies in America – that have been created over the past 20 years to find out where and when they were launched. What he discovered was that every year, the Bay Area and the west coast are becoming more and more successful in spawning meaningful startups that grow into large companies – and the east coast tech hubs of Boston, New Jersey, Raleigh-Durham, and New York City less so every year.
In the past 20 years, Boston has added one company to the S&P-1500 technology sector companies, while Silicon Valley has added 19 companies. Our local startup list reads like a who’s who of publicly traded tech – Google, eBay, Yahoo!, Juniper Networks, McAfee, Palm…the list goes on.
Of course this doesn’t even take into account those burgeoning private tech concerns like Facebook that will become public one day soon. And then there’s Twitter, the company that could stake a rightful claim into leading the social networking revolution. Twitter just announced plans to lease headquarters space on Market Street in San Francisco as the company works to expand its workforce from 400 to close to 3,000 employees, as this story discusses.
Success breeds success. The Valley’s dominance in launching and growing tech companies will attract even more of the world’s top engineering minds, more creative entrepreneurs, more venture capitalists, and the cycle will repeat itself.
Information courtesy of Rick Turley, Coldwell Banker, President Northern California
No comments:
Post a Comment