6 ms·

I wonder why Chicago isn't more of a major destination for tech companies. The city is highly walkable, has excellent transportation infrastructure, and low co

• jtmcmc 9y ago
  terrible weather? lack of real feeder schools for tech entrepreneurialism ?
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• tomaha 9y ago
  Because mostly only big companies choose their destination. For the rest it's where they live when they found the company. So if more people in Chicago found tech companies you'll get more tech companies. That's the reason SV is a self-feeding machine. People work at one of the many startups or big companies here, get experience, get money, and then part of them start their own companies. That's the circle that drives SV and because it gets stronger each time it's hard for any other city or region to really catch up.
  • _RPM 9y ago
    > So if more people in Chicago found tech companies you'll get more tech companies Wait, really?
    • gumby 9y ago
      I know it sounds tautological but makes sense in the context of the rest of the reply.
  • radiorental 9y ago
    Your description made think of the slime mold map of the Tokyo transportation system [1] albeit with a different set of inputs. As with any organic, self propelled, system.. it matures and growth turns to maintenance, and eventually decay. Is the general argument here that SV has become a victim of it's massive organic growth, has it eaten up one of it's resources (housing, healthy diversity, etc) to the point where another city/system can now flourish?? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwKuFREOgmo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwKuFREOgmo
• kodt 9y ago
  >You can get a nice house for less than 200k Gonna need a source on that one
  • arkem 9y ago
    Doesn't seem too far fetched[1] if you read it as a nice house under 200k within an hour of Chicago. I don't know enough about Chicago to know exactly how far our an hour's drive is or to know exactly what 'nice' means in this context but it seems like there are areas where the median price is quite a bit lower than 200k. [1] https://www.trulia.com/local/chicago-il/type:home_prices_sales_affordability https://www.trulia.com/local/chicago-il/type:home_prices_sal...
    • tptacek 9y ago
      Those are not generally places where a tech worker is going to buy a house. Let's just stick with "housing in Chicago is significantly cheaper than housing in SFBA or NYC".
• ng12 9y ago
  Because it doesn't have the people and that's all that really matters. SV is self-fulfilling at this point: talented programmers and entrepreneurs flock to the Bay because that's where the talented programmers and entrepreneurs are. Yes, there are talented programmers in every metropolitan area but the Bay has significantly more of them than anywhere else.
  • vonmoltke 9y ago
    Yet SV companies complain the loudest about having a hard time finding talent. In large part, I suspect, because of decreasing amounts of talent that want to put up with the area.
    • kmonsen 9y ago
      People are having problems finding cheap talent. I lived in both bay area and NYC and in both places I would constantly get lowball offers. You can get really good engineers in bay area, it just cost more than many are willing to pay.
      • vonmoltke 9y ago
        True, but part of the reason talent is so expensive is because companies have to compete for it. I would not call a market where good people regularly pull down multiple offers one that is good for employers or one where talent is readily available.
    • TeMPOraL 9y ago
      I believe that's just selection bias. The media - especially the media most of us here are likely to read - focus on SV tech companies. Next to an article about SV startup complaining about lack of talent, you won't find an article about startup from Kraków, Poland complaining about the same, because who cares. I.e. "loudest" isn't really the right word to describe the only group that is even allowed to speak publicly.
  • wolco 9y ago
    Findig programmers is not the issue VC money and culture make the difference.
• acchow 9y ago
  > apartment rent is around 600 - 1000 a month You can't really use this as an "advantage" since it disappears rapidly once it starts become a tech hub.
  • Eire_Banshee 9y ago
    Meh, it doesn't have the geographic limits that you get on the coast. The only geographical feature hemming in the city is the lake. You have essentially unlimited space to expand in all other directions. It would be hard to get skyrocketing rents outside of the immediate downtown area. But mostly Chicago just sucks. Its all the shitty parts of the midwest without any of the good ones. What you really want is Indianapolis, Columbus, Minneapolis, Louisville, etc...
    • rayiner 9y ago
      > But mostly Chicago just sucks. Its all the shitty parts of the midwest without any of the good ones. What you really want is Indianapolis, Columbus, Minneapolis, Louisville, etc... Shameful Indianapolis trolling.
      • Eire_Banshee 9y ago
        I stand by what I said.
    • justin66 9y ago
      > What you really want is Indianapolis, Columbus, Minneapolis, Louisville, etc... There's something you don't hear every day.
  • ryuker16 9y ago
    We have a lot of excess housing stock from the rust belt days and can build a lot more towers(not sitting on fault lines).
    • patio11 9y ago
      Tokyo waves hello and says, in a friendly but firm tone of voice, that the decision to not built up is political and not based on earthquake-resistant buildings being an engineering technology humanity lacks access to.
• CalChris 9y ago
  University of Chicago isn't a bad school. I am, however, straining to think of another Chicago research university. But then compare it to Stanford+Cal+UCSF and it just isn't a fair fight. An underrated advantage in SV is its top tier legal and capital talent. WSGR, Cooley, Fenwick, ... are outstanding. For VCs you can start with Sequoia at the top and work your way all the way down to angels. L+S did a demo in Andy Bechtolsheim's garage and walked away with a check for $250,000. That just ain't happening in Chicago.
  • strange_quark 9y ago
    UChicago is an excellent school, right up there with Stanford and the Ivys, and you're forgetting Northwestern, UIUC, Wisconsin - Madison, Michigan - Ann Arbor, Purdue, and plenty others.
    • CalChris 9y ago
      There's a good reason I've never met anyone from the University of Chicago in Silicon Valley. It doesn't have an engineering school. I have met two people from Moscow State University (quite a bit further, no?) in Silicon Valley. It does have an engineering school.
      • tptacek 9y ago
        It has a CS program, but it's not a great CS program. Aspiring engineers in Chicago tend to go to Champaign or Madison. UIC has a competent, serious research-university engineering program that is adequate to the region but not a standout on the national scale. (Northwestern, the other top-tier Chicago school, does have an engineering program). We should probably dispense with the notion that regions "need" engineering schools to feed a tech industry. That is probably not generally how it works. Portland has a thriving tech scene, but not many people travel for engineering school in Portland. Boston has world-class engineering schools, and an anemic tech scene.
        • CalChris 9y ago
• logfromblammo 9y ago
  Having lived in Chicago, I think it's probably because the city government is corrupt, the Cook county government is corrupt, the suburban county governments are corrupt, all their municipalities are corrupt, and the whole region is going bankrupt from it. People look at Detroit, and think Chicago may be next. They don't want to put their eggs in the same basket as a time bomb, or an egg-sucking weasel. The only thing that has saved it so far is that it is a nice, affordable place to live. There are billboards on the state border encouraging people to live in Indiana (live in Gary?!) because Indiana isn't going bankrupt. And it isn't just the obvious form of corruption that everyone can see and hate on, like Blagojevich trying to outright sell a vacant senate seat. It's also the subtle form that pays public employees slightly too much to do not quite enough, and then a pension that gives them even more for doing even less, while their replacement adds even more to the burden. You can't just fire all those people and take away their pensions, because then you can't provide municipal services to your residents, and that is more acutely painful than being slowly bled to death. Edit: In slight support of those billboards and some cousin posts, Indianapolis is one of the most affordable cities in the US for buying housing. And the pool for tech talent is largely untapped. Public transit sucks, though. The city has a huge area and is almost completely flat, so it has taken extreme advantage of its ability to sprawl. Any sudden spike in growth will immediately lead to commuting nightmare traffic, all around the entire city.
  • tptacek 9y ago
    Public finance problems in Chicago are a product of unrealistic pension guarantees. You can call that "corruption", but by that definition many other major metros in the USA are equally "corrupt". The Chicago and Illinois Democratic party machines are almost certainly corrupt (or just rife with corruption), like most single-party states. But it's not clear to me how this impacts ordinary life for citizens. Indianapolis is fine. I generally think, if you're going to move to a Midwestern city with no critical mass of tech companies, you might just consider throwing a dart. There are more tech workers in Chicago than Indianapolis, but in no Midwestern city are you going to exhaust the supply. We generally need to get away from the notion that the locale in which you start your company is make-or-break. What we don't need to do is suggest that there's a Midwestern Ur-city where everyone needs to go.
• ryuker16 9y ago
  I work in tech here and I suspect it's becuase our early heavy hitters feel from grace: Motorola, Groupon, etc. Imagine if Motorola was first to have a major smart phone get popular like the razr instead of Apple. Seatlle has amazon and microsoft.....chicago has nothing comparable I think.
• whatyoucantsay 9y ago
  Chicago is amongst the bloodiest cities in the developed world. Last year over 700 people were murdered and over 3,000 were shot in Chicago. Most cases are never resolved. In contrast, the entirety of Canada has about 500-600 homicides per year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Chicago#Murder_and_shootings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Chicago#Murder_and_sh...