The D.C. Metro area has pretty much the most highly educated workforce in the country and something like half of the top-25 highest income counties in the U.S.

The D.C. Metro area has pretty much the most highly educated workforce in the country and something like half of the top-25 highest income counties in the U.S. IIR, the D.C. Metro is something like 3rd or 4th in the country for total software engineers after SV, NYC and maybe Seattle and is fed by "nearby" Virginia Tech, CMU, UMD, Johns Hopkins, UVA, NCState, and GMU (among others) which are all highly ranked CS and CE schools. Silicon Valley East is basically the 30 mile stretch from D.C. to Dulles and it's basically an unbroken chain of tech and engineering companies, mostly fed contractors, but chock full of people clawing at the walls to work for non-fed tech businesses. D.C.'s main issues are traffic and absolutely abysmal weather. But other than that it's an absolute no-brainer of a location even if you subtract all the political co-location and lobbying factors. NYC makes sense for different, but some similar reasons...it's also chock full of people wanting to work for tech companies that aren't fintech and LIC has long been an underdeveloped part of the city that's just a bridge hop away from basically everything you'd ever want in Manhattan. If you can stomach living 20-30 minutes east, housing prices become much more affordable even if the inventory is uninspiring.