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And why are their headquarters in silicon valley except to exploit the local talent pool? With the exception of actual manufacturing, every site decision in a
by ajross 4y ago
And why are their headquarters in silicon valley except to exploit the local talent pool? With the exception of actual manufacturing, every site decision in a tech company is about labor availability.
So Europe gets value from tech in proportion to its concentration of talent, same as everyone else. Is Europe falling behind on tech talent? Clearly not. So it'll do just fine (where conversely the bay area is largely tapped out at this point, there's no place to put more talent even if it could find it).
- some_random 4y agoCompanies expand from where they are founded to reach new labor markets, but that's not the only consideration for where they begin. Startups are founded in SV (and other tech hubs both in and out of the US) because it's an intersection of high quality talent, permissive laws that make it easy to do business (although that doesn't appear to be the case in SV anymore), capital that's willing and able to fund startups, and network effects of being next to loads of other tech companies. Europe is missing pretty much all of that outside talent, and many would argue that even that is questionable because of the typical European work ethic.
- ajross 4y ago"Founding" and "located in" are rather different though. I take this discussion to be about "Does Europe get a reasonable share of world tech revenue and activity?". And, duh, yes it does. It just doesn't have the Googleplex or Apple's weird circle thing.
- mejutoco 4y agoAn additional reason for the location could be that vcs/founders are located there. I have seen a similar pattern, where a company has an office in an unusual place because one of the founders lives there, and does not want to relocate.