I've been in the Kansas City developer market since 2002, and I can report that salaries for senior developers (java and .net) are going through the roof here. 110k to 120k is becoming common. At a very non coastal cost of living.
It's a great time to be a developer in the midwest!
Some of us are old enough to remember when the midwest (or more precisely, the Twin Cities area) was the nation's center for high-performance computing businesses. ERA, Univac, Honeywell, Control Data, Cray Research, ETA -- there was something in the water up there that laid a lot of groundwork for modern computing but is mostly now all forgotten.
>what would we find when we looked in ....Pittsburgh (home of the leading computer science school in the world, Carnegie Mellon)<p>Wait, it was 2012 and the venture capitalists were /just then/ figuring out it would be a good idea to be close to the "best computer science school in the world"?<p>Not that I had any respect for VC's before, but my opinion just dropped even more.<p>> ... entrepreneurs are building more billion-dollar companies in the Midwest than in the last 50 years combined.<p>Yes it's called currency devaluation combined with ZIRP.<p>I do wonder if they'll write such a flowery article when entrepreneurs discover that their odds of success actually go UP if they pass on VC altogether.
Columbus, OH is a big food test market. Why because it's got a large cross section of "middle america". If you can make something work here you can probably make it work anywhere. I think if more on demand companies were started here they could have adapted and/or blown up a lot faster. If you want a niche that caters to rich people go to NY and/or CA. If you want something the "average" american will buy try selling it here.
I definitely think there will be a gentle trend of tech moving away from Silicon Valley - perhaps not by people/organizations "leaving SV" - instead, people/organizations not "moving to SV". The center of mass will just disperse a bit even if the absolute numbers in SV remain more or less constant.<p>We've been building a 100% remote startup since late 2011 - it begun in the midwest (Missouri) and it has worked extremely well. We don't even have a location at this point and can't imagine a situation in which we'd elect to.
Could they add Arizona to the list of good places for tech business, please :-)<p>Life is inexpensive and good in Arizona and occasional flights to Silicon Valley are short and affordable. I spent my life in California until we moved to Arizona 18 years ago. Benefits of Arizona: very friendly people (try chatting with people in California when you are in a grocery store check out line, at the gas pumps, etc. - a culture of unfriendliness), low population density, very affordable housing, clean air and nice climate (at least where I am in the mountains), our state government is not as badly in debt as California, etc.
I am a software developer outside Philadelphia. I love what I do but I've never considered Silicon Valley as a place I would want to live.<p>I know many talented software developers and know multiple VCs in the area. This is a hub for top-noch universities, a hub for every major pharmaceutical company, most major financial firms have a large presence here, including the largest mutual fund company. Plus, it is a short trip to New York (media/Wall Street), and DC (government and military), which brings lots of subcontracting projects.<p>In short, there is a ton of opportunity, talent, and money.
My startup is in Kansas City. There are a lot of great developers here. Huge companies like Garmin, Cerner, Sprint and others do a good job of attracting a lot of talent from all over the US here out of college. Startups like mine can then hire them when they are ready for something new.<p>Cost of living here is low. Decent basic house is $150-200k in the burbs.<p>Awesome office space is cheap. Great tax incentives from KS and MO to start companies and create jobs.<p>I honestly would have no interest being in the valley trying to compete with the likes of Google, Facebook and others for top talent. In KC we can be the cool company everyone wants to work for!<p>We are Stackify, located in Leawood Kansas! :-)
I don't know. I live in Chicago, and while I do get recruiters representing Chicago firms pinging me on LinkedIn from time to time, the majority still seem to come from elsewhere. I also had a tough time finding my next job after I was laid off here, twice in the past three years.<p>I still love the area so I'm still sticking around for a bit longer, but I don't really see what this guy's seeing.
The midwest is not the future of startups and will not overtake Silicon Valley in the next 15 years. Yes you can find talent in the midwest but do you think top CS grads from CMU, UIUC, Purdue, etc. want to stay in the midwest after graduating? Think about it.. 22 years old, fresh out of college, after living in the midwest for 4 years...most of them want to come to San Francisco / Silicon Valley, the tech center of the world. Also home of all the other famous tech companies they heard of / interned for before.<p>Nitpicks from the article:<p>"California is the eighth largest economy in the world. The Midwest is the fifth"<p>really? source on that? What states exactly does that entail?<p>"The Midwest receives 25 percent of all research dollars in America and graduates more computer science degrees than any other region or country on planet earth."<p>source?<p>"home of the leading computer science school in the world, Carnegie Mellon"<p>Not one of the leading, but THE leading CS school. Even better than MIT? Better than Berkeley? Better than Caltech? I'm not saying any one of those is THE best, but I would argue they are all top-notch.
Silicon Valley is, and will continue to be, to tech, what New York is to finance. Which means all these other startups will be like regional banks. Good businesses, yes, but not a 'threat' to the big Silicon Valley companies and the tech ecosystem there.
At this point in time the advantage of SV is not for the "angel" sized company, but for scale-up from the $1M to $1B range. (i.e. Y Combinator would not have a huge advantage in being there except for the fact that the next round of funding is available there)
Any reason why midwest and not southeast? The outskirts of Raleigh and Atlanta have the same cost of living benefits while having access to a large talent pool and being close to the coast line/major cities.
Another article about this is <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/originals/ct-drive-capital-300-million-fund-bsi-20160829-story.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/originals/ct-drive-cap...</a>, via <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12391391" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12391391</a>.
We need to come up with some new Silicon something for Midwest. Here's a quick guide on all the silicon something's so far...<a href="http://chicagoinno.streetwise.co/2015/05/03/silicon-valley-names-what-other-tech-hubs-call-themselves/" rel="nofollow">http://chicagoinno.streetwise.co/2015/05/03/silicon-valley-n...</a>
> With a modest amount of effort, we met Duo Security, Farmlogs, Notion, Deepfield, and Llama Soft.<p>I wonder if Llama Soft ever feels bad about stealing the name of the still-extant British indy game house Llamasoft for much more boring purposes.
PG gave a speech in Pittsburgh earlier this year on much the same topic [1].<p>[1] <a href="http://paulgraham.com/pgh.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/pgh.html</a>
They tried that in N. Texas in the '90s. I'd say it didn't work out. The crash there meant you probably had to leave.<p>Austin? I dunno if it's really a startup hub or not.
<i>"Why weren’t top-tier VC firms spending time in Ann Arbor, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Columbus, Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis?"</i><p>Because you want to sleep close to your money.<p><i>"The answer, we concluded, had everything to do with timing. In the first few decades of the Internet, you had to be physically close to your technology. That technology, the talent that built it, and the ecosystem that maintained it was in Silicon Valley."</i><p>C'mon. You didn't need to be close to your technology. PCs and servers and backbones can be installed anywhere.<p>You wanted to sleep close to your money. But now you're willing to loosen the leash a little if it gives you more bang for the buck.
"Did you know it was possible to outfit an open-plan office with Ikea desks -- <i>in the midwest</i>? TIL."<p>This reads like a parody until it inexplicably turns out not to be.<p>Columbus and Ann Arbor both have big, important universities smack in the middle of town, and the demographics and culture that go with that. If you were choosing the least-surprising towns outside of the Bay Area and NYC to find software startups in, those would pretty much have to be on your list.
This topic has been coming up on this site for the past decade. Every time it does there are a lot of people who say Silicon Valley will never be beaten. I call this way of thinking "California exceptionalism".<p>Put another way:<p>"Nobody will ever need more than 640k."<p>Since the days of Fairchild, the bay area has had an advantage in finance, and of course VCs who didn't want to invest in anyone more than a bike ride away. The level of attitude is really kinda astounding.<p>California was the golden state... but that was 50 years ago when it had a pro-business government and was disrupting the US industrial base, and attracting high tech talent and companies in the process. Now it is eating itself, drowning in debt and getting ever more desperate due to decades of bad government.<p>In our industry things have changed. The need for VCs is dramatically less. You don't need to build servers and software from scratch, you can rent servers in the cloud and build on open source foundations.<p>There are always going to be more smart people outside of SV than there are in it. And TBH, I don't think the SV startups have been really innovative for the past couple decades. It's like after the dotcom boom everything became an "app" (instead of a "dot com" eg website).<p>For example you aren't building Intels and Apples anymore. you're building Googles (Which <i>might</i> become an Apple, if one of its moonshots turns into a product, but it isn't yet, it hasn't weaned itself from search and search's days are numbered.) You're building facebooks and ubers and airbnbs. It may not look like if if you've not been thru a couple bubbles but those companies are more flash in the pan than solid. Facebook could be more properly called a fad.<p>The difference is they aren't really technology companies. Google invented page rank, but almost nothing fundamental since. Facebook hasn't invented anything really. It's just a popular content site. Uber and AirBnB are business models, not technology inventions. Of course they all require and depend on technology investment, but they are not based on technological innovations like Intel and Apple are. (And don't even get me started on Amazon which is really a combo of Walmart and U-haul-for-computers. They actively oppose innovation.)<p>And for some high tech industries, Silicon Valley is not the center. The disdain upon which californians look at bitcoin is a good example. It's kinda a "not invented here" syndrome.<p>It's like we're the internet, you're AOL at its peak. You rule the roost right now, but you don't get it.
This article is hilarious. "Did you know that there are smart people in this place called the Midwest that can also code and find product / market fit? Who knew!?"<p>The tone, though positive, is quite patronizing to midwestern ears. If you're not investing here, you're missing a huge opportunity.
We changed the baity title, happily in time to preempt the unproductive argument it probably would have led to. If someone can suggest a better (more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.
I read somewhere that the one thing all the startup hubs had in common was that they were a desirable place to live. This does not seem to describe just about anywhere in the mid-west with its bad climate and shrinking cities.
Given a choice for investing in a new firm that is a 15 minute drive from the VC's office, and with tons of existing talent to recruit into the company, and with lots of other VC's in the area to fund future rounds VS a startup that might get a better bang for the buck on pricing because it's in the boondocks, and I don't think MORE startups will appear in the midwest than SV.