BC Bleeding Talent
Argh. I know this might be more salt in the wound for BC after my last couple of posts on this topic (which, incidentally, got picked up by Heath Row over at Fast Company), but I have to point to this information about Flickr.
Maybe I’m late to the party, but I only recently came to realize (via Niall) that the Flickr crew has moved en masse to the Bay Area. This is the problem I’m talking about – BC is bleeding talent. Here are some talented entrepreneurs that cut their teeth at home and abroad, built something up of value in Vancouver, and then moved on once they got bought. It’s not that I blame the Flickr team – they built a successful venture, and their buyer probably needed them down here – but it’s like the BC tech environment is made of helium. Succeed and leave. Rinse, lather, repeat.
What’s worse: I’m convinced most people in BC have never even heard of Flickr. Now, understandably, it’s a pretty niche product. But it’s got a pretty cult-like following, and when someone like Yahoo! buys a company that’s only about a year old for a rumored $30 million in a place the size of Vancouver, I’d expect people to sit up and take notice.
Sigh.
Have you considered applying a gravitational model to your whole “BC versus Silicon Valley” thread?
In the tech field there really aren’t a lot of restrictions on where a company locates. It’s not like they have to be built on the ore deposit they’re mining or beside the forest they’re cutting down. Tech companies are more like matter in the universe – they can be anywhere.
Of course, matter in the universe isn’t just randomly scattered. It is clumped into planets, stars, and galaxies. (Good thing, too!) How did this happen? God made it that way. Or, if you take another view, matter gradually accumulated around points that, for whatever reason, were just a little bit denser way back when. Once those intial points got started gravity took over and the rest was inevitable.
Silicon Valley is like an initial point of high density that has now turned into a black hole. Or at least a neutron star. As matter migrates toward the big objects under the influence of gravity, so tech companies, people, and resources gravitate to where tech already is.
The only way to break the cycle under this model would be for some outside force (i.e. a lot of money) to decide to buy up tech and locate it in a cluster somewhere else. Perhpas someone who is rich and happens to want to live in BC or Waterloo or Bodo, Norway and convinces their employees to live there with them. Otherwise this model will hold so long as the goal of tech people is to get bought out rather than start and also run companies. Saldy those who crave the adrenalin rush of starting up are not the types who stick around to see things through.
I’ve gotta say this is pretty funny coming from you. What would it take for you to move back? 🙂
I love it in Vancouver, but if this thing doesn’t work out I’d move to the Bay Area to work for Google in a heartbeat. 😉
William, perhaps you’ve heard of a small Waterloo company called Research In Motion? 🙂
I think Vancouver’s tech industry will eventually mature, but as long as the Bay Area is close enough to fly down for a meeting and back in the same day, it’ll always be hard for us to escape that event horizon.
I do enjoy the Bay Area, but I’m rather fond of my current situation. Five-minute commute (20 minutes on transit), tree-infested city, affordable mortgage payments… It would take a pretty amazing job offer to get me to move.
Again, I would like to see some data to back this up. Companies with large design centres in the Vancouver area, including PMC-Sierra, Creo, and Electronic Arts, have pulled R&D from the US to Vancouver, citing lower costs. While I would not be surprised to hear that the talent flux points south, don’t think it’s a one way street.
Brendon, we missed you tonight….especially Vern! What is Flickr?