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San Diego is a great place to live, but anybody who opens a business or starts a business probably doesn't think of San diego as the place to start it. If you just like living here and all your employees and funding come from somewhere else, is it really a San Diego company?
What city has the majority of their employees coming from that city? San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, etc are all mainly transplants.
I spent some time working in BMI. It's not the university that keeps that town running, it's the big billion dollar insurance company.
Bloomington does have another industry (state farm). But the State University is a big player as well. Peoria had Caterpillar and Decatur had/has some big companies as well. Danville was major industrial though I don't recall what, you can drive by and see the remnants. I can't think of anything Champaign is known for other than the major university (in fact its the university that seems to support the industry, also with State Farm in Bloomington). But anyway I'm not shooting this out of my @#$ I recall learning about this in an Urban Studies class....at, well ISU of course.
I know these are just Wikipedia links, but if you know anything about the area all you really need to read is the first few paragraphs to get it. A major university seems to be what keeps an aging city above water in the Midwest. I believe the more vibrant Sunbelt cities have so much going on its harder to see. But if you took that University away it would be felt in a major way. And colleges/universities lend a "vibrancy" that is hard to quantify ... while there are drawbacks to having a lot of youth in the area, it tends to be a positive -- I'd point to Austin in Texas vs. San Antonio.
I know these are just Wikipedia links, but if you know anything about the area all you really need to read is the first few paragraphs to get it. A major university seems to be what keeps an aging city above water in the Midwest. I believe the more vibrant Sunbelt cities have so much going on its harder to see. But if you took that University away it would be felt in a major way. And colleges/universities lend a "vibrancy" that is hard to quantify ... while there are drawbacks to having a lot of youth in the area, it tends to be a positive -- I'd point to Austin in Texas vs. San Antonio.
What is notable about Champaign, IL, and relevant to this thread topic, is that it is home to NCSA, a partner of UIC. NCSA created the ancestor of both Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Back in the early '90's group of young CS students and grads created a browser that would let images be embedded. It was spun off as a project of Spyglass, the commercial entity of NCSA. It produced a browser called Mosaic. Microsoft bought or licensed the code for that browser, which became IE.
Some of those NCSA students/researchers had since went off to create Netscape in Silicon Valley, which created Mozilla. Much later an off-shoot project would become Firefox.
Had Champaign, IL the capital and ecosystem back in the pre-'dot com' era of other tech metropolises, perhaps it could have become the center of Internet technology. Instead, that innovation migrated to Sunnyvale, CA and Redmond, WA.
Like I said, most of these reports have an agenda. Cities don't like to have their cities look bad on any report. Nor do a few big companies. You don't need sources when you actually are involved in a lot of what happens or doesn't happen.
And what agenda is that? So SD pays more or "Cooking the books" to be ranked higher than, say, Kansas City in the lists below? SF must pay the most since they always seem to be on top.
How many incubators does San Diego actually have? How many big name VC firms are located in SD or even come to SD? And common sense would tell you that if you visited Santa Monica, wow, there are a ton of little startups all over the place and they get nice little special names for their neighborhoods. Same could be said about NYC. They all try to throw out terms like Silicon Alley or Silicon Beach and so on.
Have you forgotten that SD is the 17th largest metro in the country? Trying to compare it to the 1st and 2nd largest cities seems a little desprate to me.
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Go by facts, not some report that has an agenda.
So far this year startups that got VC funding and were an actual company,
San Francisco tops the list with 354, followed by Boston-Cambridge with 248, and San Jose with 216. New York is fourth with 160 and London fifth with 73. L.A. is sixth with 65, Seattle seventh with 57, San Diego eighth with 48, Austin ninth with 47, and Chicago 10th with 29. There are seven additional cities with 20 or more venture capital backed companies: Berlin (25), Toronto and Boulder (22 each), D.C., Paris, and Atlanta (21 each), and Denver with 20.
So San Diego isn't 20th on the list, but it's not top 5. And the reality is 48 firms got funding or made enough revenue to be considered a real startup. And most of them were in the biotech/life sciences industry. An industry that is far different and isn't as good at building a vibrant economy.
If you go further and look at Angel Investors, San diego isn't even on the list...
San Francisco now tops the list with 138 companies receiving angel funding, followed by New York with 117. London is again third with 62. San Jose is fourth with 60, Boston-Cambridge fifth with 50 and L.A. sixth with 48. Chicago and Philadelphia are tied for seventh with 19, and Seattle and Portland tied for 10th with 18 apiece. Nine more cities have 10 or more companies receiving angel funding: Toronto (17), D.C. (14), Berlin, and Paris (13 each), Atlanta, Barcelona and Boulder (12 each), Dublin (11), and Cincinnati (10).
Dig a little further and just look at legit startups from this year.. Again, Where is San Diego? A staggering 11 new startups.
Legit Startups, not some random guy who used LegalZoom to start a business that really isn't' a business.
New York tops the list with 144, besting San Francisco's 135. London is next with 90, followed by San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara (Silicon Valley) with 66, and Los Angeles with 64. Toronto and Boston-Cambridge tied for sixth with 34 each, Chicago is eighth with 31, Berlin ninth with 27, and Bangalore 10th with 26. Austin (23), Seattle (22), and São Paulo (21) each have more than 20 start-ups. Another 20 cities are home to 10 or more start-ups: Istanbul with 19; Vancouver and Moscow each with 17; New Delhi (15); Paris, and Atlanta with 14 each; Washington, D.C., Amsterdam, and Miami with 12 each; San Diego, Madrid, Singapore, and Sydney with 11 apiece; and Barcelona, Dublin, Tel Aviv, Dallas-Fort Worth, Mumbai, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, with 10 start-ups each.
Oh, I see, the facts you provide are proven to be true, but the ones I link to have an agenda, right? Angel Investors? Must be some Fortune 500 company that I've never heard of.
And now you are putting SD up against places like London, Berlin, Bangalore and Sydney? Brilliant.
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I'm not sure why people need to have some inferiority complex. San Diego is a great place to live and I'm glad I live here, but why people need to proclaim it's something that it's not is beyond me.
I've got more of a superiority complex, really. I just like to call people out who can't back up what they have to say with facts.
Remember when you said in another thread that you can get to more destinations flying out of John Wayne Airport, rather than Lindbergh? That one still cracks me up.
Also phd's are only as vibrant as the people who 'have them'. And no, academia is not a bastion of vibrancy per se. It can be as dogmatic, stagnant or status quo as politics. I just don't think your logic is very sound.
No one has said that SD is a 'backwater'; there's just no way that it's vibrant like the bay area as a whole, or a larger metro area. A few braniacs and some entrepreneurs do not make up for the general political and social apathy of SD (yet this translates also into live and let live, and laid back, so interpretation is everything), or its reliance on largely chain and box stores, etc. Yes, there are other realities in SD, but the mainstream reality is the dominant one here. There's a reason SD is one of the top 'test markets' in the country for advertising and product placement.
SD as a whole is not vibrant. It is sterile and suburban. Are there exceptions? Of course. Has it improved? Yes. But that is not the primary reality. And many people like SD just fine as it is. When people comment on the threads that it's not very vibrant overall or for young professionals, that is not necessarily a dis; it's simply an observation/bordering on hard fact, so that people can make informed decisions. And nearly every comment as such will qualify itself by saying 'unless you are in certain fields'. So your point, that certain fields, and certain innovators/entrepreneurs from said fields, will do well in SD, is well taken. This does not negate the fact that by and large, SD is not a hotbed of vibrancy or a location for professionals to rise in their careers.
You know, a large part of this is San Diego's location: being so close to L.A., and therefore is in L.A.'s shadow, so to speak. The upside is the downtown area & skyline have improved immensely in the last decade or so. I remember when downtown used to be an area to avoid ... but now it's THE place to work, live, dine, and shop. I know many people wish the skyline could be taller, but there are height restrictions due to the close proximity of the airport. Still, the skyline from afar is quite impressive.
San Diego definitely has the potential for being more vibrant, as well as a place for high paying competitive jobs. The problem is San Diego's cost of living is very expensive (as is much of California), and the city itself is continuously reliant on tourism, climate, and the military for its chief economic indicators. I get the impression that most San Diegans like the laid back way of life, and the climate is definitely one of the best in the entire world. There should be more to a large city than just the great weather, however.
What is notable about Champaign, IL, and relevant to this thread topic, is that it is home to NCSA, a partner of UIC. NCSA created the ancestor of both Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Back in the early '90's group of young CS students and grads created a browser that would let images be embedded. It was spun off as a project of Spyglass, the commercial entity of NCSA. It produced a browser called Mosaic. Microsoft bought or licensed the code for that browser, which became IE.
Some of those NCSA students/researchers had since went off to create Netscape in Silicon Valley, which created Mozilla. Much later an off-shoot project would become Firefox.
Had Champaign, IL the capital and ecosystem back in the pre-'dot com' era of other tech metropolises, perhaps it could have become the center of Internet technology. Instead, that innovation migrated to Sunnyvale, CA and Redmond, WA.
It's relevant because it is a research university smack in the middle of Illinois, farms. All the other cities I listed are basically geographically the same (except that they don't have a big research university). The other cities have been very prominent in the state at different points of history and have all fallen into decline, with the exception of Bloomington and Champaign which have continued to grow and particularly Champaign which is noted to have a lot of industry thanks in part to the university being here. Most of the rust belt is in decline, so are places in the middle of the country that young people don't really want to live in. The fact that the more successful cities have large colleges is significant.
I believe that the positive force of the university is probably less apparent to people in SD because the sunbelt is doing pretty well in general comparatively speaking. It would be interesting to know what SD would be like without a large research university, but alas it would be hard to know...
It's relevant because it is a research university smack in the middle of Illinois, farms. All the other cities I listed are basically geographically the same (except that they don't have a big research university). The other cities have been very prominent in the state at different points of history and have all fallen into decline, with the exception of Bloomington and Champaign which have continued to grow and particularly Champaign which is noted to have a lot of industry thanks in part to the university being here. Most of the rust belt is in decline, so are places in the middle of the country that young people don't really want to live in. The fact that the more successful cities have large colleges is significant.
I believe that the positive force of the university is probably less apparent to people in SD because the sunbelt is doing pretty well in general comparatively speaking. It would be interesting to know what SD would be like without a large research university, but alas it would be hard to know...
I totally agree. Maybe UCSD timeline just happen to coincide with SD's growth. SD's up until probably 1990 was consider a sleep beach town and its main source of high paying jobs was mainly dependent on defense contracting and government. Which is why SD was hit so hard in the early 90s. Coincidentally, UCSD basically doubled in size from the 80s to the 2000s, going from 3 colleges to 6. Today, SD economy is a hot bed for biotech and telecom. Of course, there's still plenty of defense as well. So, compares to just 30 years ago, we're much more vibrant today. SDSU also came into its own in the last 20 years as well. I think industry needs great universities nearby and universities needs industry near by. It takes decades to build that ecosystem, but once it's built, it'll continue to grow. The bay have 60+ years head start compare to SD with Berkeley and Standford. Same with LA with UCLA and USC. So, I think it's a little unfair to compare us vs them, but we're definitely heading in the right direction with UCSD, USD, and SDSU. I don't think we'll be able to catch up in the next 10-20 years, but maybe in 30-50 years, we might end up being in the major league. That's just my guess, but I think SD is going through a great transformation in the last 15 years.
Agreed. Of course, SD pales in comparison to the Bay area when it comes to salaries, technology and major corporations, but so does everywhere else.
We also pales in comparison to the Bay area when it comes to cost of living as well. I personally thought a bout moving to South Bay 4-5 years ago. Once I found out salary was only 25% more (which confirm your statement), but similar houses were going for about 50-100% more than SD, I immediately scrap that idea. I constantly get pinged by head hunter in the bay, but every time do the income increase vs COL increase, I say thanks but no thanks.
We also pales in comparison to the Bay area when it comes to cost of living as well. I personally thought a bout moving to South Bay 4-5 years ago. Once I found out salary was only 25% more (which confirm your statement), but similar houses were going for about 50-100% more than SD, I immediately scrap that idea. I constantly get pinged by head hunter in the bay, but every time do the income increase vs COL increase, I say thanks but no thanks.
exactly, I'm facing that choice right now and have also received offers to go up there. Sometimes I'm tempted as I used to live in Sacramento and enjoyed that as well for various reasons, I think I would like the Bay area for the most part. But even without the COL, there are some things about the Bay area that can be a turn off, and which SD offers a nice alternative (its warmer -- if you enjoy surfing or swimming that is kind of a big deal and people with good jobs like these things sometimes too but I also don't always understand the logic, that your standard young person with a degree should just go there vs. other places. When you are young I don't necessarily think you want to surround yourself with so much competition unless you actually are a very talented and motivated developer (or whatever else is needed in that area).
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but I also don't always understand the logic, that your standard young person with a degree should just go there vs. other places. When you are young I don't necessarily think you want to surround yourself with so much competition unless you actually are a very talented and motivated developer (or whatever else is needed in that area).
