Forbes: San Diego is the world's second most innovative city. (Los Angeles: transplants, houses)

[shmoov_groovzsd]

Originally Posted by lrmsd

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.

Very well said on several accounts.

Couldn't agree more. SD is very zzzzzzzz. Which isnt a bad thing either

[Pedro2000]

I never buy into most of these reports as there are always agendas, membership dues, payoffs, etc. The infamous "best places to work" surveys are usually based on companies who actually pay into those publishers, groups, etc. If you don't participate you probably don't get included, and yet might be a good place to work. It's all about perspective.

I don't buy the VC. San Diego might be better than some places, but in general, Southern California struggles with VC funding compared to a lot of other regions. Some research reports just throw "southern California" into one bucket and wow...if you integrate LA, OC, and SD you might get better results. And some reports break San Fran, Silicon Valley, and San Jose, etc into different areas. So if you say San Fran is not Silicon Valley than it might rate lower compared to other places.

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?

I've worked for companies where I lived in SD, but none of my work or clients were actually in California at all and none of my co-workers actually lived or worked in San Diego. I've run a business in California but all my clients and contractors were outside of California. I guess you could call these 'San Diego' companies but in reality, it's just a shell for somebody who likes living here but doesn't really do business here. And there is a lot of that here. So when you do some statistics and reports, it looks good on paper, but dig deeper and a lot of us don't actually work here at all and we work for companies who really aren't here either.

And I'm not a fan of the 'serial entrepreneur' term in any location. Many times it's just a nice name for a good con who sells off a failing business before people realize it's a failing business. That's not always the case, but many times it's "sell this non profitable business' for some huge some to some sucker big corporation and run off and do the same thing someplace else. There are quite a few billionaires these days who made money being 'serial entrepreneurs' and yet never really ran or started a real successful business. You don't build innovation or economies that way. You just make a few good cons rich.

[rgb123]

It's all relative. Nothing really compares to the Bay area. I'm comparing it to the rest of America.

And colleges do have a big impact on a cities economy (and vibrancy...however you want to define that).

Many of the rust belt cities or small cities in the midwest have been kept alive by being a 'college town' whereas their neighbors fell into decline (for instance Bloomington or Champaign Illinois vs. Danville or Decatur)

I think I actually did some research on that when I was in school in Illinois studying regional and urban planning.

This is perhaps of interest http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/economicimpact/

[NYSD1995]

I fly to the Bay Area nearly every week to make our business in San Diego work. Im posting this on a southwest flight from SJC right now. As dull as some of those silicon valley companies are, they are all full of smart, driven, and successful young people. It is a world apart from San Diego.

[Think4Yourself]

Originally Posted by hitman619

San Diego maybe second most innovated city in the world,but California is Last place on earth you want to do Business.

You keep making that claim but year after year California leads the list in the number of new small business start ups so I'd say your claim just doesn't jive with reality.

[sdurbanite]

Originally Posted by rgb123

It's all relative. Nothing really compares to the Bay area. I'm comparing it to the rest of America.

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.

[sdurbanite]

Originally Posted by Pedro2000

I don't buy the VC. San Diego might be better than some places, but in general, Southern California struggles with VC funding compared to a lot of other regions. Some research reports just throw "southern California" into one bucket and wow...if you integrate LA, OC, and SD you might get better results. And some reports break San Fran, Silicon Valley, and San Jose, etc into different areas. So if you say San Fran is not Silicon Valley than it might rate lower compared to other places.

Just wondering what your source is when you say that SoCal struggles in VC funding, if you pay no attention to reports or studies? Would you agree that the same places seem to show up on these reports that you speak of?

Here's one broken down by zip codes. Once again, same places, different rankings.

America's Leading Venture Capital Area Codes - Richard Florida - The Atlantic Cities

[hitman619]

Originally Posted by Think4Yourself

You keep making that claim but year after year California leads the list in the number of new small business start ups so I'd say your claim just doesn't jive with reality.

Source?
Just because people a bunch people jump off a cliff,still doesn't make it the right thing to do!

[Pedro2000]

Originally Posted by rgb123

It's all relative. Nothing really compares to the Bay area. I'm comparing it to the rest of America.

And colleges do have a big impact on a cities economy (and vibrancy...however you want to define that).

Many of the rust belt cities or small cities in the midwest have been kept alive by being a 'college town' whereas their neighbors fell into decline (for instance Bloomington or Champaign Illinois vs. Danville or Decatur)

I think I actually did some research on that when I was in school in Illinois studying regional and urban planning.

This is perhaps of interest UC San Diego Economic Impact Report

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.

[Pedro2000]

Originally Posted by sdurbanite

Just wondering what your source is when you say that SoCal struggles in VC funding, if you pay no attention to reports or studies? Would you agree that the same places seem to show up on these reports that you speak of?

Here's one broken down by zip codes. Once again, same places, different rankings.

America's Leading Venture Capital Area Codes - Richard Florida - The Atlantic Cities

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.

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.

When you walk down a sidewalk or walk into a cafe and can chat it up with a bunch of people who actually are running or part of a startup, it's far different than in San Diego where the only people who seem to be 'running a business' are running some fake website that isn't really a startup at all.

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.


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.