New Hot Spot For Tech Firms Is the Old One
Matt Sanchez was just the kind of entrepreneur that the new wave of the Web boom was supposed to spawn: one untethered by geography, able to locate his company anywhere there was broadband Internet connection and a good idea.
But two years after the Yale University electrical-engineering graduate and two friends formed VideoEgg Inc., Mr. Sanchez found that he was spending more days in Silicon Valley than at the company's New Haven, Conn., headquarters. So, in December, he and four employees packed up a 12-foot U-Haul van with their servers, whiteboards and desktop computers and moved West. Since settling into an airy office in San Francisco, the Web-video-technology company has snagged some venture funding, hired an additional 22 people and signed deals with Time Warner Inc.'s AOL unit and Internet firms such as Bebo Inc.
"There's a unique set of resources in Silicon Valley that don't exist in other places," says Mr. Sanchez, 25 years old. "So if you're going to build a tech company, this is the place to do it."
From early in the Web boom, there have been predictions that the Internet eventually would erode Silicon Valley's pre-eminence in nurturing start-ups as entrepreneurs found it more attractive -- and much cheaper -- to do business online from other regions. Instead, companies like VideoEgg are now migrating to Silicon Valley and environs. The trend shows how the San Francisco Bay Area continues to possess a unique mix of venture-capital money and skilled workers that tech firms -- especially those that get to a point where they want to grow quickly -- can't afford to pass up.
Of course, pockets of tech remain active elsewhere in the country, notably around Microsoft Corp.'s home base near Seattle and also in Boston. But many companies -- typically tech start-ups headed by entrepreneurs in their 20s, often with staffs of less than five people -- are still heading to Silicon Valley. Mobius Microsystems Inc., a maker of technology that regulates timing pulses in microchips, relocated from Detroit to Sunnyvale, Calif., in March. LicketyShip Inc., an Internet firm that facilitates local deliveries, moved from New Haven to San Francisco last September. Meetro Inc., a maker of mobile social-networking software, transferred from Chicago to Palo Alto, Calif., in January, while Box.net Inc., an online file-storage-and-sharing site, jumped from Seattle to Silicon Valley that same month. Other companies are moving from overseas: Internet video company Metacafe Inc. is currently shifting its main office to Palo Alto from Tel Aviv.
"We tried to do some fund raising when we were based in Seattle, but Silicon Valley [venture] firms are just more receptive to younger entrepreneurs," says Aaron Levie, 21, chief executive of Box.net, which is now based in Berkeley, Calif., and will move to Palo Alto next week. While Box.net got some funds from Seattle investors, it recently netted a heftier $1.5 million in a round led by venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson in Menlo Park, Calif., according to a Thomson Financial publication.
The start-up influx is helping to revitalize Silicon Valley. Many of the new companies are moving into offices that had been left empty by the tech bust of 2000. They are also ramping up their hiring and creating jobs. Mobius, for instance, now employs 14 people in its Sunnyvale headquarters, up from one a year ago. Overall, 278 companies in the San Francisco Bay Area got either first-round or seed financing in 2005, up from 250 in 2004 and 216 in 2003, according to research firm VentureOne. The start-ups have also fired up the tech social scene -- Meetro founder Paul Bragiel recently helped to launch a bowling league for start-up executives, for example -- that helped to incubate so many companies and contacts during the 1990s dot-com explosion.
Metacafe Chief Executive Arik Czerniak says his Internet video site, which he co-founded in 2003, is smaller than market leader YouTube Inc., but has 20 million users watching 450 million video streams a month. Even with those hefty numbers, it attracted little notice until the company jumped from Israel to Silicon Valley.
"Other companies out here get a lot of press simply because they're here," says Mr. Czerniak, 31 years old. "We have to be here; otherwise it would be very hard to compete." While Metacafe maintains a development team in Tel Aviv, it is now recruiting marketing and sales executives for its new Palo Alto headquarters, where it expects to have 12 employees by the end of the year.
Kevin Efrusy, a general partner at venture firm Accel Partners in Palo Alto, which recently invested in Metacafe, says he now scouts around the world for potential investment opportunities, but when budding companies hit the point where they need to build a top-notch executive team and get more funding, they "can't afford not to be in Silicon Valley," he says. Besides Metacafe, Israel has seen several of its thriving home-grown tech companies shift to Silicon Valley in recent years, including software firm Mercury Interactive Corp., and privately held Skybox Security Inc.
Moving to Silicon Valley has its complications. The cost of doing business in the area remains steep, particularly due to high labor costs. According to a recent report from the American Electronics Association, a trade group in Washington, D.C., and Silicon Valley, high-tech workers in San Jose, Calif., made an average annual wage of $126,700 in 2004, the last year for which data are available. That compares with the national average for high-tech workers of $72,400.
Even with these higher costs, start-ups say they have little choice but to go where the most tech talent is concentrated. San Jose, the self-styled Capital of Silicon Valley, boasts 284 tech workers per 1,000 people, compared with the national average of 51 tech workers per 1,000 people, according to the electronics association report.
Mr. Efrusy says the region, home to big Internet firms such as Yahoo Inc. and eBay Inc., is also one of the few places where it's possible to recruit seasoned Internet executives.
For growing start-ups, that can mean a difference of months in recruiting. David Sikes, CEO of Mobius Microsystems, says that after the company moved from Detroit to Sunnyvale earlier this year, it took him just four months to recruit a senior management team that had experience working at companies such as Cypress Semiconductor Corp. and Texas Instruments Inc. If he had tried to recruit a similar management team in Detroit, he figures it would have taken him a year or longer.
Mr. Sikes, who previously worked at Motorola Inc., says he himself was recruited to Mobius by its founder, 31-year-old Michael McCorquodale. Mr. Sikes says he joined partly because he knew Mr. McCorquodale was relocating Mobius to Silicon Valley. He adds that he wouldn't have been as attracted to the job if he'd had to move for it.
VideoEgg's Mr. Sanchez, meanwhile, says he tried for more than a year to make his company a viable enterprise in New Haven. At first, things seemed promising. In April 2005, VideoEgg snagged some funding from an ex-eBay executive who is based in Pennsylvania. Mr. Sanchez and his team used the money to hire several engineers and to build their Internet technology, which allows people to easily put video onto the Web.
But Mr. Sanchez says he soon found it difficult to hire talented developers in Connecticut. What's more, as he began meeting potential partners and venture capitalists, he found he was flying to Silicon Valley nearly every Monday at 6 a.m. and taking the Friday night red-eye flight back to the East Coast. "Last October and November, I spent more nights in California than on the East Coast," he says.
The move to Silicon Valley in December was stressful, however, as Mr. Sanchez and his team had to bunk out of a hotel near San Francisco's airport for three weeks. (Cost: $52 a night for each room.) The company later leased office space in San Francisco. Soon afterward, it received some venture funding from August Capital. The amount of the investment wasn't disclosed. Late last month, VideoEgg received a further $12 million in venture funding from investors including August, Maveron LLC and First Round Capital.
Since then, Mr. Sanchez says VideoEgg has signed on more than 70 Web sites as customers, with about 85% of those customers now located within an hour's drive. The company has grown to 27 employees. Mr. Sanchez now sees some of the company's venture capitalists and advisers at least once a week. He and his team also frequently grab lunch with entrepreneurs at other nearby start-ups.
"I don't miss New Haven," says Mr. Sanchez. "Before, in order to take a meeting, I had to schedule it two weeks in advance and had to buy a plane ticket. Now I can just meet people for coffee. It really facilitates the business."
硅谷仍是科技企业的宝地
马特?桑切斯(Matt Sanchez)是一个典型的在网络新热潮中诞生的初创企业家：他绝不受地域的限制，能够把公司设立在任何有宽带及好点子的地方。
但是桑切斯和两位朋友成立VideoEgg Inc.两年之后，这位耶鲁大学(Yale University)电子工程专业毕业生发现他在硅谷度过的时间要比在公司总部的时间多。于是，他和他的四名雇员在去年12月份将他们的服务器、白板以及台式电脑打包装入一辆U-Haul箱式货车中，奔向硅谷。自从搬入旧金山高耸入云的办公楼之后，这家网络视频技术公司获得了一些风险投资、增加了22名新员工，并与时代华纳(Time Warner Inc.)旗下的美国在线（AOL）及Bebo Inc.等互联网公司达成了新交易。
“硅谷具有其他地方所没有的独特资源，”现年25岁的桑切斯说。“如果你准备成立一家技术公司，硅谷就是正确的地方。”
在网络热潮初期，有人预言，随着初创企业家不断发现利用互联网在其他地区开办公司会更加吸引人、且成本更加低廉，互联网将最终削弱硅谷培育初创企业的突出作用。但事实恰恰相反，VideoEgg这类公司正在迁往硅谷及及其周边地区。这种趋势说明旧金山湾区仍然具有独特的综合优势：风险投资资金以及熟练工人，而这些正是科技公司无论如何都不能够错过的发展条件，对那些想要快速发展的公司更是如此。
当然，美国其他地方的科技园区也十分活跃，备受瞩目的有微软公司(Microsoft Corp.)西雅图总部的周边地区以及波士顿地区等。但是很多公司仍然直奔硅谷，特别是那些由20多岁年轻人领导、雇员数不超过5人的科技初创企业。Mobius Microsystems Inc.是调整微芯片脉冲时间技术的提供商，今年3月它从底特律搬到了加利福尼亚州桑尼韦尔。简化当地运送服务的互联网企业LicketyShip Inc.去年9月从纽黑文搬到了旧金山。移动社交网络软件开发商Meetro Inc.今年1月从芝加哥搬到了加州帕洛阿尔托，而网上文件存储及共享站点Box.net Inc.也在同月从西雅图搬到了硅谷。还有的将公司从海外搬到了硅谷：互联网视频公司Metacafe Inc.就将其总部从特拉维夫搬到了帕洛阿尔托。
Box.net 21岁的首席执行长阿隆?列维(Aaron Levie)说，我们在西雅图时曾想进行一些融资，但发现硅谷的风险投资企业更能接受年轻的创业者。该公司目前位于加州伯克利，将在近期搬到帕洛阿尔托。根据Thomson Financial的数据，虽然Box.net从西雅图投资者那里也获得了一些资金，但却从加州门洛帕克风险投资企业Draper Fisher Jurvetson净获得了150万美元的大笔融资。
这些初创企业的到来推动了硅谷的复兴。许多新企业进驻到2000年科技泡沫破裂后空置出来的办公室中。他们不断招聘员工，创造了大量就业岗位。比如，Mobius目前在桑尼韦尔的公司总部有14人，而一年前仅有1人。根据研究机构VentureOne的数据，总体而言，2005年旧金山湾区共有278家公司获得了第一轮融资或种子融资，高于2004年的250家和2003年的216家。初创企业还积极建立科技企业的社交圈，比如Meetro的创始人保罗?布莱吉尔(Paul Bragiel)最近就组建了初创企业管理人员的保龄球协会，这种做法曾在上世纪90年代互联网大潮兴起时帮助培育了许多公司，并带来了不少合同。
Metacafe是阿里克?泽涅克(Arik Czerniak)在2003年同合作者共同创立的。担任首席执行长的泽涅克说，他的视频网站比市场领头羊YouTube Inc.要小，但每月共有2,000万用户观看4.5亿部视频节目。尽管拥有如此优异的数据，但公司却很少吸引到关注的目光，直到它从以色列搬到硅谷之后。
31岁的泽涅克说，因为其它公司设在硅谷，不在此地的公司就感到很有压力。我们不得不搬到这里，否则很难进行竞争。尽管Metacafe在特拉维夫保留了研发团队，但公司正在为帕洛阿尔托的总部招聘营销和销售管理人员，该公司预计到今年年底时总部将拥有12名员工。
帕洛阿尔托风险投资机构Accel Partners的普通合伙人凯文?埃法西(Kevin Efrusy)称，他现在会在全球寻找潜在的投资机会，但当一家初创公司达到需要构建一流的管理团队和获得更多资金时，不在硅谷就会困难得多。该公司最近向Metacafe提供了融资。除了Metacafe外，近年来以色列还有几家在国内发展到一定规模的公司搬到了硅谷，如软件公司Mercury Interactive Corp.和私人持股公司Skybox Security Inc。
搬到硅谷后也会遇到新问题。这里的经营成本依然居高不下，特别是劳动力成本。美国电子业协会(American Electronics Association)在最近的报告中称，根据能得到的最新数据，加州圣何塞高科技员工2004年的平均年工资为126,700美元。而美国全国高科技员工的年平均工资为72,400美元。
尽管成本偏高，但初创企业表示，他们别无选择，只能搬到科技人才更为集中的地区。圣何塞自称为硅谷之都，根据美国电子业协会的报告，据说圣何塞每1,000人中就有284名科技人员，而全美的平均数据为51人。
埃法西说，这里是雅虎(Yahoo Inc.)和eBay Inc.等互联网巨头的所在地，也是为数不多的能招聘到优秀互联网管理人员的地区之一。
对不断壮大的初创企业而言，这可能意味着招聘时间上的差异。Mobius Microsystems的首席执行长大卫?赛克斯(David Sikes)说，在公司今年初从底特律搬到桑尼韦尔后，他仅用了4个月的时间就招聘到了曾在柏士半导体(Cypress Semiconductor Corp.)和德州仪器(Texas Instruments Inc.)等公司工作过的高级管理人员。如果想在底特律招聘到类似的管理团队，他估计需要一年、甚至更长时间。
赛克斯以前曾在摩托罗拉公司(Motorola Inc.)工作。他说，Mobius 31岁的创始人迈克尔?麦科克代尔(Michael McCorquodale)将他招聘到了该公司。赛克斯称，他加入该公司的原因之一在于了解到麦科克代尔将把Mobius搬到硅谷。他还表示，如果他要为此到别的地方工作，这个职位对他的吸引力可能就不会那么大。
同样，VideoEgg的桑切斯也表示，他用了一年多的时间让公司成为纽黑文地区生机勃勃的企业。起初，前景似乎一片光明。2005年4月，VideoEgg获得宾夕法尼亚州一位前eBay管理人员的投资。桑切斯及其团队用这笔资金聘用了几位工程师，开发了自己的互联网技术。这项技术能让人们轻松地将视频传到网络上。
桑切斯说，但他很快就发现难以在康涅狄格招聘到优秀的开发人员。而且，当他开始会晤潜在的合作伙伴和风险投资家时，他发现几乎每周一早上6点就要飞到硅谷，然后坐周五夜里的红眼航班飞回东海岸。他说，去年10月和11月，我在加州呆的天数比在东海岸还多。
不过，去年12月向硅谷搬迁却并不顺利，桑切斯和他的团队被迫在旧金山机场附近的一个旅馆中凑合了三周。（每个房间每晚52美元。）后来公司在旧金山租下了办公场所。此后不久，该公司获得了August Capital的风险投资。具体的投资额没有对外披露。上月末，VideoEgg又获得了August、Maveron LLC和First Round Capital等投资者的1,200万美元风险投资。
桑切斯称，此后，VideoEgg已同70多家网站客户签订了合约，其中约有85%的客户都在一个小时的车程范围内。公司现在已拥有27名员工。现在桑切斯每周至少都与公司的风险投资家和顾问见一次面。他和他的团队还频频同附近其他初创公司的企业家共进午餐。
桑切斯说，我并不怀念纽黑文。以前，为了会面，我需要提前两周安排计划，并预订机票。而现在我能约人边喝咖啡边谈事情。这确实方便了公司的业务。
Pui-Wing Tam
