Only 70 years, still young. Nowadays, change occurs much faster. I am going to form a team of 18 people to look into how to recruit talent and coordinate work across many many many (millions?) places. Screw the talent at one place, talent is everywhere. My apps will democratize the talents, your choice of lifestyle and home!
Btw, are TEAM, PLAN, SMAR and OKTA any good? @marcus335 Do you think these are potential new 10x candidates?
MarkZ famously met Sheryl at a party. It’s like dating. You assume you already know who you want and then go out and recruit them. In reality much happens by chance encounters.
Exactly why density matters. So you have good chance of meeting the right people.
Another example why geography matters and again it’s a Facebook story. Pony Ma wanted to buy WhatsApp and he was scheduled to fly in from China. But last minute he had serious back pain and couldn’t fly. Somehow MarkZ got news of that and just drove to see WA founders and sealed up the deal on a weekend.
@manch You are a historian. Wait for my apps! I am creating a talent density far denser than any physical location allow. And a VR/AR party/meeting far more real than a physical location.
Put words in my mouth again 
Which type of companies employ more people? Do mature companies move their HQs? Did they also move the people along?
The company currently has 700 employees in Bellevue and more than 45,000 at its Seattle headquarters.
How many will be in 2nd HQ? Total outside Seattle?
Amazon last summer had about 45,000 corporate employees in Seattle and 17,500 elsewhere in North America, meaning about 28 percent of the company’s corporate workforce was outside Seattle , but those numbers include employees in Canada.
Amazon currently employs around 575,000 workers around the world.
Amazon, the online commerce titan that has reshaped modern retail, may soon help reshape a major North American city. As reported by the New York Times, the company is looking for a location for a second headquarters, a new facility meant to house as many as 50,000 workers…
Now is half of that, but still a large number.
Just to show you how slow things change. Remember everybody think with computers, consumption of writing paper would reduce? It increase initially, now…
Printing and Writing paper volume has been declining , with Newsprint in particular suffering the most rapid decline.
One Jeff Bezos is worth how many of these lowly Amazon working bees? Each person is not worth the same.
Super clusters create Bezos and Zuckerberg. Third tier cities like Austin attract individual contributors.
Actually I no longer know what we are debating about.
Which of the following stocks do you own?
PLAN, SMAR, OKTA and TEAM
Btw, I presume you’re saying Jeff owns 1 million houses 
and consumes $1 million worth of food & beverages per day.
By worth I mean capacity to generate wealth. Bad choice of words by me.
Super clusters, by churning out entrepreneurs, create wealth and jobs. IC’s are leaf nodes. They generate economic activity by their consumption but orders of magnitude less than guys like Bezos. Seattle won’t be what it is today without first Gates and then Bezos.
Are you giving a counter-example to your hypothesis? He wasn’t born out of the high talent density of Seattle. Neither is Zuckerberg from SV.
Btw at what size is a company considered more established? 20 employees? 50? 100? 200? 10,000?
If more established mean 200 for a potential size of 10,000, only 200 stay in original place, say SV, the other 9,800 would be elsewhere. So not sure why you keep arguing having more startups is good, would it mean create more jobs? higher house prices? better ROI for houses? Fame? Even more startups? More homeless? More lower quality housing like HDB-like condo worth $2M and shack for $2M?
AMZN has 45,000 employees in Seattle while the rest of the 575,000 jobs are elsewhere.
You just explained why the need of geography is overstated. It’s buy/sell situation as opposed to discussing some high value item that must happen face to face. Pony Ma could have called the Whatsapp founders to wait till he gets better, and also could have come with a better bid to fend off MarkZ. Sounds like a purely business decision by Pony Ma to not chase whatsapp doggedly. I do not think the seller would not want to wait a few more week for a better deal from Pony. I do not know the details.
I need to do more research on them.
Jeff Bezos grew up in Miami? And went straight to Seattle?
This is a good description of how things work. SV does an excellent job of providing an eco-system for nascent and start-up technology companies. It is not alone but it is far larger in scale than other cities in doing so.
Yup. Vast majority of the warehouse workers are not in Seattle.
Besides the community of engineers and scientists, what works well in Silicon Valley is a community of venture capitalists who have honed up skill in picking and funding technology with VC funds. For example, a story goes that Vinod Khosla listens to anyone in need of fund, not always to fund a new venture, but to be aware of what kind of ideas entrepreneurs are coming up with. Proximity between VC funding and the engineering community allows Silicon Valley to be a source of money needed to fund a startup. I am not sure where else is this happening. And I think this a big barrier that other cities will find hard to cross. There are tons of engineers with good idea, but there is not enough money to fund them all.
Earlier this year, Amazon abruptly canceled its plans to build a massive “second headquarters” (dubbed HQ2) in New York City’s Long Island City neighborhood. Now, it’s leasing 335,000 square feet of office space in the city’s enormous Hudson Yards complex, which will host more than 1,500 employees (they’ll join the 3,500 who already work at Amazon offices in the city).
Meanwhile, Facebook is in negotiations to lease 700,000 square feet in Midtown, adding to the 1.5 million square feet it, too, leases within Hudson Yards. That’s a little under 3 million square feet, putting the social network on similar footing to other huge corporate tenants such as Bank of America. (Combined, all of Facebook’s various spaces will host some 14,000 employees, according to The Wall Street Journal . )
The Amazon and Facebook expansions put some serious pressure on Google, which announced plans in December 2018 to build a “Google Hudson Square” that will occupy 1.7 million square feet and cost roughly $1 billion to build. That space will open in 2020; in the meantime, the company occupies a lot of office space in Chelsea Market, which it owns, and leases space at nearby Pier 57.
But as the biggest tech firms expand their New York City footprints, it sets up a titanic fight for talent in 2020 and beyond. Companies such as Verizon and Bloomberg are clearly willing to pay top dollar for the talent they need, but can smaller firms out-bid a Google, Facebook or Amazon for the best machine-learning specialists and data scientists? Probably not, especially when you throw in other perks and benefits, including stock options and cash bonuses; for example, levels.fyi features a handful of Facebook’s New York City employees self-reporting salaries higher than $450,000 per year, once stock and bonuses are factored in.
What do these people making half a mil do? 
Doesn’t matter. The demand for these people is extremely high and will remain high till most companies have incorporated ML in their apps. The mad rush to cloud and ML their current system is ON. Investors like us should assess how long will the mad rush last. Throw away your academic hat.
How do we position ourselves to make some money off the mad rush? 
Invest in stocks of cloud and ML businesses, and buy rentals in tech hubs such as Austin Even though techies don’t rent your houses but their presence lead to good appreciation of your rentals. Moreover, techies love to be pampered so lots of sweatshops supplying services to indulge them like royal. Buy rentals in neighborhoods where employees of sweatshops stay.
