Is Chicago's tech talent leaving for Silicon Valley?
Chicago is a breeding ground for a lot of things: bad baseball teams, all-beef hotdogs, icy winters, and tech start-ups.
But according to a recent article by Mark Caro for the Chicago Tribune, 鈥�, but can鈥檛 get them to stay.鈥� The bigger issue, Caro writes, is that 鈥渃ities like San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Los Angeles serve as even more powerful magnets to Chicagoans who conclude that greener pastures await them on the coasts.鈥澛�
Chicago was once a flourishing hub for digital start-ups, with employed in digital technology companies in 2013 (a 21 percent boost from 2012). It鈥檚 been home to some of the fastest growing start-ups in the States: Raise, ContextMedia, GrubHub, and Groupon.
Yet while some startups are thriving in Chicago, the city doesn鈥檛 have the sort of money that startups in Silicon Valley have. As Mr. Caro , Perfect Audience, a Chicago social/online advertising startup sold its company to San Fancisco鈥檚 Marin Software for $25.5 million.
This isn鈥檛 the first time Chicago has seen an industry leave. In the early 1920s, Chicago was the 鈥淗ollywood鈥� of the country 鈥� home to 鈥溾�� box-office stars like Charlie Chaplin and Gloria Swanson. (A depressed economy and cold weather shipped the film industry out to sunny Los Angeles.)
Still, the Chicago tech startup scene is is still healthy 鈥� for now.
A report by Crain鈥檚 Business in April found Chicago to be 鈥� for tech jobs coming out of the recession,鈥� beating out New York, D.C. and Boston. Another found that numbers were rising for University of Illinois engineering students to flock to Silicon Valley 鈥� but the majority move to the Chicagoland area.
A number of groups like , the 聽(CIE), and have become major portals for budding young entrepreneurs looking for opportunities to 鈥渃ollaborate鈥� and 鈥渋nnovate鈥� 鈥� two buzz words frequently circulated in the tech world that often mean teaming up in shared office spaces to work. A key initiative of ChicagoNEXT is to 鈥� to help raise the city鈥檚 profile as an innovation hub and destination for business and tourism.鈥�
But despite this, whether Chicago can ever become Silicon Valley is still in question.
As J.B. Pritzker, managing partner of the investment firm Pritzker Group and a major Chicago businessesman, told Caro, 鈥�. We develop a lot of talent in Illinois, and the question is how much do you have available to that talent to absorb them into your economy, and how much of that talent needs to get up and leave because opportunity exists elsewhere?鈥�
"Chicago's tech ecosystem is a lot younger than you'd see in Silicon Valley or Boston," John Flavin, Executive Director of the Chicago Innovation Exchange told 海角大神 Science Monitor by phone. "It's changing now. The culture is shifting. It's not a competition with Silicon Valley. It's just different. Silicon Valley is purely digital. If you're focusing on digital alone, it's a great place to be. If you're purely biotech, Boston is great. But Chicago is a hybrid. It's the applied data sciences, like healthcare systems using data analytics. Our goal is to create an ecosystem for the best and the brightest."
