Joanna Glasner
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The San Francisco Bay Area is at launching startups that go on to dominate their 19, a powerhouse. This has long been a curse and a blessing.
On the bright side, the technology startup machine produces high-tech technology projects and dollars flowing into local economies. On the flip side, it also exacerbates housing scarcity and living costs that are sky-high.
These issues were top-of-mind long before the unicorn flourish: After all, technology giants from Intel into Google to Facebook have been climbing up in Northern California for over four decades. Lately however, the question of how many tech giants the area can sustainably support is getting fresh attention, as Pinterest, Uber and other super-valuable local businesses embark on the IPO path.
The worries of techie oversaturation led us at Crunchbase News to take a look at the question: To what extent do tech companies started and based in the Bay Area continue to grow ? And what portion of workers work elsewhere?
For those agonizing about the effect of the unicorn boom that is local, the information provides a bit of reassurance. While companies founded in the Bay Area seldom move their headquarters, their workforces tend to become more geographically dispersed as they grow.
Headquarters ≠ headcount
Just because a company is based in Northern California doesn’t mean most employees are there. Our survey shows, headquarters, doesn’t always translate into headcount.
“Headquarters place can often be the wrong benchmark to use to identify where workers are located,” said Steve Cadigan, founder of Cadigan Talent Ventures, a Silicon Valley-based talent consultancy. That’s especially the case for big tech companies.
Among the largest technology employers in Northern California, Crunchbase News discovered most have fewer than 25 percent of their full-time workers working in the city where they’re. We put out the details of the technology businesses that were regional that were most valuable below.
With the exception of Intel, these companies all have a proportion of employees at headquarters, so it’s not like rsquo; re leaving town & they. If you’re a new hire at Silicon Valley’s most valuable companies, it appears chances are greater that you&rsquo be based outside of headquarters.
Tesla, meanwhile, is somewhat of a unique case. The company is based in Palo Alto, but doesn&rsquos listing of top 10 employers. In neighboring Fremont, Calif., nevertheless, Tesla is the largest city employer, with roughly 10,000 allegedly working at its auto plant there. (Tesla has about 49,000 employees globally.)
Unicorns flock to San Fran, employees less so
High-valuation private and recently public technology companies may be dispersed.
Like to spread its wings although they tend to get a larger proportion of employees at headquarters than technology giants, the unicorn crowd does.
Take Uber, the poster child for this trend. Although based in San Francisco, the ride-hailing giant has fewer than one-fourth of its workers there. Out of a global workforce of around 22,300, only about 5,000 are SF-based.
If that kind of breakdown is typical it & rsquo; s unclear. We had trouble assembling employee counts that are similar at other Bay Area unicorns, largely because cities break out numbers for their 10 employers. The lion’s share of unicorns are San Francisco-based, and of them Uber made the Top 10.
That said, there is another, rougher methodology for assessing who functions at headquarters: job postings. At a number of the most valuable Bay Area-based unicorns — such as Airbnb, Juul, Lime, Instacart, Stripe and the now-public Lyft — a large number of open positions are far from the home office. And as we wrote this past year, private companies have been actively seeking out cities to prepare secondary hubs.
Even for earlier-stage startups, it’s not unusual to set up headquarters in the San Francisco area for access while doing the majority of hiring in another place, Cadigan said. The evolution of collaborative work tools has also enabled businesses to add staff working remotely or in offices that were secondary.
Plus, of course, unicorn startups tend to be national or global in focus, and that necessitates hiring where their clients can be found.
Take our tasks, please
As we wrap it up ’s worth bringing up how unusual it was for denizens of a metro area to oppose a significant influx of high-skill jobs. In the past couple of years, but these attitudes are becoming more prevalent. Witness Queens residents&rsquo reactions to Amazon’s HQ2 plans. And in San Francisco, a surge of newly minted IPO millionaires is currently causing some consternation among sailors, along with jubilation among the realtor crowd.
As college towns retain space for students by graduating ones, but it appears sensible that sustaining Northern California’s strength as a startup hub requires finding jobs. That could be good news for other cities, such as Austin, Phoenix, Nashville, Portland and many others, that have emerged as popular secondary places for fast-growing unicorns.
That said, we’re not predicting near-term contraction in Bay Area technology employment of the startup variety. The region’s entrepreneurial and enterprise ecosystem keeps on producing valuable newcomers well-capitalized to maintain hiring.
Methodology
We looked only at employment at company headquarters (except for Apple) . Companies on the list may have workers based in other Northern California cities. For Apple, we included all Silicon Valley workers, per quotes by the Silicon Valley Business Journal.
Amounts are rounded to the nearest hundred for the largest employers. Most of the information is for full-time workers only. Large tech employers hire predominantly full-time for staff positions, so whether included or not, is expected to reflect only a tiny percentage of employment.
Cities list their 10 employers in annual reports. We used either the annual reports themselves or information excerpted in Wikipedia, using 2018 or calendar year 2017.
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