AUSTIN, Texas – Competition for technical talent can be fierce, and often employers find that their best recruiting tool isn’t the job or even the corporate culture, but the city where the job is located. And no one sells a city better than the people who are already working there.
Austin’s Chamber of Commerce organizes about 16 trips a year for local executives who are willing to be ambassadors for their city. James Truchard, CEO of test equipment maker National Instruments, gets much of the credit for recruiting Bob Metcalfe, a founder of 3Com and co-inventor of the Ethernet, who moved to Austin from Boston to become a University of Texas “Professor of Innovation” and help run the school’s “1 Semester Startup” program. Metcalfe says Austin also made the “A list” for his wife, who competes in triathlons.
Tandem Computers founder Jimmy Treybig also calls Austin home now, saying this is the only place he looks for investments for his venture capital firm, New Enterprise Associates. Treybig is committed to Austin even though he is the first to admit that startups face a tougher funding climate here than they do in Silicon Valley. “If a deal is just as good as a deal in Silicon Valley, it won’t get funded. It has to be better,” he said recently at the Austin Technology Council’s CEO Summit. Venture capitalist John Stockton of the Mayfield Fund added that startups here in Austin may favor talent from Silicon Valley over local hires. “If they’re from the Valley you can incentivize them with stock,” he says. “But if not you have to incentivize them with cash and that’s the most painful thing to do for a startup.”
Of course that cash will go farther in a town like Austin than it will in Silicon Valley or in competing startup meccas like New York, Seattle and Toronto. Transplants from the East and West Coasts sing the praises of Austin’s low cost of living.
Austin may also be ahead of some other cities when it comes to public-private partnerships. At a keynote last fall during Austin Startup Week, Bob Metcalfe said local government support is one area where Austin beats the Valley hands down. “There is no Chamber of Commerce in Silicon Valley that’s worth talking to,” he said. “But here it’s a happening place.”
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