Quote:
Originally Posted by ILUVSAT
How can it be a weakness? All of those companies are still located in the cities in which they were founded.
Unless they go through the laborious and expensive task of relocating, those companies are not going to move their HQs from where they are currently seated. Instead, you see what is happening now...they develop "second HQs" rather than massively expanding their main HQ.
What I see happening is that Austin is one of the most innovative cities in the world. A myriad of bright companies have been founded there and gained so much notoriety that they were gobbled up by a Fortune 500 company based elsewhere. You must give Austin credit for that fact. The issue one might have is that it's been a very long time since a home-grown company reached Fortune 500 status. Heck, even Whole Foods was bought.
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Of course it’s a weakness.
SF Bay: Google, Apple, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Square, Tesla, Salesforce, Netflix, Roku, Oracle, Adobe, PayPal, eBay, HP, Facebook, Cisco, Sunrun, Chegg, Intuit, etc all have their HQs there.
Seattle: Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks, Costco, Expedia, etc all have their HQ there.
Austin: Dell.
I’m not saying that you only get corporate HQs by luring it away from somewhere else, you can develop your own too. But what I am saying is that Austin is lacking in major HQs. Yeah it’s cool having startups and all but you need some big time established players too and Austin only has Dell and maybe National Instruments. Whole Foods is now a division of Amazon, it’s not it’s own company anymore and frankly it was never a tech company to begin with. It’s a grocery store. And sorry but I don’t accept your reasoning about Austin companies getting bought up when they become big. That happens to companies everywhere but SF and SEA still keep enough around to have a good sized list. Austin doesn’t. We can’t make excuses for that.
Austin is a first class tech city. It has the school, talent, companies, money, allure, and innovation. But the one thing it really lacks is more major tech HQs, I’m not talking about secondary campuses or back offices. I’m talking about the actual HQ. And BTW, if a company doesn’t list your location as their second HQ, then you don’t really have one. Apple and Oracle don’t have a second HQ in Austin, they just have very big secondary campuses there. No taking away credit from the work that happens at these campuses, Austin usually has the second most important office for most tech companies outside of Silicon Valley but please don’t ever call them HQs because they’re not that.
That’s why I’m excited about this TikTok thing. It finally gives Austin a second recognizable corporate HQ beside Dell. Assuming TikTok actually goes to Austin instead of DFW or HOU, I think if they set up in TX then it’ll be in Austin where they already have an office but that’s just my guess.