Quote:
Originally Posted by tjp
Chicago's tech position has improved in recent years and that's something to be excited about, but I still think we're underperforming. We're the third largest city in the country - we should be competing on the same level as NY, LA, SF, and DC, and outperforming cities like Seattle, Austin, and Boston, but we're not.
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Things are more nuanced than just how big you are. Seattle's success in this space goes back to the 80s with Microsoft and Nintendo, which then attracted other companies and formed others as time went on. Austin goes back to the 80s with companies like Dell and then later just attracted expansions. Austin is good but also overrated in terms of things like startups - guess it depends on what you want. DC has tons of government contractors who started their own things too. LA has been big on video game development since the late 80s or early 90s. Boston goes back to bio medical.
You should think beyond size and what should be. That's really not how it works no matter how much everyone wants to believe it. I think Chicago and midwest in general has a lot more talent (which is very hard to measure) than most people realize (you need to understand just how many people in Silicon Valley are from the midwest - it's not a small number at all). I think the issue with Chicago is more marketing - it's been the problem for a long time. Chicago's marketing sucks and it's only recently that it's attracted some of these fairly major expansions. You can't compare it to Seattle, Austin, etc - they've been getting this stuff since the 80s and 90s. NYC has done a good job of playing catchup and that's basically just in the last decade only, but NYC has excellent marketing. Most cities are playing catchup as these other places have had a few decades head start on a lot of people and have kept it going.
Again, most people just assume Chicago is flyover country, there's nothing there, and/or it's not nice. It's about marketing. I can't tell you how many times I've met people visiting who have the same reaction of "WHO KNEW!?" or just showing people here at my office in NYC street view of Chicago. They're always like "I just assumed there was nothing there and it wasn't nice." That actually happened today when talking to someone and I told her I moved to NYC 2 years ago from Chicago. She said "wow that must have been a big change" - She's never been to Chicago and I told her no, because Chicago is not hugely different as far as lifestyle goes from NYC (at least my lifestyle). Showed her some coastline pic of Chicago and she said "nice - is that Florida?" and when I said it was Chicago she just said "wtf?" - showed her more streetviews "Wow, I never knew Chicago was this nice..." It's all about marketing and sometimes this trickles down to companies who should be doing their homework better than normal people like you and me, but they don't always.
The 2 things holding Chicago back is basically how everyone thinks it's -20 degrees in the winter and reports of crime on the news. People in various parts of the coasts kind of have a self importance and think there's nothing worth visiting outside of that. Which is funny because the same people claim to be cultured and knowledgeable, but yet don't know shit beyond a few places in the US. Some others are those from the midwest who grew up in small towns, who basically write off everything midwest including Chicago (even though they don't know about it in reality because they grew up in Iowa never having actually visited Chicago) and want to act cool for their "cultured" coastal peers, so they trash talk everything and say there's nothing worth going to in the midwest. So they assume Chicago too. Unfortunately these types of people are sometimes running the companies you want expansions from.
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