It’s not really a war; it’s a mobilization of innovation and motivated minds — the leaders, the builders, the doers, all the combined skills that make up rocket soup and of course the money that make it all happen, with barriers to business entry lower than the’ve ever been (rocket soup is what rockets needs to run on in one of my daughter’s favorite shows, Little Einsteins).
At least, that’s the way it felt as I walked through Cruzioworks from my co-working office to the restroom and past the packed day-long classroom on covering HTML5. Or maybe it was jQuery. Or C#. Or PHP. Or Ruby. The times I went past the classroom when they were all on break I heard the buzz of “open source” and “cool new idea” and “the next big thing.” This is all happening in the heart of Santa Cruz, the laid back little surfing community in the backyard of traditional Silicon Valley. Remember hearing “Silicon Beach” back in the dot-com day? That tide pulled back and supposedly never returned. Not true. I live and breathe it almost every day.
Now according to one of my favorite tech columnists at the San Jose Mercury News, Chris O’Brien (San Jose once being the heart of innovation):
After years of drawing a sharp circle that included Santa Clara County as well as southern San Mateo and Alameda counties, this newspaper is expanding the geographic boundaries that it considers to be part of Silicon Valley to include the five core Bay Area counties: Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Francisco, Alameda and Contra Costa. This is recognition, perhaps overdue, that the kinds of entrepreneurial companies and industries once tightly clustered in the South Bay can now be found throughout the region.
Just a smidge over an hour-and-a-half drive time (as long as it’s moving), the new heart of SV innovation is San Francisco. In fact, in 2011 companies in San Francisco raised $2.87 billion in venture capital, and San Francisco has led the world in venture capital since at least 2009. But I’d still argue that Silicon Valley proper should extend as far south as Santa Cruz and Monterey, and it will someday.
Startups abound across many industries, and if the upcoming HRO Today Forum iTalent Competition and the Recruiting Innovation Summit Startup Competition are any indication of how hot the HR and recruiting technology spaces are getting, then the world’s going to catch fire.
We can only hope.
Sure there is intense competition for the right combination of folks, but let’s stop calling it the war for talent. Really. Again, this is a mobilization of innovation and motivated minds — the leaders, the builders, the doers, all the combined skills that make up rocket soup and of course the money that make it all happen. These are the job creators, whether they be full-time, part-time or freelance (and just check out how tech is pulling up the Bay Area).
Innovation is the heart of job creation. Let’s make it happen.
Did you miss this week’s preview? Click here — and check out the slideshow below of yesterday’s #TChat tweets. Thank you for joining us. We’ll see you next week.
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