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After a decade+ working in NYC tech across Google, Foursquare, and Slack, some thoughts on the impact of Amazon+Google committing to space for hiring ~35k people — around 4.5x their footprint today.
Punchline: perhaps counterintuitively, this will be great for local startups.
Punchline: perhaps counterintuitively, this will be great for local startups.
1/ To grow in NYC at this scale, AMZN/GOOG will have to hire, train, and develop huge numbers of recent graduates. They'll provide some of the best, pragmatic “graduate schools” for a much more diverse group than exists in tech today.
2/ To bootstrap their NYC teams, AMZN/GOOG will want to transfer hundreds — if not thousands — of seasoned employees who bring experience leading at massive scale to the city.
3/ To bring new senior hires to NYC, AMZN/GOOG will import veterans from across the country/world. The proposition of moving to NYC now that it is comparably priced, safer, and cleaner than SF is clearer than ever (along with all the other benefits).
4/ For all their NYC employees, AMZN/GOOG will let people learn from tackling massive problems startups rarely get to see: operational/organizational complexity with 100k+ people, hundreds of millions customers, billion-dollar businesses, massive data sets, etc.
5/ The brilliantly sparkling silver lining for startups: AMZN/GOOG aren't building true co-HQs. They're building massive satellite offices, which will always feel like their rotating around the gravitational pull of their west coast HQs.
6/ Thousands of talented, well-trained people will look to start and join exciting, local startups. I've seen this first-hand with Foursquare and Slack, and second-hand across dozens of other NYC companies. Startups will be the talent barnacles to the massive AMZN/GOOG tankers.
7/ The second order effects are potentially meaningful, too: VCs will invest more time/capital as talent relocates, which will encourage more startup formation, which will grow the local economy...
8/ There also a lot of public policy considerations I'm woefully ill-equipped to get into: (corporate) taxation, (affordable) housing, school funding, infrastructure investment, transit needs, and so on. Time for AMZN/GOOG to show how they can be great corporate citizens.
