Tech Startups and the Cities That Seduced Them

The shift of technology startup companies and talent into cities is taken for granted today, but I would never have predicted it even a decade ago.

The leading-edge high-tech companies of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and even the early 2000s -- like Intel, Apple and Google -- were housed in corporate campuses in Silicon Valley. Microsoft had its headquarters in suburban Redmond, Washington; other high-tech companies clustered along the Route 128 suburbs outside of Boston, in the suburbs of Austin, Texas, or the office parks of North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Back in the late 1980s, when I conducted my early studies of the geography of venture capital and high-tech industry with Martin Kenney, the lion’s share of venture capital-backed startups were in these suburban areas.