A recent article in Crunchbase (link) examines how mayors in cities across the U.S. are trying to curry favor with startups.
The findings from a Crunchbase News analysis of the geographic hiring practices of U.S. unicorns. Since most of these companies are based in high-cost locations, like the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, and New York, we were looking to see if there is a pattern of setting up offices in smaller, cheaper cities. (For more on survey technique, see methodology section below.) Here is a look at some of the hotspots.
- Nashville – We found at least four unicorns scaling up Nashville offices, plus another three with growing operations in or around other Tennessee cities.
- Phoenix – Phoenix is another popular pick for startup offices, particularly West Coast companies seeking a lower cost hub for customer service and other operations that require a large staff.
Nashville and Phoenix aren’t the only hotspots for unicorns setting up secondary offices. Many other cities are also seeing some scaling startup activity.Let’s start with North Carolina. The Research Triangle region is known for having a lot of STEM grads, so it makes sense that deep tech companies headquartered elsewhere might still want a local base. One such company is cybersecurity unicorn Tanium, which has a lot of technical job openings in the area Another is Docker, developer of software containerization technology, which has open positions in Raleigh.
The Orlando metro area stood out mostly due to Robinhood, the zero-fee stock and crypto trading platform that recently hit the $5 billion valuation mark. The Silicon Valley-based company has a significant number of open positions in Lake Mary, an Orlando suburb, including HR and compliance jobs.
Portland, meanwhile, just drew another crypto-loving unicorn, digital currency transaction platform Coinbase. The San Francisco-based company recently opened an office in the Oregon city and is currently in hiring mode.
