Interesting article from Fred Wilson over at A VC about eBay growing in NYC, but I’d particularly like to focus on this part of his post:
My parter Albert calls Google’s fortress on 8th Avenue “the gift that Google gave New York.” That’s because Google has well over 1000 engineers here in NYC and continues to build that team. Those engineers are exactly the kind of talent that web startups need. Some of Google’s talent bleeds out into the startup world. But also having that kind of ballast anchoring the engineering talent pool makes it such that young software engineers are more confident to come to NYC and build their career here.
(Via A VC)
This got me thinking about tech hubs in Chicago and what they mean for the Chicago games industry. What’s the ballast that keeps engineer and developer talent in Chicago? Is it one company? Is it a broader community that brings together a collective of smaller companies? Do we even have one?
I think this is what our goal at IGDA Chicago has been to some extent. Sure, Chicago has Groupon, 37Signals, and some mid-sized game studios, but alone they’re nothing near as big as a collection of 1,000 engineers in NYC. The promise in Chicago, I think, is bringing all of these smaller distributed companies together as a community to share information and grow together. This kind of community could be Chicago’s ballast.
