In pricey Bay Area, startups searching far afield for talent

Silicon Valley may be the world's tech paradise, but it's a hiring nightmare for many startups now forced to venture from Portland to Boise in search of talent.

Enormous salary expectations -- driven by the Bay Area's soaring cost of living and competition from well-paying giants such as Google and Facebook -- have made it too expensive for a growing number of Silicon Valley startups to recruit employees. Others say the workers they do have want to leave, frustrated by their inability to buy homes as the region grapples with a chronic housing shortage.

Now local startups increasingly are opening satellite operations in cheaper markets -- no longer expecting all their employees to congregate in one Silicon Valley office for work, free food and pingpong. It's a cultural shift shaking up the startup eco-system that has long been credited with powering Silicon Valley's iconic tech industry.

"As we've been looking to hire, we're running into the same issue that everyone else is running into -- in that the Bay Area is broken," said Michael Dougherty, co-founder and CEO of San Mateo, Calif.-based advertising tech startup Jelli.

Jelli, founded in 2009, opened a satellite office last June in Boise, Idaho, where Dougherty says average salaries are about a third lower than the Bay Area. The startup has 10 people in the office so far and plans to add another 30 or 40.

"The community's cool," Dougherty said. "There's a lot of really great folks there."

As with many startups that operate satellite offices outside Silicon Valley, Jelli's 30 employees in San Mateo generally make more than their counterparts in Boise, Idaho. But the money goes farther in Boise.

The median home value in Boise is $236,200 -- compared with $1.3 million in San Francisco, $1.1 million in San Jose and $755,600 in Oakland, according to Zillow.

San Francisco startup UrbanSitter, which runs an online platform for on-demand baby sitters, recently started recruiting engineers in Portland, Ore. About two years ago, one of its top engineers said he was moving to Portland because he wanted to a buy a home in the Bay Area and couldn't. Not wanting to lose him, the company let him work remotely from his new home. The next year, two more UrbanSitter engineers announced within a week of one another that they, too, were moving to Portland in search of cheaper real estate.

"We said, listen, maybe this is a huge opportunity for us," UrbanSitter co-founder CEO Lynn Perkins said. "Maybe we should open an office in Portland."

UrbanSitter now has four engineers in a WeWork space in Portland -- about a third of its engineering team. The company invested in Zoom videoconferencing technology to bridge the 600-mile gap between the two offices and tries to share the fun events that have come to be synonymous with startup culture. Workers in Portland and San Francisco connect via video chat for lunches, happy hour drinks with online trivia games, and even the occasional in-office yoga session.

Those efforts help, but working in the satellite space isn't the same as being in the main office, said UrbanSitter lead engineer Travis Dobbs, who moved from the Bay Area to Portland in October.

"I would say there definitely is a small bit of longing," he said. "You feel like you're missing out a little bit on things that are happening in San Francisco."

SundayMonday Business on 04/15/2018

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