San Mateo County Expects to Hit 2007 Job Levels in 2015

San Mateo, the northern (and largely software) half of Silicon Valley, expects to get back to its 2007 job count by 2015. The county economic development agency, which decided to buy a vowel when it chose the acronym of SAMCEDA (San Mateo County Econ Dev Association), sees a slow recovery over the next few years.

So in this county, which is home to Oracle and Genentech, is a stone's throw from Google, Yahoo, and Intel HQ, and receives 10-12% of all venture capital invested domestically, what do you expect are the growth industries? Well, according to SAMCEDA, it's professional and technical services, retail trade, government, hospitality, health care, social assistance and manufacturing. Basically, the leading growth professions in the county that sits between San Francisco and San Jose are the same as everywhere else.

I've said that for just about every region outside of Silicon Valley, Boston, and maybe Austin/Seattle, that VC is no longer part of any sensible economic development strategy. And if you're Cleveland, or KC, or Lansing, and you wonder whether this applies to you, just look at VC's increasingly niche role in the middle of the San Francisco peninsula.

San Francisco Getting Tech Firms to Move Back into the City

Interesting story in the SF Chronicle about Silicon Valley companies moving into San Francisco. Much of this is the result of lower rents, especially in the South of Market neighborhood, as well as Twitter staying in the city, and not heading down the 101 like other big name Bay Area companies such as Google, Yahoo, Oracle, Intel, etc.

Most of these companies are consumer application developers, the hardware and semiconductor designers aren't leaving Santa Clara anytime soon.

Top 10 Regions for Biotech

Most industries with high fixed costs and low variable costs tend to cluster in a handful of areas, while those with low fixed costs and high variable costs can go anywhere. An example is semiconductors, an industry which is heavily concentrated in a few places, while technology consultants can be found just about anyplace.

As a high fixed cost/low variable cost industry, biotech is clustering too. I don't like using NAICS codes to determine industry concentrations, because they're often slow to adjust to new company categories, so to figure out the top 10 regions for biotech, I did some indeed.com searches for biotech and biotechnology jobs. Results are below, with each region's share of total U.S. biotech job openings. Now, in the spirit of the recent NCAA conference shifts, where "10" can mean 11, 12, 14, or whatever makes sense for the TV deal, I've actually included the top 12 regions, because there is a big dropoff after #12, with region after #12 accounting for more than 1% of U.S. biotech positions. Sales jobs, many of which are for remote offices across the country, are excluded.

1. Boston 19.25%
2. San Francisco/San Jose 12.85%
3. NY/NJ 8.90%
4. Philadelphia 7.24%
5. Washington, DC 5.99%
6. Los Angeles/Orange County 5.39%
7. San Diego 3.83%
8. Chicago 3.03%
9. Raleigh/Durham 2.53%
10. Indianapolis 1.80%
11. Seattle 1.48%
12. Minneapolis 1.47%


These 12 regions account for 74% of all biotech openings. The clustering is very strong, almost as strong as semiconductors, where the SF Bay Area comes in at close to 30% of all national job listings for that industry.