Joanna Glasner
Contributor

More posts by this contributor
From lab-grown meat to fermented fungus, right here’s what company meals VCs are serving up
A document $2.5B went to US insurance coverage startup offers final 12 months, and large insurers are in all the way in which

The San Francisco Bay Area is a world powerhouse at launching startups that go on to dominate their industries. For locals, this has lengthy been a blessing and a curse.
On the brilliant facet, the tech startup machine produces well-paid tech jobs and dollars flowing into native economies. On the flip facet, it additionally exacerbates housing shortage and sky-high residing prices.
These points have been top-of-mind lengthy earlier than the unicorn growth: After all, tech giants from Intel to Google to Facebook have been scaling up in Northern California for over 4 many years. Lately nevertheless, the query of what number of tech giants the area can sustainably help is getting recent consideration, as Pinterest, Uber and different super-valuable native firms embark on the IPO path.
The worries of techie oversaturation led us at Crunchbase News to try the query: To what extent do tech firms launched and based mostly within the Bay Area proceed to develop right here? And what portion of staff work elsewhere?
For these agonizing concerning the inflationary impression of the native unicorn growth, the info provides a little bit of reassurance. While firms based within the Bay Area hardly ever transfer their headquarters, their workforces are inclined to grow to be far more geographically dispersed as they develop.
Headquarters ≠ headcount
Just as a result of an organization relies in Northern California doesn’t imply most staff are there additionally. Headquarters, our survey exhibits, doesn’t at all times translate into headcount.
“Headquarters location can often be the wrong benchmark to use to identify where employees are located,” mentioned Steve Cadigan, founding father of Cadigan Talent Ventures, a Silicon Valley-based expertise consultancy. That’s notably the case for giant tech firms.
Among the biggest know-how employers in Northern California, Crunchbase News discovered most have fewer than 25 % of their full-time staff working within the metropolis the place they’re headquartered. We lay out the main points for 10 of essentially the most precious regional tech firms within the chart under.

With the exception of Intel, all of those firms have a double-digit share of staff at headquarters, so it’s not as in the event that they’re leaving city. However, for those who’re a brand new rent at Silicon Valley’s most dear firms, it seems chances are high better that you simply’ll be based mostly exterior of headquarters.
Tesla, in the meantime, is considerably of a singular case. The firm relies in Palo Alto, however doesn’t crack the town’s listing of prime 10 employers. In close by Fremont, Calif., nevertheless, Tesla is the biggest metropolis employer, with roughly 10,000 reportedly working at its auto plant there.(Tesla has about 49,000 staff globally.)
Unicorns flock to San Fran, staff much less so
High-valuation personal and not too long ago public tech firms can be fairly dispersed.
Although they have a tendency to have a bigger share of staff at headquarters than more-established know-how giants, the unicorn crowd does prefer to unfold its wings.

Take Uber, the poster youngster for this pattern. Although based mostly in San Francisco, the ride-hailing big has fewer than one-fourth of its staff there. Out of a world workforce of round 22,300, solely about 5,000 are SF-based.
It’s unclear if that type of breakdown is typical. We had bother assembling comparable geographic worker counts at different Bay Area unicorns, primarily as a result of cities get away numbers just for their 10 largest employers. The lion’s share of regional unicorns are San Francisco-based, and of them solely Uber made the Top 10.
That mentioned, there’s one other, rougher methodology for assessing who works at headquarters: job postings. At quite a few essentially the most precious Bay Area-based unicorns — together with Airbnb, Juul, Lime, Instacart, Stripe and the now-public Lyft —  a excessive variety of open positions are removed from the house workplace. And as we wrote final 12 months, personal firms have been actively looking for out cities to arrange secondary hubs.
Even for earlier-stage startups, it’s not unusual to arrange headquarters within the San Francisco space for entry to financing and networking, whereas doing the majority of hiring in one other location, Cadigan mentioned. The evolution of collaborative work instruments has additionally enabled extra firms so as to add employees working remotely or in secondary workplaces.
Plus, after all, unicorn startups are usually nationwide or international in focus, and that necessitates hiring the place their clients are positioned.
Take our jobs, please
As we wrap up, it’s value citing how uncommon it as soon as was for denizens of a metro space to oppose a giant inflow of high-skill jobs. In the previous couple of years, nevertheless, these attitudes have grow to be extra frequent. Witness Queens residents’ blended reactions to Amazon’s HQ2 plans. And in San Francisco, a possible surge of newly minted IPO millionaires is inflicting some consternation amongst locals, together with jubilation among the many realtor crowd.
Just as school cities retain room for brand new college students by graduating older ones, nevertheless, it appears affordable that sustaining Northern California’s power as a startup hub requires finding jobs out-of-area as firms scale. That could possibly be excellent news for different cities, together with Austin, Phoenix, Nashville, Portland and others, which have emerged as standard secondary areas for fast-growing unicorns.
That mentioned, we’re not predicting near-term contraction in Bay Area tech employment, notably of the startup selection. The area’s huge entrepreneurial and enterprise ecosystem retains on producing precious newcomers well-capitalized to maintain hiring.
Methodology
We seemed solely at employment at firm headquarters (aside from Apple) . Companies on the listing could have further staff based mostly in different Northern California cities. For Apple, we included all Silicon Valley staff, per estimates by the Silicon Valley Business Journal.
Numbers are rounded to the closest hundred for the biggest employers. Most of the info is for full-time staff solely. Large tech employers rent predominantly full-time for workers positions, so part-time, whether or not included or not, is anticipated to replicate solely a really small share of employment.
Cities listing their 10 largest employers in annual studies. We used both the annual studies themselves or information excerpted in Wikipedia, utilizing calendar 12 months 2017 or 2018.