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Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

nytimes.com

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Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#161

Post by tzs »

> At this point, though, we’re going to eliminate Portland, because it makes little sense for the company to put a second headquarters so close to Seattle.

Nonsense. Most or all of the reasons people have speculated on for why they want a second headquarters work as long as it is not in the same state as Seattle.

Portland is only three hours from Seattle by car. That's close enough that it is not unreasonable for someone at one office to make an occasional day trip to the other. That could give some flexibility they would not get if the offices were farther apart.

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#162

Post by delinka »

dasil003 wrote: post #115
delinka wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“More competition for employees” translates into higher costs.

Are you purposefully reiterating the GP's point? Because that's exactly why he's questioning it.

I misinterpreted the comment as asking why Amazon would drop cities with strong job growth.

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#163

Post by Johnny555 »

danjayh wrote: post #90
rmason wrote: post #2

This really burns me. The Times compared the metro population of Grand Rapids (1 million) to Detroit's population (670,000) in order to disqualify the city in their first round. But metro Detroit has a population of 4.5 million so the Times either was sloppy with their criteria or they deliberately snubbed Detroit. Detroit may be a dark horse in this competition but with Dan Gilbert going all out to win I don't think…

As others have stated, Detroit was eliminated for sluggish growth, not low population. Having said that, I'm definitely in their target demographic (35 yrs old, BSCE and MSEE, 10 years software development experience and team leadership experience), and I think that their 'has the right labor pool' filter is a bit off. I'd guess that Amazon is looking to rein in their labor costs a bit, and often a large city with so…

I don't think you're in their target demographic if you want to live on 11 acres but don't want to deal with the traffic to work at a corporate campus of 50,000 workers in a city of 1M+

I think there are a lot of workers who would like to live on that much land, but it's just not sustainable. If 50,000 people each lived on 10 acre plots, the amount of land they'd need to live would exceed that of a large city. That's 780 square miles, larger than the 600 mi^2 of of Houston which has a population of 2M people.

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#164

Post by mcbits »

Johnny555 wrote: post #160
mcbits wrote: post #148

Instead of two headquarters, why not 50 headquarters? They have one of the largest and most reliable networks in the world - use it! With offices spread across the country (continent, even), they could hire from a talent pool that dwarfs Seattle and Denver. They wouldn't have to find 100+ contiguous acres for sale in one metropolis. City Council elections wouldn't have to be of strategic importance. Likewise for disa…

The same reason Google, Facebook, Apple, et all still bus employees 40 miles south from SF to their offices -- having people together in one office (or campus) makes them more productive, no matter how much technology you throw at it.

Is that really true? How many people in a 50,000-person campus ever even make eye contact, much less work together in a way that requires physical proximity?

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#165

Post by vitus »

technofiend wrote: post #77

Actually I would challenge the idea Houston doesn't have enough of the professionals required. Houston was eliminated as not having enough white collar workers. Yet they left in Austin which is far smaller because at least 12.5 % base of their base has the right skills. It makes sense to compare desired jobs versus the general population but not without context. Seriously with six million+ people here, do you really…

Off the top of my head, two main points for why Austin is better-suited than Houston for a tech HQ:

- UT (@Austin) means a large pool of fresh grads from a top-10 CS program they can recruit.

- Existing presence of both Amazon itself and other tech companies (Google, FB, MS, etc) means they don't have to relocate workers, and it's a lot easier to convince SDEs from other companies to jump ship.

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#166

Post by AndrewKemendo »

mcbits wrote: post #148

Instead of two headquarters, why not 50 headquarters? They have one of the largest and most reliable networks in the world - use it! With offices spread across the country (continent, even), they could hire from a talent pool that dwarfs Seattle and Denver. They wouldn't have to find 100+ contiguous acres for sale in one metropolis. City Council elections wouldn't have to be of strategic importance. Likewise for disa…

Kind of defeats the purpose of a "headquarters" - Even 2 is pushing it as an "HQ" is about where the primary decision makers will work on a day to day basis.

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#167

Post by randymercury »

krrrh wrote: post #78
PorgSmorg wrote: post #22

Absolutely love, despite the fact that it's mentioned numerous times that Amazon is searching all of NA for its second hq, that both Canada, and Mexico are completely ignored. This is despite the fact that Toronto is currently the continents fastest growing tech market due to a lot of factors that would be of incredible interest to a behemoth like Amazon. Feels a like a bit of a snub of the thumb by NYT on that one..…

The second-class nature of amazon.ca would indicate that Amazon doesn't take the market very seriously.

I think a lot of the issues with Amazon.ca stem from NAFTA's exclusion of ecommerce. That's one thing I'm actually pretty excited for in terms of the NAFTA negotiations.

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#168

Post by hpcjoe »

rmason wrote: post #2

This really burns me. The Times compared the metro population of Grand Rapids (1 million) to Detroit's population (670,000) in order to disqualify the city in their first round. But metro Detroit has a population of 4.5 million so the Times either was sloppy with their criteria or they deliberately snubbed Detroit. Detroit may be a dark horse in this competition but with Dan Gilbert going all out to win I don't think…

I'd say snubbed. The Detroit-Ann Arbor corridor and metro area is 5-ish million, with a strong tech scene, quite a bit of airport capacity (DTW, and if they wanted to use it, Willow Run). Cheap (and I mean cheap) housing, active and growing downtown, etc.

This is not the Detroit I went to grad school in, (mumble) 20+ years ago. Very different place, lots of investment. Ann Arbor is a dense tech mecca. East Lansing (90 miles away) less so, but between Wayne State, UofM's, MSU, Central Mich, MTU, and some of the smaller schools, there is a very strong engineering and computing culture. One that is frequently overlooked.

One thing I will note is a paucity of investment capital in the region, and a strong reluctance on the part of costal VCs to invest in fly over country.

However ... cost to hire/retain people here is very low compared to the coasts. Given how much the percentage of cost is in people, this should be a factor in any companies calculation on where to move.

Land/facilities are cheap. Transportation is ok ... we still have to work on local transit, as decades of mismanagement if not worse, have left the public transportation options in terrible shape. However, there are strong pushes from Dan Gilbert, the Illich family, and many others for modern regional transport. There are light and heavy rail all over here.

And, not for nothing ... we have 4 real seasons. Though, in my first few weeks out here (mumble) 30 something years ago, I surprised how they could all be on the same day ...

Detroit should be in the mix. As a leading contender. All of the rust belt should be.

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#169

Post by hpcjoe »

curiouscat321 wrote: post #6
rmason wrote: post #2

This really burns me. The Times compared the metro population of Grand Rapids (1 million) to Detroit's population (670,000) in order to disqualify the city in their first round. But metro Detroit has a population of 4.5 million so the Times either was sloppy with their criteria or they deliberately snubbed Detroit. Detroit may be a dark horse in this competition but with Dan Gilbert going all out to win I don't think…

I think this is an excellent point. While Detroit has a relatively small population, it's metropolitan area does not. It's large metropolitan area has a large STEM talent pool thanks to the automotive sector, the second largest Delta hub (behind Atlanta and just a giant airport anyways), and has a very willing government plus Dan Gilbert. It'll be a uphill battle, but I think Detroit is a serious dark horse.

Dan Gilbert has created RocketFiber. 1Gb for $79/month residential and business in Detroit. 10Gb available for reasonable amounts.

When I was running my own company, I came quite close to looking at spots there. I was in Plymouth (30 miles west), but needed lots of bandwidth at the time, and DC hosting wasnt an option.

FWIW: you could do air cooled DCs up and down the Michigan west coast. Wonderfully cool air coming off a natural chiller, Lake Michigan, cheap power, excellent transportation infrastructure, very business friendly state government ... though sometimes they lurch the other way, most of the time they don't do stupid things.

I tried gauging investor interest in this model of DCs a few years ago ... few thought DCs were a growth industry, and clouds/hosting was a fad. Go figure.

Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

#170

Post by marchenko »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #46

I know they eliminated Pittsburgh right out of the gate, but I think it has a bunch of things going for it. It's one of the few places where housing is cheap (but a pretty beautiful downtown) but young tech workers would love to live: tons of stuff to do but lots of knowledge workers with CMU. Biggest obvious issue is no direct flights to Seattle, but if Amazon built a headquarters there it seems like it would be eas…

I think Pittsburgh and Cleveland are two ideal choices, for many of the same reasons. They both have strong tech pipelines at Case and CMU, affordable prime real estate, openness to offering incentives, and are are highly under-rated in terms of livability. Both have shown they can attract tech workers with options (CLE with its hospital system, Pitt with Google and others).They are both disadvantaged by the flight availability metric, but I think this could be induced by demand from Amazon.
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