We've been thinking a lot about building businesses in small cities. So our ears perked up at a recent article from Business Insider contributor, Chris Wertz, who writes that tech entrepreneurs can leave New York City.
Wertz, who built Abe Books (later sold to Amazon), in Victoria, BC (pop 78,000) gives a thumbs up to starting tech businesses in smaller markets.
If you're bent on starting the next Facebook you may want to stay where the buzz is generated. But Wertz says there's lots of potential in any city with low costs and lots of untapped talent (key points to note, city boosters), your company can benefit from launching away from the twin vortexes of New York and Silicon Valley.
You might not have the same access to money and senior talent but you usually have much lower costs of operating your company, access to great engineering talent without competing with the Googles and Facebooks of the world (and the salaries that they are paying) and an environment that sometimes makes it easier to focus on the real value of a product for customers compared to chasing the latest hype.
Wertz's other example is Club Penguin, recently sold to Disney for over $750 million. Club Penguin was launched in Kelowna. That's a city in Canada. Enough said.
