Everybody knows that costs for tech startups in the Bay Area are crazy. Pundits have predicted that these high costs could, maybe, someday, blunt the Bay Area’s edge.
“Someday” was apparently last month.
At the end of July, Bloomberg reported on a new study by CBRE that showed each of New York, Seattle and even Washington DC created many more new tech jobs in 2017 than the Bay Area.
And then came the pigs can fly moment. The region that created more tech startup jobs than the Bay Area, New York, Seattle and DC combined was… Toronto. Yup, the GTA.
Now as we all also know, job creation is a dodgy metric for evaluating startups. So we need to triangulate. How about cost of doing business?
When you add labor and space costs together, Toronto is almost half as expensive as the Bay Area.
How about Toronto costs compared to Rochester.? It’s the US tech region with the lowest costs in the Lower 48. Toronto costs are almost 20% lower than Rochester’s.
All of this was based on converting all expenses to US dollars.
And here’s another perspective. CBRE also reports that when it comes to the fastest growing markets for tech talent, there’s a top 10 — and the Bay Area is not in it.
The leader in this category is… Ottawa.
And Ottawa doesn’t just squeak in ahead of its competitors at the finish line. Ottawa’s tech talent growth rate is more than double the second-fastest growing US center. That’s L.A.