[ghaff]

While I'm all for making non-competes for employees unenforceable in general, I think their role is overplayed notwithstanding your anecdote. Otherwise you'd have a tech industry in Oklahoma and wouldn't have one in Massachusetts, which until fairly recently fully allowed for non-competes. (EMC in particular fought against legislative change but there's now a somewhat weak garden leave requirement--but it at least makes companies put skin in the game.)

[iancmceachern]

The tech industry in Mass us there because of the universities. It doesn't have to do with non competition agreements. Also, the tech industry in California is an order of magnitude larger than that in Mass.

[ghaff]

>The tech industry in Mass us there because of the universities. It doesn't have to do with non competition agreements.

That's pretty much my point. The presence of non-competes did not prevent the development of a tech industry in MA. And, while VC funding is about 20% of CA's, MA+NY+CA have far more VC than any other states--and NY and MA together have more than half of CAs funding.

Those two states collectively also have a lot of different kinds of "tech" that are far less represented in CA such as fintech and biotech/pharma.

[MAGZine]

i think the point GP is making is that Mass's tech sector might be actively hindered because of non-competes, and that without the universities, who knows if it would exist at all.

[ghaff]

Oh, I think it's obvious that, absent a concentration of world-class research universities, MA would not have developed the sort of concentration of technology-oriented companies that it's had over the years.

I'll just add that I'm not sure how common non-competes actually were in the MA computer industry. I certainly never saw one until the company I was with was acquired by EMC in about 2000. What is true is that people tended to stay with companies a long time but I don't have any evidence that non-competes played a big role in that.

[neilv]

I don't know whether it's true, but I've often heard the theory that California's no-noncompetes is what made it so startup-friendly originally.

Once the dotcom boom started, people were saying go to the SF Bay Area for startups, because that's where the investors are.

MIT graduates with computer-y degrees seemed to be fleeing Cambridge/Boston as soon as they could.

[ghaff]

As someone who was there at the time, the reasons were complicated. The Route 128 computer industry was in pretty significant decline and nothing had really come in to replace them. And the metro itself saw an outflow of population until the late nineties. When Teradyne moved out of Boston that was probably the last significant tech company in the city proper at the time. And the whole biotech and pharma boom in Kendall Square didn't happen until later. (As well as the establishment of major offices for firms HQd on the west coast.)

[neilv]

At the time of Web boom, I didn't understand some of the foot-dragging by West Coast tech companies, on setting up offices Cambridge/Boston, to get more of the talent fresh out of the universities, and the research university partnerships. But maybe they (correctly) thought that most of new grads would come to them.

In the case of Google, I thought there might also have been a Stanford-vs.-MIT factor. MIT was known as very strong-minded and self-assured. (And Stanford and California have their own stereotypes.) Were I trying to craft a particular culture, starting either around Stanford or MIT, there's no way I'd open a major office on the other coast until the HQ culture had really gelled, and I thought I could get the distant people to meet us more than halfway (rather than them carbon-copying what they already know from MIT or California).

[ghaff]

Arguably, it took young college-educated professionals increasingly wanting to live in cities to make the change. Which in Cambridge/Boston's case led in part to the development of Kendall Square and the Seaport.

Before that, pretty much all the technology-related companies in MA were out in the suburbs and I can imagine new grads thinking if there were going to be out in a suburban office park anyway, why not be in California?

And, yes, historically there have been east coast vs. west coast stereotypes that doubtless have some basis in reality.