MENLO PARK, Calif. – Silicon Valley, it turns out, doesn’t revolve around the stock prices of Facebook and its playful sidekick, Zynga.
By most indications, tech companies in this hub of innovation are humming along, even as two of its rising stars endure steep declines in their stock prices that have wiped out more than $60 billion in wealth in the past six months.
Companies catering to mobile devices, business software and data management products are thriving, while longtime Silicon Valley stalwarts such as Apple Inc. and Google Inc. remain among the most revered brands in the world.
“Nothing has fundamentally changed about the opportunities that are possible,” says Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, an online data-storage company based in Los Altos, Calif.
The optimism in Silicon Valley can be seen in a variety of ways in this area that covers roughly 40 miles from San Jose to San Francisco:
• Entrepreneurs are still pursuing big ideas and raising millions of dollars.
Silicon Valley startups raised $3.2 billion from venture capitalists during the April-June quarter, far more than in any other part of the U.S. as tracked by the National Venture Capital Association. Venture capital flowing into Silicon Valley increased by 4 percent from the same time last year, while it dropped 12 percent nationwide.
• Apartment rents in San Francisco have soared beyond the lofty levels of the original Internet boom more than a decade ago. This time, it’s being driven by well-paid software engineers and Web designers who are flocking to Silicon Valley.
San Francisco apartments rented for an average of $2,734 in June, up 13 percent from a year ago and well above the average of $2,128 when technology stocks were at their peak before the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, according to the research firm RealFacts. Renting in San Jose – the region’s largest city – is less expensive than San Francisco, but even there the average lease cost $1,811 a month in June, a 10 percent increase from last year.
• Computer coding programmers still command top dollar for their services because there aren’t enough of them to meet demand.
Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of the 8-year-old online reviews service Yelp Inc., said his company is always behind on its hiring goals for software engineers.
“There is no one who is like, ‘Oh, we have all the engineers we need and we don’t need more,’” he says. Competition is fierce from all sides – massive companies such as Google and Facebook, tiny startup incubators and everything in between.
“And there is attrition,” Stoppelman says. “From what I gather from engineers, two, three times a week they get calls from recruiters.”
Software engineers working in the San Francisco area are now paid an average of about $115,000, up from $106,000 in 2008, according to Glassdoor.com, which analyzed compensation figures collected from users. The average salary for software engineers in the Bay Area is about 17 percent higher than the national average for the same occupation, according to Glassdoor.
Google now pays its engineers an average of $142,000, up from just under $104,000 in 2008, Glassdoor calculated. During that time, Google’s work force has swelled by 70 percent to about 34,000 employees, including thousands of engineers working at or near its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
Even Facebook and Zynga remain on hiring sprees.
Facebook still plans to transform its Menlo Park headquarters into the equivalent of a small town that is supposed to eventually house 6,000 workers. The social networking leader has hired famed architect Frank Gehry to design a 420,000-square-foot warehouse that will feature a garden growing across its roof. Plans also call for a town square featuring restaurants, a bike shop and health clinic.
Levie moved Box from Seattle several years ago because he believed his company had to be in Silicon Valley to succeed. Box now employs about 500 workers and raised $125 million this summer. Levie is just 27, a few months younger than Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who turned 28 the week his company went public in May.
Echoing an oft-repeated Silicon Valley ethos, Levie says startups are much more focused on their long-term prospects than their performance from one quarter to the next. Wall Street, though, isn’t known for its patience. Investors’ fixation on short-term results has left Facebook’s stock trading much lower than its initial public offering price, while Zynga’s stock has lost more than two-thirds of its value.
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