Playing it safe in Silicon Valley--what's the point of living here then?
Why would you pay all this money to live here just so you could be a corporate drone?
The WSJ reports on a (supposedly) growing trend of people looking for more stable (call them old-school) companies as opposed to start-ups.
The story cites the fact that IPOs are down and that getting to a public offering is taking much longer than it did in the 2000-era where you could basically get an office and file to go public. But that was never scalable and in fact contributed to serious economic confusion--especially here in the valley.
I believe that today's startups are much better managed than the companies that were being built in early 2000 or so. The era of irrational exuberance is clearly over (unless you are Facebook) and your chance of hitting the jackpot at a BigCo are pretty much zero.
I am sure there are many people who live in the Bay Area that are looking for security and stability and there are certainly many companies that offer those things. Yet, these safe companies like Intuit and Cisco are likely to weather the upcoming economic storm through massive layoffs just as startups are likely to flame out. Either way you end up without a job.