Over the last decade, the costs of scaling a company in the bay area, NYC, and many other startup regions in the US has escalated sharply. We have encouraged our portfolio companies that are located in these high cost regions to build out secondary locations where they can hire high quality engineering and other talent at lower costs. Locations in North America that have been attractive to our portfolio companies are cities like Des Moines, Indianapolis, Toronto, and a number of others.
Another approach that has worked well for our portfolio companies is to have a secondary location outside of the US, where talent can be hired a much lower cost than the US.
So it was with interest that I read this in Zoom’s IPO prospectus;
we have a high concentration of research and development personnel in China
It turns out that Zoom has most of its engineering team in China, where they can hire
Look at this P&L.
Zoom spends most of its
This is something to think about as you scale your company.
