If you don't think Northern VA or South East VA are large tech industries, then we have very different dictionaries. NoVA/D.C. is only the home to the second largest tech center in the country, larger than NYCs. You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a tech company of any size along the Dulles tech corridor. With a 5% unemployment rate, there are literally thousands of job openings there, the demand is unbelievably high. If that doesn't qualify as a large tech industry, then nothing does.

Blacksburg and Charlottesville have all the advantages of a place like MIT or Stanford. Nice STEM focused college towns full of ready to work STEM students who'd love to stay in those towns and low costs of living. If you want to open a remote office, those are good places to do it.

Tampa has a sizable tech industry as well. If you didn't notice it, it's because you, like most people, aren't paying attention or you've dismissed every possible company you could have worked for because it wasn't in with the cool crowd. I wonder how many folks in Tampa wouldn't mind working for Tampa pay but get equity in an SV startup?

Here's 5 minutes of looking for Tampa tech companies. If there's companies, there's tech employees you can hire for your company. Tech companies can't exist where there aren't people they can hire. (all of these had open tech positions and I didn't even look for non-tech companies with open tech positions)

- http://www.actsoft.com/
- http://www.connectwise.com/
- http://www.e-ins.net/
- http://www.fairwarning.com/
- http://www.syniverse.com/home
- ...

you know what...screw the list, here's 7 thousand developer position near Tampa http://www.simplyhired.com/search?q=software+developer&l=Tam...

I bet most of these are for some boring insurance company, healthcare or real estate company. How many people do you think you can find who want to work for a SV company and get SV startup perks?

Here's Nashville with almost 7,000 more open positions.

http://www.simplyhired.com/search?q=software+developer&l=Nas...

Portland, a tech friendly city, only has twice as many openings.

http://www.simplyhired.com/search?q=software+developer&l=Por...

Guess who has more open positions on this board? San Francisco or Washington D.C.?

http://www.simplyhired.com/search?q=software+developer&l=san...

http://www.simplyhired.com/search?q=software+developer&l=Was...

The point is that there is plenty of tech industry all over the place, and people in those areas can be hired at fractions of San Francisco's going rates.

People also don't like working in boring shitty jobs and the allure of working for a startup, with high payout equity can be a good alternative, if it's offered to them.

But Silicon Valley Myopia makes it impossible to see this. It's easier to sell hiring in Hyderabad than in Austin sometimes, and that's a shame.

While I see posts on San Francisco's labor shortage and the desire to get more H-1B visas, I can't help think of the hundreds of thousands of qualified tech employees all over the rest of the country. It's not expensive to set up a remote office and not hard to manage one either. If a SV startup can spin a photo sharing site as "changing the world" they can spin opening a remote office in Alabama as a an actual world changer.

Here's a very relevant example https://gaganpreet.github.io/hn-hiring-mapped/src/web/