Fresno, technology black hole

@philderksen - "RT @FresnoBiz: Business Journal Survey: The State of Technology in the Valley. Let us know what you think."

That tweet led me to The Business Journal, and a 1000 character survey, which wasn't near enough to explain how I feel about Fresno as a technology center. Phil has one view, I have another.

Look, you really have to want to live in the Fresno area to live here. That may sound like a big "DUH!", but it's true. Those of us that choose to live here will typically give one of a couple answers, here's what I've heard most often; "I could afford to buy a home here." and "I have family here." The second reason is a large part of why we're back in The Valley after living in the Seattle area for five years. Family is hard to argue with, but being near your family comes at a huge price if you're a professional software developer. As for the first reason, well that's not so true any longer. The housing boom forced home prices into the stratosphere, ridiculously high for the region. The Valley is one of the poorest places in California, and I'd imagine the country. It's a weird place to be. We're used to being poor here. The economic downturn has hurt the region but it's not like other regions of the country.

Watch out! It's Fresno, the tech black hole!

Watch out! It's Fresno, the tech black hole!

On to reasons Fresno is a technology black hole, in my humble opinion.

Reason #1: The Valley is poor as dirt

Our economy is based on agriculture. The Valley feeds the world, that's not an overblown statement. A large portion of the worlds fruits and vegetables come from The Valley. We have a large unskilled workforce. A workforce that tends to be very poor. We've become a service industry based region; McDonalds, Burger King, Taco Bell, you get the picture.

Reason #2: Fresno is a cultural wasteland

I once read somewhere, and I wish I could remember where, a site exclaiming "People in Fresno think culture is something the doctor takes." There you have it. What do we have to offer vast fields orange groves, which are amazing to behold, but not likely to draw you to them week in and week out. We have the Chaffee Zoo and the Fresno Metropolitan Museum but they struggle, see Reason #1.

Reason #3: Limited sporting events

We have Fresno State, The Fresno Grizzlies, and The Central Valley Coyotes. Fresno State fans will claim they're great fans. Rabid more like. Think Oakland Raiders. Rowdy-obnoxious-drunken-brawlers. Who wants to deal with that? I certainly don't. I'm not sure how well the Grizzlies are doing. They have a fantastic brand new stadium. I've been there and it is indeed a great place to watch baseball, but I've only been once.

Reason #4: Downtown Fresno is dead

The great technology centers I've visited personally have vibrant downtowns. Seattle is a great example. When I worked for Visio I could step outside and experience wonderful activities on a daily basis; restaurants, shopping, music, art. Seattle had it all, and it was all within walking distance, even after we moved to One World Trade center, which was removed from the core of downtown. Downtown San Francisco is the same, with San Jose being slightly less so, but it still offers workers an abundance of amenities. Fresno's downtown has shown a bit of a renaissance in certain areas, which is encouraging, but it has a long way to go to live up to the technology hotbeds of America.

Reason #5: We have ZERO high tech companies in the region

That is probably the real clincher. Our one great company in the region, Pelco, cannot employ thousands of tech workers. It just can't do it. So where do they go? They flee to the high tech centers; Seattle, The Silicon Valley, Boston. Pelco is trying to turn the corner and become a great high tech company. It'll take some time, but it's getting there. We have the leadership in place and are making moves to achieve that goal, we're working on seriously cool stuff, but once again, one company can't employ the region. Pelco has been a real leader in its' chosen field, but that hasn't drawn companies into the region.

We've had two interesting startups in the region over the past year, both have fled for greener pastures.

Plastic Jungle moved to Mountain View, and Vine Global relocated operations to Arizona. Vine apparently moved because of a big deal with a client and needed to be there for them. I'm not sure why Plastic Jungle left? I'd heard it was at the request of their VC's. If that's true it doesn't bode well for anyone trying raise funding from the Fresno area.

Robert Schultz: "If you weren't aware I wrote another post regarding another startup based on the Fresno area called PlasticJungle. They were recently funded from a Venture Capital firm in which following the round of funding, decided to move most of their operations out of Clovis to the bay area. While I disagree with these moves since I want to see new and innovative businesses grow here in the valley, I understand that the business here is not as optimal as places like the bay area."

Reason #6: It's really hot here!

We just came off a streak of 100+ days. At its peak the temperature was 111, that's just insane, and a lot of folks are really turned off by the heat. Just like living in freezing weather for months on end is a turn off to a lot of people. We lack a certain balance in our weather. It's always warm here, even in the winter. In the past year I'm fairly certain I've worn shorts just about every day.

Reason #7: The air quality is horrible

We have horrible air quality, see for yourself. In the list of 23 places the San Joaquin Valley owns six positons, with three in the top ten! Folks that are sensitive to dust, pollen, and molds are at risk here. Both of our children developed asthma after moving here. Not so good.

But wait, it gets worse

Phil asserts that local tech companies don't allow him to get involved, which is the desire of developers. I haven't experienced this myself, but I understand what he's saying. I've run into a lot of "mom and pop" shops that have a very local thinking mindset, which I think hurts them. We live in a poor region. People just don't like to spend money on custom solutions. I know of a developer that was told he couldn't charge for his implementation on top of an open source solution, what? Because he was going to use a free product he shouldn't charge for his time? Ridiculous. Custom development shops, and consulting, are fine, but they're not the way to build great technology centers. The overhead is too great and you're constantly trying to hustle business from people that don't want to pay up. The real win comes in the form of product. Not the kind you package and put on a shelf. The kind you create, publish in some form, and charge for it. Desktop or web, it doesn't matter. Things like Netflix or Amazon. Why not out of The Valley? Is it lack of networking, brain drain, a combination of the two? Most likely a combination of the two, well that and we live in a poor area. Not many wealthy local entrepreneurs out there.

The bottom line.

Q: Who will change the Fresno technology black hole?
A: Those of us born and raised in The Valley will have to do it.

I wouldn't have it any other way.

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Rob Fahrni has been a Software Developer for 20 years. He's developed DOS, Windows, Linux, iPhone, and Palm based applications in C, C++, Objective-C/Cocoa, C#/ASP.Net, and, yes, even BASIC...
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Jerry Fahrni, Pharmacy Informatics and Technology

RxCalc - A Pharmacokinetic Calculator for iPhone

BillSaysThis 11:12 AM

One key factor for successful tech regions that Fresno doesn't have, AFAIK, is a university with a great CS/engineering school and probably more than one. Nothing against Fresno State but I'm talking about Stanford/Cal plus San Jose State, UC Santa Cruz and the smaller schools.

As for Plastic Logic moving here, this is fairly typical. Companies move from all over the world to here, or at least bring the HQ - executives, marketing and sales.
- VCs do not want to have to get on a plane to visit portfolio companies.
- Talent pool is immense.
- Customers and partner companies are here.

Rob 11:43 AM

Bill,

Thanks for posting. You're absolutely correct Fresno State is not a great CS school. We do however have some wonderful software engineers at Pelco that graduated from CSUF, but by and large, you're absolutely right.

To "fix" this problem would take more effort than the region is probably willing to make. Leadership is crucial to that sort of movement, and it just doesn't exist.

As for Plastic moving, well the VC's are obviously too lazy and can't, or won't use, technology. Fresno is a couple hours drive from The Silicon Valley.

It's ok. It is what it is. The Valley will hopefully find its way into newer business models, even if they're not centered around software and the internet.

Kim and I have been discussing a move for quite some time now and discussions like this keep me headed in that direction. In fact, with California's recent budget woes it makes me want to leave the state, but that's oh so hard to do. We have everything in this state! If we stay, and can find a way to pull it off, the Central Coast is our next destination. If we can't figure that one out a move out of state may be in order, possibly Ft. Collins, CO.

Anywho, thanks for chiming in. You make great points.

James 3:09 PM

Interesting perspective.
I, too, took that survey, and would argue two of your points: 1) the premise that we're a black hole, and 2) that Plastic Jungle's move doesn't bode well for others.
While Fresno doesn't host many others in *my* technology vertical, it's a center for technology and innovation - with regards to agriculture. Denying that would be like denying your Reason #7, so it's important to acknowledge.
Technology workers may not be flocking here for many of the reasons you've listed, but that doesn't mean that they're not rising up organically; one of the powers of the web is that many of its innovators aren't "educated" in it - they figure things out as they create, as is the case with Plastic Jungle. And yes, they took $4.5M in funding, so they're moving headquarters out of the area - I find that encouraging. I'd rather talent/companies grow and leave than to never see them here at all; if enough do, we'll gain the attention of outside investment.

Phil D 2:35 PM

Thanks for your post Rob. Your bottom line Q&A nails it on the head. As a friend of mine says, "Be the change you want to see."

Jerry 12:08 PM

It's not just a technology black hole, it's a black hole for advancement in many fields. Medicine suffers in the Central Valley partly due to the lack of technology, but also due to many of the same reasons you mention in your blog above.

I don't think it will ever change, and you have to honestly ask yourself what you're doing here. It's a question I frequently ask, but don't have an answer for.

As for CSUF...well, I went there for Chemistry prior to pharmacy school and can tell you I was at a clear disadvantage to kids that had attended other universities. I'm fortunate to have been admitted to the UCSF School of Pharmacy and my first year was a struggle as I spent much of my time learning material that other students considered "basic".

Change is needed, but will require a change in the entire culture of the valley. Good luck.

Thanks for the thoughtful post.

BillSaysThis 11:52 AM

It's not that VCs are lazy, its that their time is too valuable to drive 3-5 hours each way 6-18 times a year. Virtual meetings are getting better, e.g., Cisco Telepresence, but still not there at the appropriate price point.

California is a leading indicator. The problems we have now are likely to be seen across most of the other 49 over the coming years. The advantages of living in Silicon Valley for a tech industry person, not just VCs, are still very clear to me.

Still... the thought of living elsewhere is alluring, especially if one could have a decent piece of land for peace and quiet while not suffering the weather of North Dakota or Massachuesetts.

Rob 8:37 AM

James,

Thanks for the feedback. I completely agree with you regarding agriculture, it's very true, we do have some folks in the region advancing that field. I worked for Paramount Farms, for a year, doing processing plant automation. It was cool technology, and very advanced.

And you're also correct about the organic growth. I knew we had some talented technology people, but this post has shown me we have more than I'd expected. It would seem that we have a whole lot of web developers based on the feedback I'm seeing here, and a few new Twitter follows.

It makes me wonder if any of these guys know about each other? Are there any groups that meet on a regular basis and exchange ideas, share stories? Time for another blog post I think. :-)

Phil Derksen 9:29 AM

There are a few groups I know of:

http://www.centralcaldotnet.com/ - Brings in guest speakers. Not necessarily specific to .NET every time. There have been topics like cloud computing and Amazon web services.

http://groups.drupal.org/fresno - Specific to the open source Drupal framework.

http://fresnodesignalliance.ning.com/ - Pretty large following but specific to designers.

Maybe we need something to encourage new tech ideas or startups. Search for "startup weekend" or http://startupweekend.com/ for examples in other locations.

Rob 10:16 AM

Phil,

Thanks for the links. Very nice.

It's really odd we have so many web site design firms, but NO firms doing either desktop applications for the general population or web services for everybody.

Too bad some of those great web front end guys don't spend some time developing general use stuff. That's where we need to be. One off sites with follow up changes is not a great way to make a living. I'm after the package, sell it, collect money, repeat. The problem is most firms start off as consultants, to pay the bills, with the idea of moving to a product company and can NEVER get there because they're too busy hustling more business or trying to collect payment to keep the doors open!

And, the other thing I mentioned about no VC money here. That's honestly not the best way either. If you have VC's behind your venture, it's no longer your venture, you give a lot of control over to the VC's. Which is fine, if that's ok with you. :-)

Robert Schultz 10:15 AM

Thanks for the reference to my blog post regarding Plastic Jungle. I like how you broke down some of the points why we're a black hole here beyond mine which includes the poverty level as well as general things like downtown. Currently, I actually do live downtown trying to do my best to help what I can to make something with this city but it can only go so far. I think there exists a culture problem here but I do think we are on the right track with all of us bringing up this issue especially lately.

Rob 10:25 AM

Robert,

Thanks for joining the conversation. It's SO nice to see there are a lot of us that would like to see change. The problem is HOW do we band together to make it happen.

If a bunch of folks would band together, somewhere downtown for instance, and create a workspace for tech, and do it organically, that would be HUGE. The City of Fresno may have to get involved at that point.

A place I see as a great for a tech community is the old "Ye Old Spaghetti Factory" warehouse building downtown near the tracks on the curve of Hwy 41.

Could you imagine a collection of tech firms all working from the same location? The opportunities for collaboration go through the roof, and it would attract attention. That, of course, is just one example.

Heck, what about a co-working facility somewhere downtown? That could be nice as well.

I think we need to get together, this group, along with many of the others in the area, and start a conversation about change. I know some great guys out of Visalia that would be interested as well.

Rob 10:26 AM

Bill,

You're right, the VC's aren't lazy. Sour grapes on my part. :-)

Christopher 5:56 PM

I could afford to buy a home here, AND I have family here!

I'm the guy Rob mentioned above, the one whose client objected to paying for having a free open source application installed & set up, because "it's free - you can't charge for setting up free software". I've run a small development shop in Visalia (www.cogeian.com) since 2003.

With that intro out of the way, I agree with every single one of Rob's points. Really, reasons 2, 3 and 4 all fall under the umbrella of "culture", which I believe to be the biggest problem. If Fresno & surrounds could legitimately be seen as a capital-D "destination", with something to offer a person's lifestyle aside from affordable housing, then the lack of a good local CS program wouldn't matter so much.

Home prices alone don't drive nearly enough of the type of ingress we need - educated and/or skilled tech workers. I've had a hell of a time finding qualified local devs over the past 6 years, and an even harder time finding qualified prospects. The majority of my devs - and clients! - are far from here. This vexes me.

In the linked piece, Phil Derksen makes some decent points as well, but I fear he's being a bit tunnel-visioned on some points. Employers are not going to keep themselves on the bleeding edge of technology just to make developers happy, particularly not if they have a stable and profitable product. As we all know, you don't re-write your product unless there's a compelling business case for doing so. To think otherwise is short-sighted technical geekery that leads to us-versus-employers thinking, and that doesn't help anyone. I don't think the issue is nearly so adversarial.

Here in Visalia we have an extremely limited corps of qualified developers - granted, my idea of qualified might be different than yours, but nobody is going to argue that the depth of field is thin. Fresno being what, 4 or 5 times the size of Visalia, you'd think Fresno would have at least 4 to 5 times more qualified developers. But after reading some of these Tweets and blog posts, I wonder.

My dream is to be able to found a co-working facility in Visalia. I seriously doubt that there are enough mobile or independant devs & designers to make it fly. Fresno already has at least 1 co-working place that I know of - Cargo Bay. Sure, it's not a co-working facility in the hip, funky sense, but it will serve the same purpose if there are sufficient devs & designers who are willing to use it.

And on the subject of custom shops vs product shops, I'd love to see more product shops here in the Valley. My firm has a product in private beta right now, and I'm sure there are a few other small players doing similar things. Aside from Pelco I'm aware of maybe 4 or 5 other legitimate product shops in the Fresno area.

That's not much if you consider our population in the Valley, but at the same time I recently read some statistics that indicated only 1% of Valley workers are in knowledge/IT work positions. One percent! So maybe, if that number is accurate, the amount of tech you see locally is just right.

Gah, I didn't set out to write a novel. It's good to see that there are at least a few dev groups, even if they're up in Fresno. It gives me hope for Visalia.

Rob 9:15 AM

Chris,

Thanks for stopping by and chiming in.

It would seem that most of the development happening in our area is around web site design, which is great, but I wonder how sustainable that will be? Apparently it's fairly sustainable today judging by all the folks I've discovered from feedback on this post!

The co-working thing is such a great idea and it would be nice to get together with some of the other folks working in the Visalia area and make that happen, if they're up for it. If I were running an indie shop I'd be into it. It's a great way to exchange ideas and work with others that may have skills you need to get your job done. Sharing, what a concept.

When you talk about developers what exactly do you mean? For me, I believe, it means something different. I think C/C++, more "hard core" development. Some people label HTML work development, I don't, that's more design to me. If it's backend work, then I'd label it development work as well; Ruby, Python, PHP, C#/ASP.Net, etc...

We're in an uphill battle if we want this area to become a technology center, even a small one. People will have to think globally, not just hyper-locally. Think products and services that can be used by the masses regardless of location. We have Google App Engine and Amazon Services to help us compete in a global economy, we just need a few good ideas to launch, AND STAY in the area.

Doing it without VC help is the absolute best way. VC's will of course want to have say in the business and will get a huge chunk of the payout if you're successful, rightfully so! It is better if you can do it without their help, so you need to grow a good idea into a product/service.

Phil Derksen 3:33 PM

The Business Journal survey results are in. Rob, your comments made the cut.

http://www.thebusinessjournal.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1549

brent 5:10 PM

Hello Rob

I know I'm months late about this, but as a native son who went away for three degrees in CS and then came back, I do think about these things. There are two things I would highlight: your point #1 (no money) and the first comment about universities.

Your point about the valley being dirt poor (and under-educated) outweighs the rest by an order of magnitude in my mind. I've tried to make this point with some of the local architecture types who moan about the state of their local business.

I think the rest of your original points are second (or third ...) order effects: #2 cultural wasteland depends on what you are looking for, the Fresno area ranks pretty well when it comes to concerts. Not stuff that I want to attend, but it's there (along with the fresno phil, multitudes of performances at Fresno State, Bocelli, Seinfeld, Kathy Griffin...). #3 sporting events - I'm not personally interested in attending many, but AAA baseball and D1 football (no alcohol sales in the stadium for a couple years now) and basketball is enough for me. I include the three local national parks in the culture category also. Less than an hour from my house to the Grant Grove entrance station is great. #4 downtown - I'm a big fan, like the mall, etc. I think it goes back to lack of money. #5 - yep, related to the university issue, #6, 7 - it's hotter in PHX and LAS, and smoggier in LA, and during the early heyday of silicon valley I remember a nice yellow/brown pall over the south bay, so I don't buy that one either. Don't get me started about asthma :)

It's late Nov and my tomatoes are still blooming. There's a weather story that plays well in much of the rest of the country.

But the other prime thing is universities. SJSU? Pfft. Same educational system, same faculty pay scale, as Fresno State (and the two Cal Polys). But the UCs and Stanford are what the Carnegie Foundation calls Research Universities with "very high research activity". Instead of teaching, say, 4 classes in a semester like in the CSU, a prof at a research university might teach 1/3 of that load. And PhD students make a *huge* difference. Occasionally I get to work with a doctoral student at another university and it reminds me what a difference it is to have people whose job 24/7 is research :) Without PhD students and faculty spending substantial effort on research you don't get silicon valley (or the boston area). That I still think it is sad that UCM wasn't UCF. It would've already made a huge difference here.

Thanks for thinking and posting about such things. - brent

Fresno, technology black hole

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