Many in Silicon Valley are worried silly about the supposed exodus of high-tech jobs to India and China, but the stream of tech companies coming this way shouldn’t be ignored. The latest is search company YourAmigo, which tells VentureWire (sorry, sub required) that it’s moving its headquarters to Silicon Valley from Adelaide, Australia. Just two weeks ago, the Korean founders of MySimon unveiled Become.com, a company they formed locally after returning last year — saying the U.S. market is still the most lucrative, that Silicon Valley is the best place to hire, and, oh yes, raise moolah. Become.com’s CEO Michael Yang told us he’s looking to raise a VC round of about $12 million. Meanwhile, the five-year-old YourAmigo apparently has gotten $4 million from Silicon Valley’s BA Venture Partners and is looking for one more investor to close its $8 million first round of institutional funding, according to VentureWire.
According to CEO Rahmon Coupe:
The new centerpiece of YourAmigo’s technology converts the dynamic Web pages that the company used to search into a format that allows search engines like Yahoo and Google to read them.
“Given that we had the core technology to search the invisible Web, we thought we could help Web sites get crawled and provide a bridge between Web sites and Google,” said Coupe. “Search on the Internet is already important and attracting significant advertising dollars, but its going to be really, really important in the future.”
2 Comments
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Anonymous Techie said:
$4 million to parse the User-Agent header and enumerate database links when it shows a spider? With the absurdly obvious corresponding patent in application, no doubt.
Still I do admire that someone somewhere is willing to shell out millions to back a 15-line script.
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Dr. Chuck said:
Its interesting to note that there is a fundamental shift in the “value” of computer programming and electronic design. The number of people who have real talent in designing new algorithms or new circuits are a constant (and small) fraction of the total workforce. Finding and nurturing these folks is the job of managers through out the valley. But the truth is, you can’t justify a Silicon Valley salary just re-implementing strcmp() or UNIX code. That can be done by anyone with a modicum of training, even in the US of A.
The second aspect of this story that no one covers well is that as the demand for “tech” employees in these regions goes up, so does competition to hire them. That means they get paid more. At some point, probably in the not to distant future, the economics of hiring someone in Bangalore will not offset the difficulty of real-time interaction. Once that happens the “outflow” will stabilize and places like Canada and Minnesota will again be popular places to build tech pools.
There are a couple of valid concerns about China however; first is that the government regulates the economy which could prevent stabilization and second they don’t enforce IP protection so your employees might just be making your Chinese competitor better at competing. Those imbalances may be a thorn in our sides for a number of years before they get resolved.
