Not really, not if you want to grow to any scale—then you need to be where the talent is, which is not generally in low-tax states. That’s why Silicon Valley isn’t in Mississippi.
And if these guys want to schmooze themselves into business relationships with the major media companies, there’s no better place to do that than NYC.
Bingo!
California, for all it taxation burdens, has unique advantages that I cannot foresee any other region except the East Coast replicating, and even then, I have my doubts.
The thing is, California has a wonderful lineup of interconnected high technology universities - Stanford, UCLA, USC, Berkeley, CalTech, etc., between the SF-LA region, all critical to high tech industry success. Combine that with the free California spirit (closely resembling my home country, Australia) where ‘business outfit’ means t-shirts, sandals and shorts, and the above-excellent weather, you have a captive environment where the people (graduates) are willing to pay for the compromise of ridiculously high taxes in order to live in such a professional and cultural climate.
I work with a company that makes advanced machines for the tech industry and they have a critical / urgent requirement for an embedded systems programmer / architect and the guy who will be interviewing candidates for the position is a buddy of mine. The company has centers in California, Texas and Georgia - and this is what he told me with a straight face - he tests candidates by asking them if they are willing to move out of California - and he tells me he won’t hire anyone who makes the mistake of answering in the affirmative because he considers anyone willing to do so to be, in his words, ‘stupid’.