Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Season 2 of SCALE UP – Global Talent Strategies Deep Dive.
Last week we pulled back the curtain on the pilot episode, which tackled Silicon Valley’s paradox. On one hand, it’s still the world’s richest talent hub — on the other, it’s become so unlivable that more than 230,000 tech workers have packed up and left. We told Sarah Chen’s story: a Stanford grad earning $180,000 at Open AI, decoding world-class AI models by day, yet sleeping in her car by night, because housing ate 70% of her paycheck. It was the perfect way to show how the Valley is both dream and inhumanity at once.
For Episode 2, we asked the natural next question: where did everyone go? And the first stop on that journey is America’s West Coast — from Seattle to San Diego.
What we found is striking. While Silicon Valley still dominates AI research and venture capital with $85 billion a year, the rest of the West Coast has quietly built its own $17 billion innovation engine. The talent profile looks different too: average age is younger, Gen Z now makes up a third of new hires, and their priorities have shifted. For this generation, mission alignment outweighs maximum compensation, and sustainability matters more than prestige.
To bring these shifts to life, we anchored the episode in one story: Jennifer Park. Picture her in 2022, standing in her University of Washington computer science lab with two job offers. One from Google in Mountain View — the archetypal Silicon Valley dream, $180,000 salary, a fast track to the center of AI. The other from Microsoft in Seattle — slightly less money, but closer to the mountains she loved, and a culture that promised balance.
Her professor gave her a line that stuck with us: “Ten years ago, this choice was obvious. But you’re graduating into a different world. Your generation is rewriting the rules.”
Jennifer chose Seattle.
From there, the episode zooms out. We went city by city to map the West Coast renaissance.
* Seattle, where the Microsoft–Amazon rivalry created the second great tech capital of the U.S.
* Portland, betting big on climate tech and affordable living.
* Los Angeles, where Hollywood, gaming, and creator platforms collide.
* San Diego, fusing biotech and AI in ways that could extend human life.
For each city, we compared compensation, housing, commute time, and career sustainability against Silicon Valley. One key stat stood out: Seattle engineers save the equivalent of nine work weeks a year just by avoiding Silicon Valley’s brutal commutes — and 3x more of them own homes by age 30. That’s the hidden currency of this shift: time, stability, and the ability to build lives, not just careers.
And then we circled back to Jennifer. Three years later, she isn’t just surviving — she’s thriving. She leads a team of 12 at Microsoft, earns $380,000, owns her condo, takes sabbaticals to travel, and still has energy left to volunteer and train for marathons. Compare that with her peers still renting studios in Mountain View, waiting for work-life balance to materialize someday.
Her reflection was powerful: “Silicon Valley taught us that success requires sacrifice. The West Coast taught me that real success requires integration.”
That, ultimately, is what Episode 2 is about — not Silicon Valley versus the world, but the rise of multiple models of success. For Gen Z, this isn’t theory. It’s lived reality: 71% say they’d take a pay cut for purpose-driven work, and increasingly, they’re proving it with their choices.
Next week, we’re flying east. Episode 3 takes us to New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. If the West Coast is about lifestyle and sustainability, the East Coast is about specialization and scale — think fintech in New York, biotech in Boston, and gov-tech in Washington. Without giving too much away, we’ll meet a Wall Street technologist who traded hedge fund bonuses for blockchain infrastructure, and a Harvard-trained biologist reshaping what the next generation of medicine looks like.
So stay tuned. The migration story doesn’t end on the West Coast — it’s only just getting started.
