Vladyslav’s Reviews > Abundance > Status Update

1) Maybe Walmart opened e-commerce division in San Francisco not because they are longing cities but cause management has no fucking clue what they are actually doing?! They did not open e-commerce division in Seattle - the birthplace of gigantic e-commerce platform of all times - Amazon - but in the Silicone Valley. Silicone Valley is where global IT hub so we must establish our presence there as well, no doubts!

I mean there is no doubt that Silicon Valley is unique and authors pointed out earlier that such knowledge hubs are difficult to achieve and IMPOSSIBLE to replicate. As well as cities and urbanization is one of the greatest achievement of human kind for overall prosperity not without drawbacks. However use Silicon Valley and Return To Office trend to explain how large city hubs are important is extrapolation..

> Some thought that the dislocations of the pandemic, combined with the rise of videoconferencing, would finally sever the link between place and innovation. It's undeniable that white-collar employees are more likely to work remotely, and some have used this opportunity to move to smaller and cheaper cities while clocking in for firms based many miles away.

> Walmart saw what many tech executives see. If you want the best software products, you need to locate amid the best software engineers. Those engineers aren't cheap to hire. But if a few dozen or a few hundred of them can build you an e-commerce platform that you will use for millions or billions in sales, it'd be foolish to locate elsewhere. Walmart now trails only Amazon in annual online sales.

> Walmart is famously frugal, maintaining its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, and insisting top executives locate there, too. But when it wanted to enter into e-commerce, it didn't pile software engineers into a new wing of its headquarters. "Instead it chose Brisbane, California, just 7 miles from downtown San Francisco, one of the most expensive labor markets in the world," Moretti notes.