Three technology executives representing companies with collectively $4 billion in revenue and 9,000 employees said Monday it’s increasingly easy to recruit technical talent in San Diego.
“With over 500 life sciences companies in the area, we have no trouble getting good people,” said Peter C. Farrell, founder and chairman of ResMed, whose medical devices treat sleep disorders.
“There’s much more talent here than there was a decade ago,” said Alexis V. Lukianov, chairman and CEO of Nuvasive, which makes spine surgery products. “At least 90 percent of our talent is coming locally or from California.”
The executives spoke on a panel sponsored by CONNECT, San Diego’s original technology accelerator, at the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine in La Jolla.
While the three agreed that talent is available locally, they noted it is harder to recruit experienced workers from outside San Diego because of the region’s high housing costs. And Silicon Valley remains very attractive to talented engineers because they can easily change firms there.
“Pulling people out of Silicon Valley is the hardest thing,” said Mark Dankberg co-founder and now chairman and CEO of ViaSat in Carlsbad.
The maker of communications satellites focuses on hiring new engineers out of college, with UC San Diego emerging as an excellent source of talent. “UC San Diego is a fabulous electrical engineering school,” he said.
The executives did cite a range of problems facing technology businesses in San Diego, including high state taxes, an inadequate airport, dilapidated infrastructure and logjams in dealing with local issues like a new stadium for the Chargers.
Nuvasive looked hard at moving its headquarters several times, with Austin, TX, one possibility, Lukianov said, but “the reality is that people just love to live here.”
“San Diego is still underappreciated relative to what it houses here,” he said.
“San Diego is undervalued,” agreed Dankberg, “but UC San Diego is especially undervalued.”
