打造“下一个硅谷”大潮中隐藏的一个重要问题

    每座城市都想成为下一个硅谷。在过去十年中，政策制定者和拥护者们投入了数百万美元的刺激方案，希望吸引和培养当地企业家。看看这些方案：“费城企业孵化计划”、 “迈阿密企业孵化计划”、 “弗吉尼亚企业孵化计划”、“美国企业孵化计划”等等。然而无论这些城市多么努力地偷学湾区的魅力（说的就是你，Silicon Sandbar），并没有哪座城市能够复制硅谷让初创企业成功的独特公式，而且这种努力越来越像是误入歧途。

    近年来，得益于数字设备的高效，公司盈利所需的员工数量日趋减少，这种迹象在科技创业公司中尤为显著。Instagram以10亿美元卖给Facebook的时候，只有13名员工。WhatsApp以190亿美元卖给Facebook的时候，只有55名员工。而Snapchat获得40亿估值时，也只有20名员工。这类超精简的“独角兽”公司正越来越多。相较之下，2015年《财富》500强公司的平均员工数量是5.3587万人。

    由此看来，这么多城市奋力寻找创业家来充当创造就业岗位的明星，似乎十分奇怪。就以“纽约企业孵化计划”为例。纽约州试图在5年中创造约2100个工作岗位。然而，在花费了一年时间和2800万美元的市场营销投入后，最终只催生了30家公司，共76个岗位。每个公司的平均员工数量不足3人。

    这种状况并非科技行业所独有。各行业初创公司招聘的员工都越来越少。很长时间以来，新公司一直是创造就业岗位的重要力量。但根据美国劳动统计局的数据，新公司雇用的员工数量从20世纪90年代开始持续下滑。1994年，新公司共创造了410万个就业岗位，而2010年，新公司只创造了250万个岗位。

    长期以来，巴布森高管教育学院创业实践教授丹尼尔·伊森伯格都在批判将新公司看作经济推动力量的现象。伊森伯格表示：“第一个问题是初创公司能够创造工作岗位这个前提。从经验角度来说，这一点是存疑的，而从逻辑上来看，它也站不住脚。如果我是一名投资者，我最不想看到的事情就是我投资的某家公司以创造工作岗位为目的。”

    伊森伯格表示，最大的问题在于初创公司可能会迅速砍掉他们创造的岗位。在最近进行的一项研究中，斯坦福大学商学院和IESE商学院的教授调查了欧洲和亚洲的15.8万家初创公司。他们发现，成立5年后，这些公司创造的大部分工作岗位都被随后的精简裁员抵消了。此外，新公司创造的工作岗位并不总是报酬很高，而且发薪水往往需要很长时间。

    更好的解决方法是什么呢？伊森伯格认为，如果政策制定者希望在十年内看到效果，就应当着重激励那些已经取得成功（年收入至少几百万美元），且有意扩大规模的现有公司。根据小型企业管理局的数据，那些对就业率增长影响很大的公司都不是新公司，而是平均成立时间至少有15至20年的公司。美国运通在最近发布的中型企业报告中指出，自2008年起，中型企业（年收入在1000万美元至10亿美元之间）创造了92%的就业岗位。

    凯斯西储大学教授斯科特·谢尼认为，创业项目可以在城市中占有一席之地，但仅具有边际意义。一个城市创业项目效果的衡量标准应该是看它是否能解决市场失效问题。比如说，如果政府插手来培养一个能让公众获益，而不是私人投资者获益的公司，那也许会有意义。不过谢尼告诫道，鼓励创业本身也许会产生意料不到的负面影响。政府补贴也许会鼓励人们创立公司，但他们也许在其他地方工作效率会更高。

    好消息是什么呢？据布鲁金斯学会介绍，你不必通过创立公司来创造高薪水的技术岗位。最近一份报告发现，先进的技术部门发展速度比整体经济要快30%，而其中大部分公司都来自开展数字化运营的其他行业（汽车公司、制造商、媒体、酒店业等等）。布鲁金斯的马克·穆罗表示：“大多数竞争性行业都充满技术。”

    换句话说，一家位于得梅因的保险公司通过扩充信息技术部门创造的技术岗位，也许和该市一个应用开发商一样多。地处大平原的城市可以用这种方法来扩充技术员工群体，而不需要真正营造创业景象——尽管那听起来很棒。对不起了，硅谷平原。（财富中文网）

    译者：严匡正

    审校：任文科

    Every city wants to be the next Silicon Valley. In the last decade, policy makers and municipal boosters have spent millions on initiatives meant to lure and nurture local entrepreneurs. See: “StartUp PHL,” “StartUp-Miami,” “Startup VA,” “Startup America,” and countless others. But no matter how hard cities try to borrow that Bay Area magic (looking at you, “Silicon Sandbar”), none have managed to recreate the Valley’s particular formula for tech startup-fueled success—and increasingly it seems like the wrong aspiration.

    In recent years, digital efficiency has ground down the number of workers a company needs to make money, particularly in tech startups. Instagram had just 13 employees when it sold to Facebook for $1 billion. WhatsApp had 55 employees when Facebook bought it for $19 billion. And Snapchat had 20 employees when investors valued it at $4 billion. The list of super-lean unicorns goes on and on. For a little context, the average Fortune 500 company in 2015 had 53,587 employees.

    So it seems odd, then, that so many cities are trying so hard to recruit entrepreneurs to be their job creation champions. Just look at New York, where a state initiative called Startup NY, set out with the aim of creating some 2,100 jobs in five years. After one year and $28 million spent on marketing, it could claim just 76 new positions at 30 companies. Average employment per company was less than three people.

    And it’s not just tech. Startups across the board have been hiring fewer people. The number of people employed by new firms, long a huge factor in job growth, has been falling since the 90s, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There were 4.1 million jobs created by new firms in 1994, and just 2.5 million created by new firms in 2010.

    Daniel Isenberg, Babson Executive Education Professor of Entrepreneurship Practice, has long criticized the pursuit of young companies as economic drivers. “The first problem is the premise that startups create jobs,” Isenberg says. “Empirically it’s problematic, but also logically it’s problematic. … [As an investor], the last thing that I want a company that I invest in to do is create jobs.”

    The biggest problem, Isenberg says, is that young companies tend to shed the new positions they create very quickly. A recent study conducted by professors at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the IESE Business School followed 158,000 startups in Europe and Asia and found that by the end of five years, the majority of the initial gains in employment were offset by subsequent downsizing. Plus, the jobs that startups do create are not always highly paid, and they often take a long time to materialize.

    A better solution? Isenberg thinks if policymakers want to see results in less than a decade, they should instead focus on boosting existing companies with track record of success (meaning a few million in revenue), and with ambitions to scale. The companies in the U.S. that have a high impact on job growth aren’t newest firms—they’re companies that are at least 15 to 20 years old on average, according to the Small Business Administration. And a recent report on midsize businesses by American Express finds that medium-sized companies (between $10 million and $1 billion in revenue), have created 92% of the new jobs since 2008.

    Scott Shane, professor at Case Western Reserve University, believes that startup programs can have a place in cities, but only sparingly. A good test of the efficacy of a city startup initiative is whether it solves for a market failure. For example, it might make sense for the government to step in to seed a company that benefits the public good more than it would a private investor. But Shane cautions that promoting entrepreneurship for its own sake could have unintended negative consequences. The subsidies might encourage people to start companies when they would be more productive working elsewhere.

    The good news? According to the Brookings Institution, you don’t have to be a startup to create high-paying jobs in tech. The advanced technology sector is growing 30% faster than the economy as a whole, a recent report found, and much of that is at companies in other industries (car companies, manufacturers, media, hospitality and more) that are bulking up their digital operations. “Most competitive industries are saturated with technology,” says Brookings’ Mark Muro.

    In other words, an insurance company in Des Moines could create as many tech jobs by beefing up its IT department as a new app developer would by setting up shop in the same city. The Great Plains city could boost its tech employee base that way, without ever actually growing a startup scene—as great as that sounds. Sorry, Silicon Prairie.