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Tech companies in Austin are taking over the job landscape. And there’s good reason for that.
The tech jobs in Austin that have given birth to its ‘Silicon Hills’ makeover have some of the best perks of ANY jobs in the famously laidback city.
Elon Musk, the tech world’s leading voice, presided over the latest of the top tech companies to move into Austin. Musk told podcaster Joe Rogan that his team chose Austin as their top choice outside of California for a new factory. When he asked for a second choice, the room was silent.
But this tech hub transition has been driven by more than the migration of big tech companies. In Austin Chamber’s 2019 estimate, there were over 7,200 tech companies in Austin. Texas’s tech renaissance is centered on the city.
You better believe that it’s more than just a handful of the biggest tech companies in Austin driving this growth.
What are the best tech companies to work for in Austin?
Forget Oracle, Amazon, and Tesla’s high-profile relocations for a moment. The following are some of the best tech companies operating in Austin right now.
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Let’s not skip the obvious — Texas has no state income tax.
You don’t have to look too deep to see what the spate of recent tech company relocations have been driven by. NerdWallet found a 98% higher cost of living in San Francisco compared to Austin. Differences include:
This is one reason for San Francisco leading the nation in its tech workforce exodus, whereas Austin leads all cities on new tech arrivals. According to LinkedIn, Austin gained 217 tech workers for every 10,000 existing tech workers from May 2020 to April 2021.
How does that measure up to San Francisco? The city lost 80 techies for every 10,000 at the start of the count.
Despite its rising cost of living, Austin has something that keeps it ahead of other growing tech hubs.
Ethan Parker, founder and CEO of Austin-based public relations firm Treble, is part of the Silicon Valley to Silicon Hills movement. He explained the area’s appeal to industry publication CMSWire:
“The number one advantage that Austin has is its culture. The ‘Keep Austin Weird’ mantra has deep roots, and there is a priority on work-life balance here that is alluring to recruiting and keeping top talent. The pressures of scaling a venture-backed startup are immense, but companies in Austin seem to have found that optimal balance between working hard and playing hard.”
Everyone knows that the big tech companies have a standing competition for delivering the most outrageous perks. Gourmet food, on-site child care, and on-call masseuses are standard at Google, Facebook, and Apple.
These companies don’t have to sacrifice much to give their employees the royal treatment. A 2019 analysis by industry analyst PostBeyond found that Facebook makes over $634,000 in profit per employee.
Can you guess how much the average Facebook employee makes? Hint: it’s less than that.
We’ve organized the best of the rest by company description, GlassDoor job rating, and perks. Read on to see what the inside of this growing tech hub actually looks like.
A Cloud Guru offers courses and labs dedicated to training individuals and organizations in cloud services and infrastructure. Since the Austin-headquartered firm started up in 2015, they’ve shown over 2.2 million learners and 4,000 organizations “the way to cloud.”
ActiveProspect is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform which seeks to make consent-based marketing the most scalable, efficient, and safest method for customer acquisition.
AppSumo is a ‘daily deals’ website that seeks to make entrepreneurship accessible for everyone. AppSumo has helped launch over 1,500 startups — like Mailchimp, Evernote, and Dropbox.
Atlassian is an Australia-based SaaS company that builds collaborative tools like Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, Trello, and OpsGenie.
BazaarVoice has an extensive global retail network, engaged community, and software offerings designed to drive their clients’ revenue, extend their reach, gain them actionable insights, and create loyal customers.
If you’ve listened to Lil Nas X’s hit “Old Town Road,” you’ve heard of BeatStars. The hip-hop star bought the beat for his signature track on the music marketplace for $30, giving these disruptors the best example yet of their platform’s potential.
BigCommerce is another Australia-founded company that made its way to Austin. Its chief product is a hosted shopping cart. Its SaaS has been used by 60,000 online stores in 120 countries.
An Austin in-mover, Bloomfire specializes in SaaS. The company creates web-based applications that target workplace information sharing.
Bold Commerce is a software company which provides ecommerce technology to more than 90,000 brands in 170 countries worldwide.
Bumble is a social network with several modes. In the popular dating application, women must contact their male matches first. Bumble also offers Bumble BFF and Bumble Bizz to fill in the gaps in users’ friendship or networking lives.
Canva is another Australia-based tech company that’s opened a US office in Austin. Canva is a graphic design platform which is used to create over 229 million social media graphics, presentations, posters, and other documents per month.
Duo has more than 25,000 customers worldwide, including Bird, Facebook, Lyft, University of Michigan, Yelp, and Zillow. Duo is now part of Cisco Systems. Their mission is to “democratize security by making it easy and effective for everyone to use.”
Indeed is the most popular job site in the world, with over 250 million unique visitors every month. Their emphasis on putting job seekers first applies to their own employees — which number around 10,000.
Khoros is an SaaS company with offices around the world, headquartered in Austin. Formerly called Spredfast + Lithium, Khoros provides online community management, social media marketing, analytics, and content management software and services.
LogicMonitor is a leading SaaS-based IT monitoring and AI platform for businesses.
Orchard is a home-selling intermediary which aims to take the stress and logistics out of moving house. They handle all the details of home sales, and advance the cash needed to make a non-contingent offer on a new home.
RetailMeNot is the internet’s leading coupon aggregator, and yet another Australia-Austin tech connection. It’s more corporate than many other entries on this list, born of VC money and operating a slew of companies under the auspices of its parent company, Los Angeles-based J2 Global Inc.
Silicon Laboratories designs and manufactures semiconductors, silicon devices, and software for Internet of Things infrastructure applications. It first came to prominence in the late 1990s for its modem and cell phone components.
Snow Software is a Sweden-headquartered SaaS company with offices in 18 countries — the Austin branch is their only US office. They have more than 4,000 customers worldwide.
Founded in 1990 by a University of Texas at Austin scalper, TicketCity predates the online marketplace. In 1998, it became one of the first online ticket brokers. Through acquisitions, it gradually expanded its access to ticket markets nationwide.
30% of all websites are built with WordPress, and WP Engine hosts a good number of them. This premium hosting service is part of the WordPress corporate family, so it shares back-end development. Its speed and integration are the big draws for the half-million websites that use the service.
Has the tech movement to Austin already hit its peak
Keith Nealon, CEO of Bazaarvoice, doesn’t think so. He told CMSWire that Austin would become a tech boomtown — an assertion that Elon Musk has echoed.
Nealon foresees something special in this tech company convergence, a creative synergy. “We will continue to see the different types of technology flourish,” he said, “from software, to AI, to healthcare, to fintech. With all the brainpower relocating to Austin, definitely expect innovation to accelerate.”
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