The Software Industry’s Cabin in the Woods – Portland, Oregon has quietly lured startups and big company satellites.

In 2013, about a year after he started the property-management software company Cozy in San Francisco, Chief Executive Officer Gino Zahnd hired a guy who insisted on living in Portland, Ore. So Zahnd set up a small office there and, in the interests of fairness, slowly started letting the rest of his employees choose between the two. By 2015, all 18 were in Portland. In the Bay Area office, Zahnd was the one who finally turned off the lights.

"We’d have people come up from the San Francisco office to work in Portland, and they’d just want to stay," Zahnd says. That’s fine by him: In Portland, he pays less than one-third of his San Francisco office expenses.

Peter Robison

Full Story: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-18/portland-oregon-s-laid-back-answer-to-silicon-valley