We'll get to the Origin Story of Bitwise another time: What Soberal and Olguin are doing here, how they agreed to work together, what they hope to accomplish for the region. For now the focus is on the improbable challenge of building a tech industry in a part of the country with an agricultural-centric economy, no major nearby research universities, and a reputation (as discussed previously) as a place that ambitious young people move away from rather than return to.

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I asked Jake Soberal on this latest visit, as I had earlier on, what he thought could be the business base for a tech economy that was 3+ hours' drive from either Los Angeles or San Francisco (sadly, High-Speed Rail does not yet exist) and thus would lack all the place-based advantages that came automatically to firms in SF, Boston, or New York. How could he fight the trend toward the concentration of national and global talent in a handful of hyper-expensive but also hyper-productive big centers?

To boil a long discussion down to two main points, his first argument was that the global centers and the regional ones could prosper together—the latter using their advantage of such dramatically lower operating costs. (Note for future article: In about six or eight big U.S. metro areas, life is ever-shaped by the unavoidable, unbelievable cost of real estate. Since these are the areas that dominate our media, entertainment, and politics, that's cast as an overall American predicament too. But it is not, at least not in most of the places we've been.)

"The per-person total cost of a very happy mid-career developer here is $80,000 to $100,000," Soberal said. "That's half, or less than half, of the cost in the Bay Area" or other big tech centers. "If we can get a critical mass of people here in Fresno who are competent and capable, national and global companies will choose to expand their operations here. The Silicon Valley and Boston and Portland will continue to grow. And so will Fresno—and Des Moines and Wichita. Software and tech have not been a zero-sum game."

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That is what you could think of as the "outsourcing" part of the Bitwise/ Greater Fresno tech vision. Another part was more intriguing to me, in that it matched the observation we've heard in the most successful-seeming cities across the country. That is the insistence on "knowing who we really are" in a given city or region, and choosing strategies based on an honest assessment of an area's advantages and handicaps.

What Fresno really is, is the regional capital of one of the world's most important agricultural areas. "The economy is global, but significant strengths are local," Soberal said. "Industries tend to develop in a regional way." He went on to argue (1) that agriculture involves many of humanity's most important challenges, starting with sustainability in all its aspects; (2) that agriculture was still relatively behind in apply modern data tools to its operations; and that therefore (3) tech companies in the Central Valley had an opportunity to become the leaders in a field of ever-increasing important.

"My guess is that 5 to 10 percent of the tech need of the farming industry is now being met," he said. As compared to about 900 percent of the financial services industry and four million percent of the online commerce industry. "You could build a technology industry in Fresno based on that alone, not to mention the worldwide need in agriculture." (For a previous report on high tech in agriculture, see this account by our Marketplace colleagues on our trip to Sioux Falls back in 2013.)