As unemployment in some American states climbs above 10 per cent, the giants of Silicon Valley are throwing increasing piles of cash at people like Rose.
"I've never seen things as white hot as they are at the moment," says Mike Butcher, the editor of TechCrunch Europe, a technology news blog. "Google [is] looking for the vision of the sort Mark Zuckerberg has. These people aren't just creating a product, they're creating something people will want, whether or not they know it now."
Rose was raised in Las Vegas, where he dropped out of a computer science degree. In 2004 he co-founded Digg, which allowed web users to like links online. The site first attracted Google in 2008, when a US$200 million buyout deal was on the table before collapsing. Rose left the company last year to found Milk, a mobile applications company.
"Many people in the tech community are saying that what will limit the growth of tech companies over the next few years is not the technology, but the people," Butcher says.
The American Society for Training and Development has predicted that, by 2015, 60 per cent of new jobs will require specialist skills held by just 20 per cent of the population.
When talent emerges it's usually in a small start-up whose product acts as bait for the big fish. The real catch is the brains behind the company. At tech conventions across the world, competing companies and young entrepreneurs circle each other.
- Independent
