Mosaic Steering Committee Member Sekhar Prabhakar Writes About Talent, Immigrants, Mosaic Project
When I moved to St. Louis from Silicon Valley in 2000, I soon learned of specific challenges for the St. Louis technology sector and its labor force. Here, the smaller job pool forced many St. Louis tech workers to become road warriors — requiring significant domestic travel without reciprocally bringing in sustainable revenue to the region as a direct consequence. As we would see with Amazon, massive corporations and offshore companies adopted an e-commerce model that led to the closure of many small businesses who could not keep up with the competition and associated shifts in customer demands and expenditure. In 2006, St. Louis took a step in the right direction through the efforts of ITEN and local nonprofit organizations, together advocating for investment in emerging St. Louis startup companies. Read more