As a community, we take great pride in recruiting regional offices for tech companies — startups and large firms alike. Benefits include high paying jobs, cachet from having name-brand employers in town, and general civic pride. Only, from an innovation perspective, there’s one real downside: regional offices don’t do the most important work.
If you want to attract the absolute best people, you need the absolute most important work. And, in the tech world, the most important work almost always takes places at the headquarters (and for companies that were acquired, headquarters here means where ever the core product is developed). The best way to grow the base of the most important work is to develop the homegrown entrepreneurial success stories. In fact, this is also the best way possible to help startup communities.
What else? What are your thoughts on the idea that the most important work is typically done at the corporate headquarters?
David Cummings on Startups 
This used to be true. Times may be changing.
At the Atlanta Press Club on Tuesday, Ralph de la Vega (President, AT&T Wireless and Business Services) said firmly that AT&T was moving to a networked model, with critical tasks distributed among Dallas (the legal HQ), Atlanta, El Segundo, and “someday soon, a location in Mexico.”
Even without being HQ, Atlanta is getting plenty of creative work from the AT&T Foundry, AT&T Drive Studio (both in Tech Square), and other locations.