Citrix being sold for $16.5 billion to Vista Equity Partners and Elliott Investment Management:
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article257883208.html#storylink=mainstage_lead
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Just being taken private by Private Equity…which could be terrible for employees
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This news doesn’t necessarily mean immediate shift for Raleigh (or Citrix for that matter) but I was just telling Karla as we were walking around downtown the other day that I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Citrix building with a different logo on it in the coming years. They only “came to town” because of their acquisition of ShareFile and while I think Raleigh has a great talent pool, I’m not sure if Citrix has legs in this tech world. Most of their products are relevant, but they have stiff competition and I’m not sure they’ve evolved as well as some others in their space. Anyway, I love their building and I wouldn’t be distraught if a fun local start up was able to take that space over and really activate it again.
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I hope they build a taller parking deck, too! 
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They are getting merged with Tibco so they will have plenty of “legs”. 400,000 customers. Just wish thry would move HQ here.
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This N&O article (which is based on this new study from the influential Brookings Institute) has some fascinating statistics about missed economic opportunities from not supporting Black-owned businesses.
Ideally, the composition and performance of businesses owned by Black people shouldn’t be any different from those owned by the rest of the general population. But it turns out only 4% of businesses in Raleigh’s MSA are owned by Black people (versus 21.6% of Americans or 29.0% of people in Raleigh being Black), and that’s not the only difference. With the paper’s assumption that “no gains in Black business revenue or size come at the expense of non-Black businesses”, this has some interesting implications:
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We would’ve had 11,500+ more jobs in Raleigh if existing Black businesses were able to hire as many people as the race-agnostic average. Black-owned businesses in Raleigh employ an average of 10 people each, versus 21 for all races.
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If the number of businesses were to also keep up the same way, that number shoots up to nearly 146,000 more jobs. That’s more than 35 times the numbers of employees that our upcoming Apple and Google headquarters will hire.
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Raleigh’s economy would have $280M+ more moving around if Black businesses that already exist were able to pay their employees an equal average salary as the average across all businesses.
The subtext of the N&O article seems to be that Black people are naturally taking advantage of these sorts of opportunities -mainly through online microbusinesses and small, local stores- but they may be unregistered, undercounted, and/or struggling to raise capital.
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The Brookings Institute is obviously full of smart people, but that core assumption that a world where Black business was up to par would in no way come at the expense of non-Black business feels very shaky. Even with a larger pool of customers from a wealthier Black population, you’d also have weaker non-Black businesses going under, which seems like a more complex interaction than “let’s just zero it out.”
Even if we realize all that historically underused potential, the study seems designed to create eye-catching numbers versus seriously figuring out the actual slack in the economy from historic injustice.
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I agree that the assumption seems flimsy, but isn’t that a different research question that’s out of scope for this paper?
I think this study was only meant to be a first draft for one possible counterfactual to our reality, and not a complete account that accounts for indirect effects from the additional competition from more, wealthier Black businesses. Besides, since that paper also notes that no metro area in the U.S. actually has Black businesses’ performances on par with its local community as a whole, it also implies we have no direct, apples-to-apples comparison to estimate the true slack from historic (and currently, too!) systemic injustices.
You could model it based on historical data and idealized assumptions about how the market will behave. But I think that really only makes the problem you pointed out worse since you’d have to extrapolate your data and abuse your assumptions even more; that’s just bad science.
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So here my response to it Raleigh MSA is Raleigh-Cary if Durham and Chapel Hill MSAs were merge with us which I believe will happen in 2023. This number of black business would be higher. But we have to fight for that merger to represent the black businesses that are in Durham mostly… But I also believe blacks are hated for having progress that’s called white fragility (I’m not saying all white people or black people in America or on this forum are that way), you mentioned Black businesses were denied PPP loans that’s because black people are the most hated people in the world IMO next hated group would be Jews. Black people and black businesses were hit hard yet the Biden administration and Dems not just blocked black business from getting PPP they helped Asian businesses more (nothing against that) but that anti-black sentiment is too blame. But this has happened before when the Ebola Virus happened back in 2014 black businesses were hit hard. White folk hotta know this when black people when we do good we all do good.
Sincerely,
From a Black Man…
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Umm, I’m pretty sure money for PPP loans was gone way before the Biden administration. Unless there were additional rounds that I wasn’t aware of years after the first.
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Isn’t this thread supposed to talk about actual business expansion in Raleigh?
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It matters Jessie! @UncleJesse
Had an interesting conversation today. I have been hearing rumors of Amazon Web Services & Salesforce scouting office space in Downtown. Today I heard Meta (aka: Facebook) is also looking at the Raleigh area…seriously. No further details as to whether its Downtown, the Park, Durham or where but this general area is the target location…
My source is quite credible…
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Zimmer block on Peace
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Doesn’t Salesforce already have space in The Dillon?
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Hmm interesting… I hope they look at us good we need a revival.
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A revival? What do you mean? We’re not exactly Detroit, or Dayton, OH.
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RIGHT lmao. Raleigh is and has been one of the fastest growing cities in the entire country, no clue what they are referring to needing a “revival”
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SF does have space in the Dillon but they don’t go by the SF name for some reason. My understanding is that its R&D…but why they don’t go by the SF brand is not clear
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Don’t AWS and Salesforce have a presence in most major cities? Not trying to throw cold water on it or anything, but that was always the impression I had.