Given this, I can't imagine trying to recruit the best and the brightest to NC given recent developments when there are more accepting places like NY, Silicon Valley, Seattle, etc. There are a ton of talented people who wouldn't want to live there. I'll concede that there may be others who want to live there more because of what went down, but those same people could be recruited almost anywhere without a meaningful depreciation in quality of life.
http://www.wral.com/news/political/page/10991843/
Durham and Orange Counties voted no by over 2-1 margins. And meanwhile, Proposition 8 passed in California a few years back; indeed, such propositions have been passed everywhere in the US where they've been put to the voters as a whole. North Carolina is not distinguished in this respect.
I personally like San Francisco over RTP, despite originally being from Durham, but there is a lot that is very good about the RTP area, and I personally know a lot of very talented people who are extremely happy (if, admittedly, a little bit less so this week...) to call it home.
NC is a wonderful place, I was making the comment that now it's just a little harder to recruit great people there. Perception matters when scaling a company. Starting a 10 person team is probably fine. Scaling to a 100-200 team gets that much harder.
Projecting your political opinions a bit?
The guy was sympathetic, but we both knew that was the end of that conversation.
For some of us this isn't a matter of politics, but an impact on our quality of life. And for others of us, it may just be a matter of politics, but even then, that doesn't mean it's trivial.
That is a bit unfair, but unsurprising. People choose to work where they want to live, and they'll work with the people they're most familiar with and understand, in the environment around them.
Colloquially, people use "RTP" as shorthand for "The Triangle"[2] which is generally considered an area roughly defined by a triangle of lines connecting Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. Or, depending on your take, connecting Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and NC State University.
RTP (or "The Triangle") is a tech hub in the Southeast region, and is becoming quite a startup hotbed. But one of the limitations of this area is lack of access to early stage capital. Of all the things that hurt entrepreneurs in this area, that's probably the single most encountered problem. :-(
OK, not quite that bad, but still, you get the drift. What's happening in California is not necessarily indicative of what's going on in the rest of the world. Research Triangle Park, for example, is FAR from having enough capital freely available, much less too much. Look at the most recent Triangle Startup Factory class... they took, what, six startups out of - IIRC - a hundred and some applications?
Now to be fair, probably not all 100 of those startups are worthy of funding... But I know there were more than six worthy startups in the Raleigh / Durham / Chapel Hill area as of March, 2012.