Silicon Valley in the 1990s was a place and time unlike any other, Bill Kalivas says.


The Spokane native talks almost romantically about having been there, as an old hippie might talk about being in San Francisco in the late 1960s. The difference is that Kalivas tells stories about synergy, technology, and big money, rather than tales of peace, love, and people wearing flowers in their hair.


Kalivas, a network-systems major account manager with Cisco Systems Inc.s regional headquarters office here, saw receptionists become millionaires when they cashed in stock options after their high-tech employers went public and witnessed major players kicking around merger details over lattes at coffee shops.


As a single father, however, he also watched his children go to what he considered to be substandard schools, and realized he couldnt buy a house because of skyrocketing real estate prices.


I wanted to get back to Spokane, says the 36-year-old Kalivas, who returned to the Spokane area in 1999. After four years in the Silicon Valley, I learned to really appreciate what we have here.


Hes not alone. He ticks off the names of a handful of people who grew up here, but moved away to pursue careers in high technology elsewhere, then returned to the Spokane area to work and raise their families.


Jeannine Marx, owner of JM Recruiting, a headhunting company here that specializes in placing high-tech workers, has noticed the same thing.


I have noticed that in the last year or so, Im consistently getting at least one e-mail a week from a person who grew up here and wants to come back, she says.


About two-thirds of the employees she recruits for high-tech companies here already are working in the Spokane area, Marx says. To find the other third, however, she has to search in other cities. If she can find someone with a tie to the Inland Northwest, it makes getting the employee to Spokane and keeping him or her here that much easier, she says.


Steve Helmbrecht, a 1981 graduate of Gonzaga Preparatory School, returned to Spokane last summer to take a job as chief financial officer at LineSoft Corp., a fast-growing Spokane-based maker of software for power-line planning and design.


Helmbrecht, 38, previously was senior vice president of international operations at SS&C Technologies Inc., a Windsor, Conn.-based maker of software for institutional investors. He and his family had just returned to Seattle from a three-and-a-half-year assignment in London when he was approached about working for LineSoft. The idea sparked his interest.


I came here (to visit), and it got me excited about what the company is doing, Helmbrecht says. I liked the opportunity to be in a Spokane-based company and become a part of the exciting growth thats occurring.


Kalivas, a 1982 graduate of East Valley High School, moved to Spokane to oversee sales in the Pacific Northwest region for Williams Communications Group Inc., a Tulsa, Okla.-based network-systems provider for which he had worked in San Jose, Calif. After being here about a year, he learned that Cisco Systems was expanding its Spokane operation into a regional headquarters and went to work for Cisco.


Kalivas says the cost of living is pleasantly, substantially less in Spokane than in the Silicon Valley.


My house that I bought here for $200,000 would have sold for $1 million down there, he says.


Helmbrecht likes that in the Spokane area it doesnt take as long to get from one place to another, which makes it easier to do things on the spur of the moment.


Like Helmbrecht and Kalivas, workers who are interested in returning to Spokane typically have young or school-aged children, Marx says. Oftentimes, she says, they want to come back to Spokane for its school systems and to get their kids away from the big-city environment.


Bernard Daines is the most prominentand certainly one of the most successfulexamples of a native son who has made good elsewhere, then returned to set up shop here. In 1995, he moved Packet Engines Inc., a high-speed computer network developer, to the Spokane Valley from Union City, Calif. He sold that company in late 1998 and started World Wide Packets, a network-hardware designer, about a year later. It now employs about 150 people here.


While Daines couldnt be reached for comment for this story, Nancy Goodspeed, spokeswoman for World Wide Packets, says that a number of Spokane natives with high-tech experience elsewhere joined Daines at Packet Engines when he grew that company here. Some then joined him at World Wide Packets, says Goodspeed, who also teamed up with Daines once again after working in Montana and at Avista Corp. after Packet Engines was sold.


Other people who grew up here also have moved back with aspirations of starting companies. Spokane native Chris Kelly graduated from Stanford University in the early 1980s and worked as a technical writer in the Silicon Valley for about 15 years. He spent several years with Apple Computers Inc., then worked full time as a freelancer, writing manuals for companies ranging from Microsoft Corp. to Hewlett Packard Co. to 3Com Corp.


Back in Spokane now, living in his old neighborhood near Mission Park, Kelly is considering starting his own company. He says the company still is in its conceptual stage. He currently is calling it Wobbly World and says it would be a multimedia travel-guide business with a large Internet presence. He declines for now to disclose further details about that prospective enterprise.


Kelly says he moved back to Spokane three years ago after, I realized that I wasnt doing anything there that I couldnt do for Spokane. I realized there was nothing keeping me from moving back.


What Spokane needs


Along with their individual skill sets, high-tech workers who are returning to Spokane are bringing with them ideas for continuing to improve Spokanes high-tech sector.


Both Kalivas and Kelly speak of an energy they felt in the Silicon Valley that only now is starting to be felt here. Both men boost the Spokane area as having both a lot of people with high-tech expertise and a lot of promising startup companies. Each of them, however, says separately that while Spokane has the resources to help startup enterprises, the young companies dont have access to that experience, at least not to the extent that they do in the Silicon Valley.


A couple of groups, the Entrepreneurs Forum of the Great Northwest and the Columbia Council, recently have formed to facilitate high-tech networking and business development, Kelly says, but those operate more like a grapevine than a pipeline for information at this stage.


Kalivas says, Everybody has been working in a silo in Spokane. We need to connect everybody.


Helmbrecht says, however, that Spokanes high-tech industry suffers from misperceptions more than anything else.


The reality already is that Spokane is growing and a great place to work, he says. The perception isnt there yet. We collectively need to work to get that message out there.


Fears and reservations


Of course, those who return also have their reservations.


Kalivas says his biggest fear was that his job wouldnt work out, and he wouldnt be able to find a comparable job opportunity in the Spokane area. That proved not to be the case, though he has noticed the number of calls he receives from headhunters has dropped substantially since he moved here from the Bay Area.


Marx says many people that shes recruited have echoed that concern, but the opportunities here are improving, she says. Currently, for example, 10 companies here and in Coeur dAlene need computer programmers, which gives workers options outside of one particular company, she says.


Potential returnees are concerned oftentimes about low wages in the Spokane area and whether a spouse will be able to find a job here, an issue referred to in economic-development circles as the trailing spouse dilemma, Marx says.


Helmbrecht and Kalivas report that they moved here for jobs with pay equal to or better than what they made in other cities, and the trailing-spouse issue was moot for each of them.


For others, Marx says, those issues cant be overcome. Some high-tech companies here offer salaries that are competitive on a national level. Others, however, pay salaries that are $10,000 to $15,000 less than what workers make while doing the same job in other areas.


Helmbrecht, speaking more like an employer than an employee, says, We have to compete with Silicon Valley and Seattle. All companies here are going to have to offer a competitive package.


Marx says that occasionally a high-tech worker will agree to come to Spokane under the condition that his or her spouse can find a job comparable to a job they have elsewhere. In some instances, she says, the spouse cant be placed in a position, and the high-tech worker opts not to relocate to Spokane. It doesnt happen frequently, she says, but it happens often enough.