NEO Establishes U.S. Foothold in Seattle

Da Hongfei, the founder of NEO, announced that the NEO Global Development (NGD) had established a base of operations in Seattle, Washington. This move will see them gain a significant foothold in the US markets. NEO chose Seattle because of its strong software development scene and the fact that it was the birthplace of companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Expedia and it is also home to offices from Facebook, Google, and Twitter. As such, Seattle is brimming with software talent.

Speaking at DevCon, Hongfei said:

“We are now in Seattle, the hometown of one of the biggest software companies in the world—Microsoft...Nobody knows how to win a platform competition better than Microsoft, especially for computer language frameworks and platforms….We tried to compare different locations in the US and Seattle seemed to be the best choice. New York is more for the financial sector. San Francisco or Silicon Valley is good for startups if you want to do fundraising, or [for] more consumer side internet companies. But, if you want to do serious software development, I think Seattle is a better choice.”

The NGD is going start small in Seattle but there are plans to expand soon:

“In Seattle, we will start small but gradually expand. We don’t want all the engineers [for NEO] to move to Seattle and work in the office. NGD Seattle will orchestrate all the things [related to the development effort]....We are moving from the industrial economy to the smart economy or digital economy. In the smart economy, a lot of things happen at a global scale. There is different talent in different countries and different cities. The US definitely has lots of lots of talent. We do think that we do need an office in the US and an office in China. So we will have the best of both worlds.”