Drawn by a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem, California transplants find a lot to love about the city.
Kyle Wiens and Karla Valdivieso run two completely different businesses that have one remarkable thing in common: They both launched in California and ended up setting roots in Chattanooga, TN, after their founders decided to relocate to a city they’d never heard of before.
For Wiens, the move came after two decades building iFixit, the business he launched in 2003 with co-founder Luke Soules, from their home base in San Luis Obispo, California.
“We needed an East Coast distribution facility, so there was a region it had to fall into geographically and that was a pretty big region,” says Wiens, the CEO of iFixit…