The CEO and co-founder of a file-sharing start-up based in Alphabet's hometown said his company is expanding only in other locations because Silicon Valley workers have "a sense of entitlement" and competing to hire them is a near-impossible task.
Egnyte plans to expand from about 350 employees to 500 globally in the next 18 to 24 months by hiring in several other U.S. and European cities, said Vineet Jain. He also told CNBC he is readying the company for a possible 2019 IPO.
Egnyte is doing most of its hiring far from its headquarters in Mountain View, California, Jain says, because he can't add them fast enough there "to move at start-up speed."
Workers in the nation's biggest tech hub demand high salaries and top-shelf perks and are quick to jump ship if they don't like their work because opportunities are so plentiful, he says.
"There are no consequences for non-performance" and "a sense of entitlement in the valley," says Jain, whose 10-year-old company has to compete with Google, nearby Facebook in Menlo Park, California, and other tech giants for sales and engineering workers.
Egnyte offers file storage and synchronization services for companies. It competes in the same market as Box and Dropbox, as well as with similar offerings from giant companies such as Alphabet and Microsoft. But unlike many of these offerings, Egnyte's file storage solution can also work on-premises, not just in the cloud.
The company plans to open a new office in Raleigh, North Carolina, and hire dozens of sales and technical workers in existing locations in Spokane, Washington; Bracknell, England; and Poznan, Poland, Jain said.
Jain said Egnyte is also beginning to prepare for an IPO. In May, the company did an analysis of its financial results based on so-called Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or GAAP, which is required of publicly traded companies.
When CNBC asked if the company would go public next year, Jain replied: "No, 2019. It would take 18 months" from now to go public.
The company's revenue is growing at a rate "near 40 percent" and has been cash-flow-positive since earlier this year, Jain said, declining to give more specifics.