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Comment by kozikow | Hacker News Reader

> San Francisco isn't Silicon Valley. It has never been the center of the tech world, and to whatever extent it's tech-heavy now that's less than 20 years old.

I moved to Mountain View to found a startup a few months ago. When I think about the "chat over coffee" type of meetings go, I would say that there may be slightly more of them in San Francisco than South Bay.

It feels like San Francisco starts to outweigh Silicon Valley. I didn't do precise calculation, but estimation based on my gut feelings would say that ratio of "Seed stage" startups between SF and South bay is 2/1.

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Long-term companies in the south bay that have no (or virtually no) SF tech presence. Just off the top of my head: Google/Alphabet, Facebook, Oracle, Texas Instruments, National Semiconductor, Intel, AMD, Applied Materials, Apple, Yahoo, Tesla, Palantir, and so on and so on.

Yes there are lots of kids in SF trying to get their website turned into the next unicorn. That does not make SF the "center of the tech world", it makes it the "center of the SF tech startup world".

I don't know about the rest, but google has a large office in SF and many, many people wanting positions in it (even if just a few days a week).

Most people who "work" in the SF office commute to MTV 3x/week. It's more of a coworking space than an office.

There are dedicated teams that are only there, and/or parts of teams that are full time only there. I was on one, for example, and knew of others.

Google has a large office space just down the street here in SF. Yahoo has/had a huge office in SF. Then on top of that, there are ton of buses going from SF down the peninsula, which recognizes that choice of many to live in SF.

Unless you count the hundreds of engineers and multiple offices Google has in SF.

I know people at the first two companies who work in SF. Not sure about the rest of the list.

> ratio of "Seed stage" startups between SF and South bay is 2/1.

The density of tech startups in SF is much lower, more like New York. Most of them are just retail companies (shops) or food services. Yes, Pinterest, uber, lift, twitter have serious tech problems to solve involving scale, but companies like that are in the minority. And businesses where people develop new technologies are more common in the Valley.

Living in the city and commuting to the Valley was already the norm when I got here in the early 80s.

Let me add to that list for you (in no particular order), Optimizely, Salesforce.com, Heroku, Medium, Square, Docker, CoreOS, AirBNB, OpenTable, Yelp, Mesosphere, Instacart, a whole bunch of drone startups and many more...

Well sure but you're making my point. Silicon Valley has non-tech businesses too like Survey Monkey which is about as high tech as Yelp, i.e. not much higher tech than a Cheesecake Factory (who has a lot of computerized supply chain).

The point isn't to have a pissing match. I'm simply pointing out that the heavyweight tech region is the San Francisco Bay area but within it the tech influence is unevenly distributed which should hardly be remarkable.

It's easier to find marketing, PR, non-B2B sales folks, web designers, ruby developers etc in SF than down here. It's way easier to find people down here who understand interrupt latency on 32-bit arm cores, oddities of device physics below .14 nm, B2B BD folks and the like. Does one diminish the other? No.

Reporters from outside of course go to SF to report because, frankly, what's to see in Palo Alto? I have lived in Palo Alto for decades and yes, apart from the work (which is awesome) it's dull compared to SF, or even to many places lamer than SF.

I think part of the point is that tech startups aren't founded upon chats over coffee, they're founded by a couple guys working on a project nobody else thinks is important in a garage. Completely anecdotally, that still seems to happen more often in the South Bay than in SF, if only because there are more garages. There are probably more startups being founded in SF, but there's more tech being developed in the South Bay.

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