Sam Altman: Bay Area is no longer the obvious place for startups
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> There are still some things—e.g great startup executive talent, particular kinds of engineering talent—that are much harder to find outside the bay area.
This is spot on and it becomes a real bottle neck if you want to scale your startup beyond $500MM valuation.
Obviously you often can’t choose if you want to be a $100M startup or a billion dollar startup, and by the time you’ve passed the $100M mark it can be too late to refocus on the Bay Area and you might lose momentum by dealing with all kinds of things that shouldn’t matter.
We’ve run into serious talent recruiting issues when we reached this stage and we “solved” it by opening offices in SF and Mtn View. But it was not ideal and a huge waste of money/time.
Can you give some examples?
> We’ve run into serious talent recruiting issues when we reached this stage
So - things that shouldn't matter that you would have to do if you moved
Get New office.
Deal with people that need to staff new office because some of your people won't move. Hiring. If you don't do that then you get an office through some co-working solution and have to deal with whatever requirements there are there.
If international - visas etc.
If opening local bay area office but keeping your other offices setting up culture to be able to work together between two or more locations.
If opening bay area office but closing local dealing with people's issues about moving. For example I would never move to the U.S from Denmark, so I had a job opportunity from a startup that was making the move right at the time and I said no. If I had been hired 6 months before I would have of course refused to move, and they would have had to deal with that.
Sure, many tech employees probably moved to the Bay Area primarily to find employment, but even if they don’t enjoy other aspects of the area, a place you live in for a while will become your home, and abandoning your home is not an easy or obvious decision to make.
Let‘s live there!
Plus, everything really expensive to live there. And if I work at Google I drive two hours with a bus there.
I don‘t know but reading about that place it‘s insanity.
And the output is Hit and miss. I know of no startup in the last ten years that‘s any substantial or enhancing live tremendously.
Actually, I’m pretty sure the vast majority of people in the Bay Area have very long commutes.
I had a 2 mile commute when I was working at Google - it was 5 minutes by car, and about 12 minutes by bike. I've got a 30 foot commute now - I work from home. I've put about 30k miles on my 10 year old car.
Many of my friends are the same - live in Mountain View, work at the Googleplex, ~10 minute commute. Well, at least back when I was still commuting. I've heard traffic over the 101 bridges has gotten stupendously bad such that it can take 30 minutes to drive 100 yards, but that's easily averted by walking or biking. (Apparently it now takes less time to walk from most of North Mountain View to the Googleplex than to drive, during rush hour.)
You do pay for the privilege, and you sacrifice in other ways (eg. there's not much in the way of night life in the South Bay). But most of the folks with the 1-2 hour commutes in the Bay are a.) not in tech, and therefore screwed in many ways b.) consider living in the city to be non-negotiable, and therefore willing to put up with all sorts of literal shit to maintain that lifestyle or c.) consider living in the mountains to be non-negotiable, and so are willing to put up with a long but beautiful commute to maintain that lifestyle.
My impression of SF having spent time there is that it hits the nail on the head. Sure, I doubt you get junkies asking you for money for heroin in Marin County, but it certainly happens in Union Sq.
Meth hit San Rafael pretty hard, Novato was taking federal money for anti-gang police work, and homelessness is definitely a visible problem in Marin (well, more visible these days).
Edit: Oh yeah, and the Canal was a hot spot for child sex trafficking when I was younger (cash wages + men away from their families), dunno if it still is. Marin City, well, that's a story for another time.
If you believe that you either live an extremely sheltered existence in SF or you've not visited recently.
San Francisco is pretty bad no matter where you go (except, perhaps, for the affluent areas like Sea Cliff and St Francis Woods). Out in the Outer Sunset I saw what looked like someone shat out a tapeworm over the course of three blocks the other day (if you'd like pictures, I'd be happy to oblige).
I went down to Rainbow Grocery last week and sat outside munching on some popcorn. It only took a few minutes before I was approached by a guy asking for some. Sharing food is something I've done before and will do again, but finger foods? No thanks. So the guy walks away, picks up his walking stick, gives me the crazy eyes, and then starts swinging the stick at me while muttering incoherently. This is also a part of town where you never know which side of the street you'll have to avoid due to the massive encampments (side effect of the super bowl bullshit really). Meanwhile I walked away as quickly as I could only to get hit with the stench of human shit. Turns out someone had dropped a steaming five inch mound of fresh shit nearby. The 311 ticket got closed out because they couldn't be bothered to figure out which corner if the intersection the smell was coming from (despite there being GPS coordinates in the damn picture).
I took BART last weekend to the Oakland Museum of California (the Eames exhibit was fun). I managed to get stuck on the periphery of no less than two fights on the damn trains. Last time I took BART late at night I hadn't quite realized what an open air drug market it had become. And, of course, Civic Center station has never been great but I've been seeing folks shooting up on the steps during the day. Something I never saw when I was working in that neighborhood years ago.
Backing up to earlier last week I sat next to a well traveled woman a few years younger than myself on my flight to SFO. She's from Harlem and visits SF annually. The thing that struck her most about SF vs NY was that drug use is far more open than in New York and so is homelessness. That jives with my experiences as well — San Francisco is demonstrably worse than other urban areas I've visited.
For fun search youtube for videos on sideshows. How many other urban areas get their major roads (e.g. the bay bridge, I-880) shutdown to make way for people hooning their cars? Let's not spend too much time talking about the condition of the roads out here either. They put Newark to shame. And we don't even have the excuse of extreme weather like they do in Jersey.
> There is a reason why housing here is extremely expensive. People want to live here.
That is a large part of the reason, but San Francisco is also seeing the Vancouver-like thing of rich folks parking their money in housing.
Don't forget that people often have entirely irrational reasons for wanting to live in San Francisco. Some of them have been deported from other states (thanks Las Vegas!), some of them still have a very romanticized view of San Francisco (it's not the summer of love anymore but there are plenty of kids that migrate out here in pursuit of that dream).
It's true, San Francisco used to have sketchy areas (I lived in Bayview in the late 1990s) and now basically doesn't, since the worst apartment in Bayview probably costs more than my house in Chicago does. Ok, you win. But the comment you're responding to is about quality of life in San Francisco. Nobody in Chicago is going to ask for your popcorn and swing a stick at you if you don't comply. We don't have tent cities on our main-drag sidewalks. The CTA goes pretty much everywhere and isn't an open-air drug market. We manage this despite being a larger city, with our own real pressures, and having nothing resembling the tax base San Francisco has.
San Francisco is broken. I'm sure it's fixable, but people probably need to stop pretending things are OK first.
To be fair, the antisocial behavior I witnessed on the CTA {Green Line|Red Line south of Roosevelt} and the Muni is comparable. I've never been verbally accosted by passengers on CTA like I have on Muni, but I did witness blatant pickpocketing and a drugged passenger break the bus door on CTA, which I've never seen on Muni.
For what it's worth, my sense is that the issues that SF has Chicago doesn't--homelessness, untreated mental illness--largely stem from cost of living differences, particularly housing prices. Everything from opening shelters to operating mental health facilities to avoiding homelessness in the first place is easier when real estate is more affordable. (To give an example, my hometown of College Station, Texas--hardly a bastion of liberalism!--had a quite effective program for preventing homelessness in the '90s and the aughts: straight-up building enough houses to house virtually all the needy and pricing them far below market rate. This worked because of the combination of a rich suburban tax base and rock-bottom real estate prices, which would not work in Chicago or anywhere in California.) That doesn't excuse SF and the state of California from failing to better address the problems, of course.
My experience is that Muni itself is generally OK (yes even the 8/9, 14, and 38), but that BART has gotten really bad over the past couple years. For a while Muni stopped running the (then new) hybrid buses in the Bayview because people would hit the external kill switches when the bus was stopped.
There are a couple of California-specific and SF-specific issues at play as well. SFPD simply doesn't ride Muni, although I believe they're contractually obligated to. Meanwhile BART PD is spread very thin (around four officers at any given time for their SF stations).
At the state level, California makes it very difficult to force someone to stay on psychiatric medication or keep them in an institution. I don't believe this is as much of an issue in Illinois.
I worked at Sixth and Market for a few years, so, yes I think it's largely worse than it was in the early 2000s. The big tech companies haven't helped the situation by attempting to sanitize it. Getting rid of the chess players did not help anything.
> You know, like, Chicago has 500 murders a year.
Nice whataboutism though.
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/california-...
Some of them have been deported from other states (thanks Las Vegas!), some of them still have a very romanticized view of San Francisco
From what I gather, both of these statements are true. But it is also my understanding that our best data suggests that only about 10 percent of homeless come from elsewhere. The vast majority supposedly wind up living on the street in whatever place they last had housing in.
I'm not sure how reliable such data is. I suspect data on homeless folks is somewhat hand-wavy.
Uber/Lyft has saved me thousands of dollars as it enabled me to live downtown without owning a car. It has also saved many lives since people can now easily order a ride instead of driving their car to the bar.
If the company were willing to give their share of the saved money to the employee, the situation might be different.
However, the post you're replying to was talking about larger startups moving INTO the bay area not out.
You are replying to a post about how employers should stop paying such a premium for a SF ZIP code with the observation that the premium exists.
> Assuming if you keep offering same comp
Move the company somewhere cheap and continue paying the same salary so your employees can live like kings there, and I’d wager you’ll still lose the majority of them.
Optimizing for that as a founder only doesn’t make sense, but when your investor money is trying to chase after $1B+ grand slams to make up for the dozens of failures, it probably makes a lot more sense.
People move because the paybump is often whole multiples of pay rises.
Also better managers. We don’t quit jobs as often as we quit managers.
Same with UK to an extent, salary differential between north and south is large (even when accounting for cost of living).
I could work remote for 70% of a regular salary and it will be an amazing salary for my new region. I'm sure I'll give at least 0.9 productivity remotely. I'd be silly not to hire me and I hope others see the same.
Major respect for OP, and he deserves good remote opportunities.
- Can't you simply make a contract that binds them to your company for a longer time? (I don't know about the law in the US)
- Focus the training on technology that is rather specific to your company so that other conpanies are less incentivized to poach the employee because the training that you gave him/her is much less of use for other companies.
Does that also hold for biotech talent?
The other way to look at the divide is protein vs nucleic acid. A lot of very interesting MAb and designer protein companies are in the bay area, but all the major CRISPR, mRNA, siRNA companies are in Boston. Sure you have Ionis and Caribou in CA, but that's really it.
If you believe the future is in the digital information nature of nucleic acid, Boston is the center of gravity by a huge margin.
That said, I would agree that Boston was right up at the top with the bay area in that respect. We always thought of it as Boston for depth, and the bay area for breadth.
The rest of the country was lagging way behind as I remember it, but this was a while ago. I mean there were a few bright spots. Places like Maryland-NOVA-DC area believe it or not, but they didn't shine like Boston and the bay area.
I totally agree that you often can't choose if you're a $100M or a $1B startup, but if you're a founder, I think it often makes a lot more sense to optimize for the $100M scenario, given that it's more likely. The caveat is the founder who's already made f-u money, and whose true goal is to shoot for the moon.
Most of the people I work with day to day are not just brilliant, but extremely driven as well. That was never true in the other places I’ve lived. The were lots of brilliant lazy people, and lots of super driven, less naturally gifted people.
In the Bay Area you kinda have to be both and have your eye on some bigger future, or there’s no point in being here.
Whether you'd consider that "quality of startup" or not is up to you. When it comes to hyper growth success, there are multiple structural factors that really make it easier to scale in the Bay Area, despite the 2-3x multiplier in cost per employee.
There are a number of cities around the world that have high-quality engineering talent in sufficient quantity, that part is easy to replicate. The complaint I consistently hear from startup founders across Europe (where I've worked) and in some parts of the US is that there is a broad and deep-seated lack of ambition or appetite to do very difficult engineering. The reasons for this are multi-faceted and complicated, so it isn't something that can be reduced to a soundbite or easily changed. The intensity of effort applied to technical problem solving that we take for granted on the west coast is very much not the default case most other places, and this is compounded by the relative lack of experience building high-performing engineering organizations.
It was really short term thinking that didn't understand the industry requirements and ended up throwing the product under a bus to get a tiny bit of upfront guaranteed income.
That said, feel free to skim through this (slightly outdated) list and note how a large fraction of the US-based companies are based in SF or SV: http://fortune.com/unicorns/
Hustle and grind in moderation.
Some people value the autonomy a small business gives you along with the work life balance.
Nor does not taking VC money mean you're a lifestyle business
The two founders pull down $1,000,000 a year and they give staff $50,000+ annual bonuses from profit sharing.
They also work four day weeks and spent every night and weekend with their kids.
What's the upside of trying to make it into a unicorn?
I've always found "no VC" stories incredibly inspiring.
At 7 figures you can still go broke. that isn’t fuck you money. you can’t buy houses around the world (and staff them) in a whim. you can’t go to davos and mingle with the true global power brokers. you can affect social change but only on a small perhaps local scale.
at 500m you can put the people YOU want into government to affect the change you want.
I can't imagine any of these things increasing my happiness (or even be particularly interesting to me).
If you run a modest team of 10, you're paying an additional $500K/year to be in the bay area. That's huge for a large fraction of startups.
I'd guess this is significantly under-representing the additional cost compared to most cities in America (exceptions might be NYC, LA, and Seattle). I bet it's quite a bit more than that for someone from, say, Portland.
> This is particularly true in Silicon Valley, where a recent think tank report estimates that 17 percent of workers in “highly technical occupations” are native Californians, with 40 percent hailing from India or China and 29 percent from other non-U.S. countries.
And I thought Toronto was multicultural (~51% born outside of Canada)! I wonder what is the rate regardless of occupation?
Edit to answer my own question:
> More than a third of city residents (35.6%) were born outside the United States.
It will become incrementally easier to raise money from non-traditional sources at better terms as "accredited investor" laws are relaxed e.g. through a Security Token Offering.
The biz model has, if anything, become more risk-averse and more Finacialized (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization) over the last 20 years.
The industry is no longer self-funded by exits and large LPs, but funded by large institutional investors, sovereign funds and the like who demand a reliable IRR. This in turn, leads to ever larger rounds, fewer IPOs and less equity to employees.
VCs will travel for a great opportunity. If they cant recognize it then they are not good at their job :) (like a lot of VCs)
Eventually too much of such cycle would give way to the increased cost of living. But I see a tendency of more moderation in employee compensation by big companies, which would favor small startups again around the area.
It's not that they "didn't bother traveling". That's inverted logic.
They would go to where the best ideas are most likely to be. Where are the best ideas most likely to be = SV.
You might instead ask: "Why are there unicorn ideas that are unwilling to present a slide deck in SV?" That would be harder to answer.
Clearly the lesson is that if you want to scale, you are better of being here
Don’t know how to fact check that but it would be fascinating if true.
I've strongly considered it myself.
If you are used to a city like SF and enjoy the level of things in there, in the world and US there only few cities similar. Like nyc, la, London, Tokyo etc. Portland, Seattle, Austin, Berlin are all good but not the same.
Most of these places are almost as expensive or in similar category as SF but all of them have lower tech salaries than SF, by little or by a lot.
In addition, if you live decently and your salary doesn’t only go to rent, then any decrease in rent is always less than decrease in your salary. Say your rent is $3000 in sf and you make $300k+ per year in total comp. Say moving to Austin your rent would be $1500 but your salary would be $200k. You are only saving $18k year in rent but your salary dropped $100k. Go to Berlin and you maybe pay $1000 for apartment but your salary is $60k.
Lastly, as messed up lot of startups and companies are in Bay Area, there is still a lot of experience and drive to build succesful companies. Go anywhere else in the world and you will encounter more clueless people with absolutely no networks, who have no ambition, and are just trying to do some local play of a global company. I know it sounds harsh but I think for many people thinking about moving to London and working in some consultancy or bank doesn’t sound very exciting or a growth opportunity.
So I think lot of people want to move, but cannot find good or exciting reasons to do that financially, growth or general job happiness. Quality of living and housing yes for sure.
I think options are: 1) start your company and build the culture and company you want whenever or in a distributed way
2) Decide to retire to the countryside and work on your own projects
3) Find a fulfilling, not exactly high tech job or position, but more like a foundation / helping governments with socially responsible software etc. Essentially financially retire, but work on meaningful things
I think Bay Area is still great for singles or couples without kids, that you can get dual high income and share housing costs. Also the career and company options in tech are unparaller.
Starting companies needing massive engineering force, less so.
Agree though if you’re single your living situation is more flexible and you can find a place for less than market rate here pretty easily. It’s once you get married and want kids that SF makes no sense for most people.
Someone making 200k in Austin has a much much better quality of life than someone making 300k in SF. No question.
For me though the walkability is the biggest thing. There’s not a single neighborhood in Austin that can compare to the quality of life in my “middle of the road” SF neighborhood. Miles of beautiful archictecture all around. My kids can and do walk everywhere.
It’s just a completely different experience, being in an actual pre-car city, and unfortunately there’s nothing like it in Texas.
This is why I left for Minneapolis, I actually bought a condo in central downtown. I can walk and bike everywhere. I can take a train or bus at any given moment to everything I would ever need and there is something to be said when you are easily and casually attend any of the major 6 sporting leagues at a drop.
As for the tech and pay. I find it pays the same or actually more in my experience. Finding a job is easy. Most companies don't play that Leetcode game, some do, but most don't it seems. Tons of huge fortune companies that use modern tech and have interesting problems, including places like Target, big banks and tons of healthcare. There are hidden startups, if you look, hard, but many haven't even take VC are only 2-5 people right now and are bootstrapped and highly profitable.
If I ever decide to take that job at a big tech in SF I'll rent out my condo in central downtown, pack up my backup and take the light rail to the airport with my one way ticket.
The benefit becomes compounded in the Bay Area if you have a spouse also working, and timelines accelerated.
300k is living with a roommate level IMO unless you’re just looking to buy a 1 bedroom and not have kids.
This is extraordinary hyperbole that pretty much ignores what it’s really like in the Bay Area - many people making $100k or even less don’t even live with roommates here if they don’t want to. I make over $300k myself and the only reason I have a roommate is because she’s one of my best friends and I am helping her out while she’s early in her career.
There’s no need to put down another place just due to whatever biases, especially if there are few facts behind it. It’s ok to like where you’re at without going to extraordinary lengths to stretch it to everyone.
Absolutely agree that you can afford to live alone if you do not particularly care about buying.
yes austin is cheaper but not because of taxes
And because TX does not have income tax it also means for a 300k place your state and local taxes won’t hit the $10k limit for fed deductions which you will easily hit if you earn and have property in CA.
the 10k limit is irrelevant because most people will be in the 200k-500k AMT range where prop tax is not deductible anyway.
please compare apples to apples.
why picking on austin? it was just an example. wyoming has no income tax. you think living in jackson, WY is cheaper than cupertino? and that the reason is taxes???
Also, there is huge cultural aspect that is much harder to articulate. If you are young, you can find lots of peers arriving in office on roller blades or playing video games on Friday or going for long drives in weekend. You might not find this in NYC or Seattle mature companies. People often change employers like cloths and that’s perhaps good for cultural because you continuesly encounter new ideas, opportunities and people. There is much less fear about not able to find job and that allows to take risk in working at startups at peanuts salaries. In most other places it would be hard to find folks who had more than 2-3 employers in 30 years and even more harder to find people taking pay cuts to get job at risky companies.
Yet another aspect is that either people don’t have kids or married couples both work in tech. Because of tremendous numbers of tech companies it’s easy to find tech jobs for spouses. Once you have double income in tech, housing cost is not huge deal.
I think lot of people in sf feel the pressures of housing and homelessness, that potentially makes them want to leave, but they cannot find enough ways to justify why move to place x.
Median price doesn't matter as much as the point-in-time price for what the homebuyer is looking for. A 3 bedroom house in Palo Alto can distort the price curve when all you want is a small condo in Burlingame.
It helps to have access to talent anywhere in the US.
So far investors have responded positively to our distributed setup.
Just sitting in the same area with some other remote workers that I had nothing in common with would probably just be weird.
They work together in a scarce and hostile environment and still build an inclusive culture that make people feel at home. To the point that your alliance is in a lot of way your family, at least as much as all these companies want.
The way they do that is through multiple channels, and the game itself helps ofc. But the main tool they use is always on vocal server. Teamspeak and Mumble are the incumbent there, with Discord being the new entrant.
The way it usually works is that people are always logged in these server the moment they are online. They stay online but go in an "AFK" channel if they went away for a break. Otherwise they will be in a shared "quiet" channel. Or in a "general" channel which is about talking with each other and having a shared space.
If you go do something, like play another game, organize a squad to do something specific, have a meeting, etc. Then you create a dedicated channel.
What happens is that you get people to share the space and feel a community mostly through the vocal channel.
You also usually have a forum for longer run things and "out of band" fun. And in general you also add a slack equivalent. Historically Jabber or Discord these days.
The only thing missing is a good whiteboarding experience, but i have high hope for VR there.
So yeah anyway, always on vocal is the thing most people miss that create that feeling of belonging.
Most of my remote team has family and kids and remote work allows them to actually spend time with them and afford a house in a decent area.
Bay Area is great for single people and/or rich people basically.
In my life, having that separation so I’m physically gone when I’m not available and then fully present and available when I’m home has made everyone a lot happier.
Before you go telling me I needed an office space or a cowork, I did have an office space, and for a while I tried coworking. Once you’re going to a cowork —- well, to me it’s more fun to just go to a nice office with your actual coworkers than it is to rent a desk with a bunch of strangers.
If everyone at your "semi off grid" live/work community works in tech, you have plenty of money but little free time, and end up bringing in most of the maintenance of the environment, which is expensive and alienating. It's much the same kind of way that it's unaffordable to live in SF if you're a janitor.
If you have some residents working in tech and the rest maintaining the built environment, it's uncomfortably landed-gentry-and-underclass-of-serfs, with people toiling the land.
The best model I've found is something like the East Wind Community, but you need a business model that is highly accessible to all potential residents, and an extremely high level of social cohesion, and I don't think tech fits the bill. You also have to live somewhere extremely remote in order to be able to afford the land to be self-sustaining in any significant degree. https://www.eastwindblog.co/
I'm interested to hear what other people think though. I think that the fact that we have so much of the space in cities set aside for office space is a little ludicrous.
I've actually got some land in the desert and spent some time working out of a camper. If anyone's ever interested in chatting about future plans, I'm always down to collaborate. Kind of a long term thing that's always on my mind.
I've spent time in RV parks too, I like them. Even the crappiest ones are ~$450/mo in California though.
I bought my 5 acres for a few thousand dollars. If you're able to pull it off, you can live insanely cheap. It's more about hacking cost-of-living than creating a cohesive community. My biggest issue with living in the desert was going it alone - if I had a group of 10 people who had a vested interest in the project, it would have been more enjoyable.
These are all just random thoughts though - maybe at some point I'll look into it more seriously.
I think you're dead on when you say "a group of 10 people", and that's where you have to get into building community dynamics, even for a group of hermits :)
It's possible this was mentioned in the book "Salt Dreams," a book about water issues in Southern California. But I couldn't swear to that.
Those spots are kind of rough and blighted, although there's a lot of cheap land to be had in other areas of the California deserts.
I like the contrarian attitude and I believe it's somewhat true, but hard to reconcile what I see on the ground.
The VCs love the cheap talent narrative but it rings hollow.
We absolutely have to be approaching or beyond the breaking point where it stops making sense for a lot of new college grads to want to move here. I have a friend who just started at Google but lives 3+ hours away... that’s crazy. Once workers stop wanting to live in the Bay Area, tech companies will have to shift hiring (even more) than they already have. I know at the company I work for they have been pushing more new hires to Austin.
Working at an early stage startup was already risky, but the opportunity cost sort of peaked around then and remains high.
Unless the opportunity cost noticeably drops (i.e. a massive recession that causes a 50%+ drop in public stock market) I think smaller startups will thrive in places like NYC more so than SF.
One of them is not like the other
You can learn a lot, really fast, and with very long odds maybe get a nice reward in the Bay Area.
Or you can choose a slightly more boring path with a startup almost anywhere else with a normal 9-5 schedule, pretty good pay, and a low cost of living.
Quality of life is likely better in most other cities as well, the only downside being concentrated tech talent in Bay Area.
Unless you're working at one of the mega companies, how much of a benefit is it really for developers to live there?
All that said, first, well, the silicon part is all but gone. I find the signal to noise ratio pretty low. For every 10x developer, there are 50 people who did a bootcamp and/or moved for the easy jobs. Salaries are high because the cost of living is on the breaking point. People complain about the area because of high taxes, high cost of living, and of course the homeless epidemic. And to top it off, everyone who can seems to leave the area when they get the chance.
Again, I mean no offense, I think it's a nice area on the whole. But if I were in need of a lot of good engineers today, I'd first offer remote only. If I needed collaboration or a lot of people in one area, I'd look to New York or Northern Virginia before the bay area.
Silicon Valley is what it is largely in thanks to the continuous cross-pollination of talent which is possible due to the lack of non-compete issues.
Boston is also more diverse in terms of opportunities. If you're a researcher or biologist let's say, you are more likely to find a good job in Boston than SF.
Sometimes I too think about moving elsewhere...
If you start a company outside the Bay area, you're at a disadvantage there. You'd better find enough other advantages and leverage them to get on a level with that. If your company needs venture funding, you'd probably be crazy to start it anywhere else still. Most don't.
Since a healthy startup environment needs resources, money, networking and so on, what would be another good place to raise your business?
This is something everyone in my circles have been talking about for 5+ years, it's not a particularly novel take in 2019.
/shrugs