Andreessen Horowitz is opening an office in SF
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Especially ironic considering that it was geared towards India's decision to ban Facebook's "free internet". A decision, which looks in hindsight, extremely smart.
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2016/02/10/technology/marc-andreessen-...
edit : clarify
I've never understood this. I'd like to be surrounded by people that don't all do the same thing as me. I want to meet new and interesting people, not expand the bubble around me. I already interact with everyone at work most of my day, now I have to interact with people that fit that mold even when I'm not working?
Different strokes for different folks, but SF has always felt like a bit of a monoculture to me.
I straddle the communities of tech/startups an the "digital nomad" world, and feel similarly when I go to dense nomad hubs (particularly Chiang Mai).
Too much of one thing gets old really fast.
It's unbelievably annoying after a few years when you're just trying to have dinner with your wife without overhearing someone talking about raising a round at the table next to you.
BART never made it to the peninsula and electrification of Caltrain is taking its sweet time. The only remaining option seems for everyone to crowd into SF :/.
The "new" SV is north because all the consumer websites set up shop in SF since all they needed was office and not chip fabs, and they were mostly being worked on by younger folks who wanted to live in the city proper.
Now we have a bifurcated ecosystem where all the hardware folks (and companies) are still in the south bay (and don't kid yourself, there are a ton of hardware startups down here still) and all the consumer stuff is up north.
You just hear about the consumer stuff more because most of the silicon companies are B2B.
I'd really divide it by era. Anything founded before 2005 is in Silicon Valley; after that is in San Francisco. I actually think YCombinator is a big driver of that; they funded younger startup founders (largely Millenials rather than Gen-Xers) who wanted to live in the city.
As a fun side note, the only reason Netflix is in Los Gatos is because the founder wanted it in Santa Cruz, where he lived, but was convinced no one would work there because it would be too far, so he picked the city closest to Santa Cruz that people would still consider Silicon Valley.
What I mean is that it's not the boomers' decision to make in regards to where their money is actually invested.
Can anybody explain the strategy here? I realise that funding is mostly centralised in SF, but this still feels weird to me.
Disclaimer: A16Z are an investor in my company
None of us would dream of living or working in San Francisco. We all live and work in and around Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Santa Clara, etc.
For a mostly-hype startup staffed by kids fresh from Stanford, Harvard, and MIT, I suppose the flashier the offices the better and that may mean the "excitement" of San Francisco. We're in a concrete tilt-up close to everything we need.
Edit: I realize you would be near their old offices. Still, if they're looking to find the most entrepreneurs that they can who aren't motivated by hype, the more central from a transportation perspective, the better. And there is no place in the bay area that you can expect people from all parts of the bay area to come to other than SF.
Overall, there's a net in-flow of startups into SF, and so, the VC's follow.
Stated like this it becomes obvious we need to pay attention to the denominator.
There's increasing amounts of VC funding in Asia so SFBA is not as dominant as it used to be 20 years ago but SF is still by far the center of the universe as far as starting a startup goes, and there's no major trends that would suggest a decline in absolute terms.
Much like the city is soo crowded these days that nobody goes there anymore. I mean it's true (because it is crowded people get pushed to the periphery) but it also implies that the city has reached capacity and that it is crowded all the times.
More like: startups with low funding are moving out of SF because it is too expensive.
The Millenial generation really has three sub-generations: Xennials (1981-1986, distinguished because they can a. remember the Cold War and b. graduated into a decent economy, so they don't have the economic despair of the rest of Millenial generation), older Millenials (1987-1992, these are the folks who were totally fucked over by the Great Recession), and younger Millenials (1991-2000, young enough that they could actually adapt to the post-2009 economic conditions and make life-choices accordingly). Almost all Millenial billionaires are actually Xennials: Mark Zuckerburg, Brian Chesky, Drew Houston, Kevin Systrom, Mary Kate & Ashley Olsen, et al. The older Millenials are who people usually think of as "Millenials" (grew up expecting a lot, graduated when not a lot was to be found). There's a marked difference in behavior with young Millenials: they are much more studious, much more career-focused, more of them went into STEM careers, they're the ones driving the FIRE & cryptocurrency movements, etc.
Also, this group of xennials might not have graduated in a good economy (i.e. around 2001)
In the 80s and 90s, the "center" of SV was Mountain View and surrounding cities, with the VCs mostly in Menlo/Palo Also.
In the last 10 years, as companies have decided to increasingly be based out of SF, the radius of SV is expanding, and a lot of that expansion is to the north + east: Richmond, Concord, Walnut Creek, San Rafael, Mill Valley - making SF the center of the action.
The radius of the Bay Area hasn't changed, “Silicon Valley” has just moved to align more with the Bay Area rather than being an overlapping region to the South. All the places you point to as “new expansion” for “the Bay Area” have always been part of the SF Bay Area which SF has always been part of.
(Even the biggest enterprise companies can be SF-based, though – SalesForce, for example...)
Say's web site, incidentally, now lists their SF office as 442 Post Street, Suite 901. From their job listings, I get the impression that most of the action is in the NYC and the Portland offices now, though.
I've always called it Pac Bell park to avoid confusion.
That's what I call it. But I spent eight years living in the East Bay, so that may be why.