Post-Pandemic Silicon Valley Isn’t a Place | Hacker News Reader

Post-Pandemic Silicon Valley Isn’t a Place

blog.initialized.com

53 pointselsewhen13 comments

Few takeaways from the article 1. The decline in share of Bay Area companies is almost exclusively driven by rise in New York based companies. This is not driven by any new and emerging tech hub as media would have you believe

2. The post pandemic world is actually going to impact non Bay Area tech hubs even worse. Why would a company need to be based in Miami or Austin if they are fully distributed. This will actually stunt the growth is those tech hubs more than Bay Area, where large FAANG office based employment will continue to bring in developers

I'm not sure I agree that non-bay tech hubs will have it worse; post-pandemic there will still be plenty of demand for the traditional office experience, and just like before the pandemic, there are big financial incentives for companies to provide that in places like Austin and Miami vs the Bay.

I am just commenting on the data posted in the blog. Apparently, 40% of surveyed founders said that their companies will be fully remote. Only 6% will have offices in Austin and 1% in Miami. In that scenario, none of the emerging hubs will be able to create a cluster.

What I see around silicon valley is that rent is down allot, condos and attached house are down a little. But asking prices for single family houses are still rising. And the good ones are still getting multiple offers over the asking price. There is plenty of tear down and build a bigger house going on, too, which drives up prices even faster by reducing the supply of smaller houses.

Lower commercial rents help real tech companies. It's hard for those guys to compete with VC funded parasites whose books never need to balance.

Interesting how Seattle ranks last of where founders would start a new company in 2021. I suppose it's got the same housing problems of the Bay Area but not much of a startup ecosystem, and the tech there is dominated by large established companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Valve.

The weather really is miserable, too.

She doesn’t say why we should extrapolate her data and generalize it for the Bay Area in general.

I’m not knocking her data. I believe her data, I’m just not sure it’s representative other than a general trend.

The analysis seems to focus on the number of companies, not by employee headcount, so I'm not sure this is indicative of the experience of living in Silicon Valley on average.

Realistically, today's business difference between Austin and Miami reminds me of what it can be like for a contestant on a TV game show who gets a big vacation win where they get to choose between Hawaii or the Bahamas for their prize.

So many people will consider them almost equivalent resorts without digging deep enough to fully realize in advance that Hawaii is a tropical paradise, and the Bahamas is a desert island.

The 2014 pivot date is a little earlier than I would have though but the trend is there nonetheless. If you are thinking of leaving the Bay Area and having some massive housing windfall somewhere else, act quickly. Austin and Miami in particular are appreciating like crazy and you might find yourself in a slightly cheaper, but still unattainable, housing market. By 2022-23 I predict a stalemate as folks from the Bay Area realize these new tech centers are basically unaffordable.

You have to admit that that's a goofy title.

Nice article from Kim Mai

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