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Comment by astrange | Hacker News Reader

SF didn't have a lot of tech until very recently, when they were forced out of the valley by the real gentrifying force, homeowners that won't let anyone build more homes in case it causes traffic.

These are also the people making SF expensive. It's not just artists, it's their own children who can't live there, one reason SF has fewer families with children than any other city IIRC.

As for quirky businesses, that's DRs and licensing.

https://sf.eater.com/2021/4/22/22397615/matcha-n-more-ice-cr...

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Is there a good article that describes how / why / when the startup scene moved from the South Bay to San Francisco?

I'm not too familiar with the startup scene before 2010. But from what I know, it was mostly established in its current form before the Dot Com boom.

It seems like HP, Cisco, Intel, Apple, Oracle, Sun, Adobe, Intuit, & Yahoo! where part of one movement.

eBay, PayPal, Google, Facebook & Netflix obviously added to that.

But now all the newer companies are coming from SF - SalesForce, Twitter, Uber, Lyft, AirBNB, Yelp, Splunk, Dropbox, Square, Instagram (originally), Slack, StichFix, Postmates, Instacart, GitHub, Robinhood, Coinbase, etc.

The only recent, pretty big startups in the South Bay I can think of are LinkedIn and Quora. YouTube - from San Bruno - is kind of in the middle. The rest are subsidiaries.

I mean, the OG companies like Apple and Google and Facebook are so big that they dwarf the rest of the startups in the Bay by themselves. So in a sense, the Silicon Valley still feels like the Peninsula. But the startup scene definitely seems to have shifted.

A seemingly significant part of it is because the young talent wants to live in SF and not commute 1+ hours to an office park in the South Bay. I think SF also offered incentives for tech companies to set up shop in the city in the 2009-2012 time range... https://www.wired.com/story/no-more-deals-san-francisco-cons...

It also generally became trendy for that demographic to live in (certain) cities after they graduate. My company set up an office in the Seaport (partially) for that reason because our main location an hour west of Boston was a deal-killer for some people.

That's certainly true. A career in tech became widely popular and trendy for millenials and now zoomers (I believe CS is now the most popular undergraduate major across US colleges?). Basically once people realized you can make more money in tech than on Wall St, a percentage of new grads who would have moved to NYC diverted for SF.

>I believe CS is now the most popular undergraduate major across US colleges

I saw that in one Google search and it seems incredibly unlikely. This seems much more probable (even if you assign some of the engineering degrees to CS):

https://www.niche.com/blog/the-most-popular-college-majors/

I've seen several commentators blame AWS! Before AWS, startups needed to budget for web servers and similar hardware, and a place to put them. That meant bigger offices with more floor space, plus power and similar services. Once AWS came (2007) startups could be anywhere, with the city tending to be more attractive to younger folk.

Not a good theory. Before AWS startups would colocate. On premise was rare.

You did still want on premise at the beginning, while going through the earlier phases of startup development. For example you need source code control, build servers, bug tracking, test setups, file servers, as well as developer workstations.

Not a significant space issue at the beginning. Still not a good theory.

Very few people were putting them directly in their offices, and they certainly weren't buying bigger spaces to fit them. Datacenters are the natural home for this stuff and the price was never exorborant if you're not insisting on a tier 1 facility.

Imagine it is 2003 and you are doing a startup. You aren't deploying anything yet. You need a source code control server, a bug tracker, build servers, testing systems (so many versions of Windows), developer workstations, a file server, and various other bits of infrastructure (plus backups). This easily results in multiple systems per developer. Internet connectivity was slow and expensive which is why this kind of stuff was in the office, not at a colo. So your office needed proportionally more space per person.

Zoom is based in downtown San Jose.

They were over by Great America for a long, long time. Eric was used to Milpitas @ Cisco.

Short answer: early Silicon Valley needed space for fabricators, the dotcom era needed space for data centers, then around 2010ish there were enough cloud providers and internet connections you could start a company anywhere but you already had plenty of talent in the bay and San Francisco is fun.

Long answer could be a phd thesis but “people needed lots of space until they didnt” kind of suffices.

> the OG companies like Apple and Google and Facebook

History time. It's kind of amusing to see these companies referred to as OG, when there were many generations of Silicon Valley startups before them. The real OG was probably Hewlett-Packard, founded in Palo Alto in 1939. Another key company was Shockley Semiconductor, founded in Mountain View in 1956. Eight key employees left Shockley in 1957 and formed Fairchild Semiconductor, gaining the name the "Traitorous Eight". Fairchild led to over 126 startups, sometimes called the Fairchildren, including AMD, Altera, LSI Logic, National Semiconductor, and SanDisk.

Two of the Traitorous Eight, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, left Fairchild in 1968, founding Intel in Mountain View. Later key Silicon Valley companies were Oracle (1977), Sun Microsystems (1982), and Cisco (1984). Although Apple started in 1976, it wasn't a dominant company until years later. Google (1998) and Facebook (2004) are relative newcomers.

Information on Fairchild's influence: https://computerhistory.org/blog/fairchild-and-the-fairchild...

Thanks! This is super cool!

Question - when did the VC model really come into play? Were the Fairchildren like AMD VC funded?

A lot of others have mentioned that space plays a role in this a lot. Companies needed fabricators and data centers, which took up space, so it was too expensive to be in the city.

Is this really all there was to it? Back in these times - there was White Flight from the cities, right? Did most people (even college grads) prefer to work in the suburbs then? Was this even a factor at all?

You would enjoy the documentary 'Something Ventured'. http://www.somethingventuredthemovie.com/

If you're asking why Silicon Valley is in California at all, the answer is that the state bans all non-compete agreements and won't enforce ones made in other states. This is probably why it's not in Cambridge, though it doesn't explain anything more specific than that.

I honestly think non-competes are overstated. I've worked in MA most of my life, once signed one, and it was very specific. I now work for a company that even lets me contribute to competing open source projects. Do all non-CA companies let you do that? I'm aware of one or two consulting firms that have very draconian non-compete clauses but not sure it's very common and MA, specifically, defanged them a while ago.

Personally, I think it was more of a conservative East Coast mentality vs. an anything is possible West Coast Mentality.

Stephen Levy's Hackers is probably a good start (but skip the Stallman The Last Hacker part).

Non-competes are absolutely not overstated. Microsoft would frequently sue employees in WA for violating non-compete agreements when they bounced to work for Google, Facebook or other tech companies who were starting to open up offices in Seattle.

Amazon recently sued an exec for moving to Google cloud (also in WA) – https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/11/aws-case-against-worker-who-...).

Here's an IBM one from New York – https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=84252db4-ccc3....

A quick search yielded a ton of results for large tech companies suing employees and each other over non-competes, and – surprise – none of them are in California.

Honestly - isn't it most likely to be random luck?

Possibly.

To the degree that you believe Shockley was an important catalyst, that does seem to have been largely happenstance. There are arguments to be made that the next phase after the minicomputer would logically be somewhere other than the Northeast. On the other hand, a great deal of computer tech prior to the minicomputer was concentrated on the northern part of the East Coast, so why a shift? Finally, given Compaq, Dell, and TI, why not a more robust Silicon Prairie earlier?

I'm not sure how often it comes up, but SV started with Fairchild Semiconductor being founded by everyone leaving Shockley's company - so it would've been important right at the start.

Don't forget the importance of Shockley's mom being in Palo Alto. His stated reason for moving to the west coast was to be closer to her. Given that pretty much all the "silicon" companies in Silicon Valley are descendants of Shockley Semiconductor, that chance occurrence is probably enough to explain it.

Companies generally preferred to be located in the suburbs because it was generally cheaper. But employees (notably including execs) also preferred to live there. Manufacturing facilities had absolutely been in cities in the past. Teradyne was in Boston. Gillette was in Boston. There are big pharma facilities in Kendall Square today. So it was at least in part access to workers that moved companies out of cities.

Silicon Valley happened because of proximity to Stanford University and Moffett Field and the copious amounts of government / military funding and contracts that came through them (DARPA, etc).

This is a very basic fact of the history of SV that many in the VC scene are reluctant to acknowledge.

Apple wasn't terribly interesting until maybe the mid-2000s. OK they were interesting in the Apple religion sense but it really took some combination of OS X, the 4G iPod, and eventually the iPhone taking off to put them in their current category. One could argue that Apple wasn't "a force to be reckoned with" until the late 2000s.

They were pretty good before the 90s when they invented the personal computer, there was just a "beleaguered" era.

They were an interesting hobbyist thing early-on. Although there were also the S-100 bus systems, etc. I actually used Apple IIs at work in the early 80s and then an Apple III. But they were somewhat of a sideshow until the mid/late 2000s.

So what were the more common systems that you or your coworkers worked on between the 80s and the mid-2000s? VAX machines, NeXtboxes, SUN systems?

Even though it's not headquartered in Silicon Valley, IBM's Cottle road site belongs in the early history as well. They invented the hard drive in Building 025...

Robinhood was in in Menlo Park / Palo Alto.

Here's a list of startups in Palo Alto: https://angel.co/location/palo-alto

Here's a list of startups in Menlo Park: https://angel.co/location/menlo-park

I'm sure if you have crunchbase pro you'd be able to do more analysis. But Silicon Valley is still pumping out a lot of startups, and high-tech firms.

It was largely driven by Millenials, who wanted to work in cities whether they're founding or working for a startup. YCombinator (itself based in Mountain View) found that most of their startups preferred to locate in SF, oftentimes many of them in one building. At one point there was the "YScraper", the Crystal Tower building in North Beach that was home to Justin.TV (parent of Twitch/SocialCam/Cruise), Xobni, Weebly, and Scribd.

Also your list of South Bay startups is pretty incomplete - there's also WhatsApp (Mountain View), Box (Redwood City), Coursera (Mountain View), Khan Academy (Mountain View), Tesla (Palo Alto, with manufacturing in Fremont), the Signal Foundation (Mountain View), RobinHood (headquarters is Menlo Park, not SF), Zoom (San Jose), GoFundMe (Redwood City), Carbon3D (Redwood City), WealthFront (Palo Alto), Impossible Foods (Redwood City), Roblox (San Mateo), and GoPro (San Mateo). I do agree that the center of gravity of the valley moved northwards in the 2010s though. Prior to then, it was debatable whether SF was even really part of the valley, while since then it's been a major tech hotspot.

Quite simply crime rates in SF came down around 2010. It was high in the 90s but even then the first dot com boom had some startups in SF and some in SV. Notably Salesforce. But by the second Web 2.0 boom (as it was called) SF was a very attractive place for young workers.

The earliest SV companies wanted to be physically located near Stanford and Moffett for the govt subsidies/contracts. Still happens (read The Entrepreneurial State) but physical location is not as important in the internet age.

Frankly I would not give this Sf.citi lobbyist piece much credence. “Migration” could simply be a temporary effect of the pandemic. We may very well see young people come rushing back into SF for the same reasons as before.

And crime? You wouldn’t know it from HN threads but SF violent crime is again at all time lows.[1]

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/us/ca/san-francisco/crime...

I thought the move into SF was actually caused by a specific tax incentive around 2010, but don't remember the details.

A lot of people forget that many now "elite" cities weren't that popular until relatively recently. Boston was losing population until well into the 90s and there was basically no tech left there by then.

When I graduated from grad school in the mid-80s, I don't think a single one of my classmates who got a job in Massachusetts lived in the city proper.

Yeah, living in cities was unpopular until about 2000 for a good reason - they were full of crime. Surprisingly it turns out giving the entire country lead poisoning was a bad idea.

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...

Younger people then moved back in (causing superficial gentrification) because they couldn't live in the actual richer areas because those had all blocked new housing (actual gentrification.)

Cities are full of crime again today. Is it a problem with lead? Or is it a larger condition of cities in the Americas?

Most American cities are way, way below early 1990s violent crime levels, San Francisco included. SF had three times more homicides in 1993 than in 2019.

It went up a lot in 2020, quite possibly as a reaction to unemployment and especially not having anything else to do.

But yes, before that it was limited to a few hotspots like St Louis which still had environmental lead problems. Meanwhile DC in 1990 was more dangerous than the Iraq War.

You saw around a 30% increase in homicide rates in large cities last year, and that increase began suddenly at the beginning of June. No environmental cause like exposure to lead can cause that.

The Mother Jones article referenced above is arguing that the most effective thing that can be done to combat crime is lead abatement, I think that argument has taken a fatal hit. Some cities are in fact seeing homicide rates close to or even above the 1990s rates, that happened suddenly and it happened after leaded gasoline had been banned for 45 years.

You can't explain the massive increase in homicide in large cities in 2020 using environmental factors like lead, the cause has to be cultural or political.

Or, you know, the whole "massive upheaval of lifestyles caused by a pandemic and the responses to it" thing.

Well that is in a completely different category than "lead", now isn't it?

Although I don't remember the "massive upheaval of lifestyles" suddenly happening at the beginning of June last year, is that your recollection of events?

To be clear, I wasn't supporting the hypothesis that lead exposure explains 2020, only pointing out that large year-on-year jumps in crime rates are almost irrelevant on the long trend. The Bay Area homicide rate went up 35%, but it was still lower than 2012 and all years prior to 2009.

I do: The George Floyd riots started right then.

That didn't really affect a lot of lifestyles. There's some economic evidence it caused people to stay home more (which had the result of reducing covid deaths) but they were already doing that.

A possible reason everyone was free to protest was they were unemployed.

> Cities are full of crime again today.

That doesn't seem to actually be the case, but crime statistics is a notoriously tricky area.

It is actually up a lot in 2020-2021 including murders and other “real” crimes.

There of course is also an effect where people think all of Portland is on fire because they saw a protest on TV once. But also Portland has had twice as much gun violence this year than all of 2020, which seems like a problem someone should do something about.

Sure, there is a notable bump (with all the usual reporting caveats) in 2020-21; but that doesn't change the general trend. Or at least so far that doesn't seem the case.

> Younger people then moved back in (causing superficial gentrification) because they couldn't live in the actual richer areas because those had all blocked new housing (actual gentrification.)

You're overlooking the qualitative motives for (somewhat incorrect) purely financial aspects. Younger people continued to move to denser parts of cities for at least a solid decade after in-city rents surpassed suburban ones. A large demographic group got married and started having kids much later than previous ones (this part traces pretty well back to economic factors, though!) so was looking for very different things in housing. As those factors started to change, they started following similar suburbanization patterns, and WFH accelerated that dramatically.

"Friends" is probably the clearest pop culture recording of this, showing the draw of living in the city for single 20-somethings in the 90s, and then the eventual appeal of the burbs for the later married w/ kids stage. Even in the 90s part of it, none of them were there because NYC was the cheap option.

Manhattan was something of an outlier. Even in not so great in a lot of ways 1980s Manhattan, a lot of people moved to "the city." This was especially true in finance. (Contra my comment about classmates not living in Boston proper, many lived in Manhattan proper. Of course, one difference is that the jobs were actually in Manhattan. )

But NYC has always had a singular appeal. And there was long a certain snobbery(?) about living in Manhattan specifically.

If we drop NYC we lose the easy TV show example, but I would still maintain that nobody young was moving to places like Midtown Atlanta or downtown Austin in the early 2000s just because they were priced out of the suburbs. Places were already "pay for the privilege of living somewhere denser and walkable" by that point.

>nobody young was moving to places like Midtown Atlanta or downtown Austin in the early 2000s just because they were priced out of the suburbs.

Sure. But my point was that, in the aggregate, they weren't. Maybe by the early 2000s, there were more jobs there, their parents lived there, their friends were starting to be there, etc. So, yes, at some point especially college-educated young professionals started to pay an urban premium for the lifestyle. We'll see to what degree that continues.

> Sure. But my point was that, in the aggregate, they weren't. Maybe by the early 2000s, there were more jobs there, their parents lived there, their friends were starting to be there, etc. So, yes, at some point especially college-educated young professionals started to pay an urban premium for the lifestyle. We'll see to what degree that continues.

I actually agree with `astrange that by the early 2000s, if not a tad earlier[0], millennials were moving in-town (though not because their parents lived there! the opposite, if anything!), but I completely disagree on the "why" - their claim was that it was because it was cheaper because suburbs had zoning that caused them to get too expensive. My claim is that it was a lifestyle thing, not a "forced out" thing.

[0] I can't speak firsthand to earlier, but there were a lot of new or newly-redone apartment buildings by the early 2000s, suggesting that the trend had been going for several years already.

Oh, definitely lifestyle. And, yeah, much more because of friends than family. I'm pretty sure even in the late 80s, it wouldn't have been cheaper for me to live in (a decent area of) Cambridge than the suburb I lived in.

I think the cities weren't interesting until the first wave got there, though obviously this doesn't apply to everywhere.

But also, the cities aren't naturally cities and the suburbs aren't naturally suburbs - they're suburbs because of restrictive zoning, and that's what caused them to be more expensive to starter homeowners and less appealing to young people.

Lets be real it was abortion

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion/

https://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-s...

It was not (or that was only some of it.) The same crime rise and fall happened worldwide - this is addressed in the article.

Continues to happen too. The parts of the world with the most terrorism like Iraq/Yemen also most recently had leaded gas.

Is this lead poisoning theory really any more proven than say, the access to birth control idea?

Young people tend to be economic migrants and the pockets of mass economic growth start in cities. They're also single and relatively poor so they live in multi-tennant housing near the downtowns where they work. As they get older, richer and more numerous (i.e. married w/ kids) they move out of the core. Cycle repeats with rising prices if growth is still there, or you hollow out the city and only the poorest remain. SF could stay like it is, or become a west-coast steel town, but it's unlikely to return to what it once was.

>the pockets of mass economic growth start in cities

It's varies over time. With SV-style tech that hasn't been the case until quite recently. And, in the Bay Area, arguably the nexus of jobs is still in the South Bay. And this sort of situation is true for many other areas as well.

At the time there were a lot more tech companies out along Routes 128 and 495. This is still true today, but now the balance has shifted to Boston and Camberville.

Yeah, all the minicomputer companies (which is where most of us went to work after school). I'd have actually considered living in Cambridge at the time but it would have been something like a 45 minute (reverse) commute whereas I had about a 5 minute commute until I bought a house.

Depending upon how you characterize tech, there's still a lot in the northern and western suburbs, especially if you include the defense contractors. But, yes, there's now a lot in Cambridge and the Seaport, especially, as well as all the biotech/pharma in and near Kendall Square.

> they were forced out of the valley by the real gentrifying force, homeowners that won't let anyone build more homes in case it causes traffic

Protip: Anti-housing activists will never tell you their real motivations: https://belonging.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/blacks_ch...

Some of it is immigration too: if you come from Paris or Berlin, you’re not going to want to move to Mountain View, given how ridiculously boring the peninsula is.

If your employer's in South Bay you might as well live there. It's easier to commute to fun than commute to work.

San Carlos disagrees. Plenty of Europeans love this place.

After growing up in central London, Silicon Valley was awesome. No more waiting for the bus, just drive everywhere, parking is easy, everywhere is safe. If you live in downtown Mountain View or Sunnyvale you can walk down the street to pubs and restaurants. Why live in SF with constant crime, begging and no parking, and a giant commute to Apple or Google?

And perhaps that new construction will reduce the market value of their homes, which they don't have to pay property taxes on and therefore regard as a substantial store of value.

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