Y Combinator Partner Harj Taggar: "San Francisco is Becoming Silicon Valley"
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So I've heard that in Vermont the local tradition is to build the barn first, and then live in the barn until you can afford to build the house. This seems like the digital equivalent.
The incentives of living in SF versus, say, Mountain View or Palo Alto seem to be nightlife. And most founders I know aren't really going out very much. They're too busy with their startups. It would seem Mountain View is more ideal for that.
Maybe MV is better for super-early stage startups with just two or three cofounders, and as soon as hiring occurs then SF becomes more appropriate.
It seems to me that SF has more distractions. I of course could be totally wrong, and I'm curious why, if so, the trend continues.
I cannot express myself emphatically enough about how wonderful it is to not have to rely on a car. I've saved so much money and headache, and it's been such a freeing experience, I don't know if I could ever go back to having even a short driving commute.
SF may be easier to get along without a car, but I don't find SV particularly difficult. Some combination of Caltrain + Zipcar + Uber + taxi + bus + bike + short walks is always available.
Is that enough to make the city more attractive? Isn't office space cheaper in MV or PA?
That said I'm super happy with workout out of the mission near the 24th street bart. And it's very affordable.
Housing is phenomenally more expensive, especially when compared to MV or Sunnyvale.
I think we've all read the stories of founders not sleeping for days and ruining their personal lives in the process and I just don't see how any of that is necessary.
San Francisco's distractions should be seen as a benefit, not a hindrance.
* I don’t need a car. This has been as freeing for me as for others.
* I don’t worry at all about logistics, ever. The subways run all night, taxis are ubiquitous, and walking is safe and pleasant.
* Everything is close by, so I don’t need to worry about meetups at the opposite end of the bay.
* I can find good food nearby regardless of the time of day. This city never fully sleeps, which is great because you can set your own schedule.
The city is also distracting, but after a while you get used to it and build up the self-discipline to stay in and work. I’m not convinced this is any harder here than it would be in any other place that I had friends.
I lived in the East Bay, and it was such a pain to go to any Silicon Valley anything.
My impressions: Mountain View and Palo Alto are beautiful, wonderful places.
SF is a scary place. It's an old city, and it reeks of shit. I was going through some neighborhood once by car and everything around me felt like GTA4.
I took this picture about a block or two away from the caltrain station
Suppose, for instance, you were in Merced (as it was 20 years ago--it has changed a lot since then I believe). Not much nightlife or culture, but most of the time you'd be working too hard for that anyway--you'd only have time for the occasional movie and Merced had sufficient movie theaters to get all the major releases.
When you could get a weekend off, you'd just drive up to San Francisco and stay for the weekend in a nice hotel.
The difference in housing costs between Silicon Valley and Merced were such that even if you were buying a house in Merced, you'd be paying so much less than rent on a decent Silicon Valley apartment that even if you headed up to San Francisco every other weekend for the culture and stayed in an upscale hotel and ate at good restaurants, you'd still come out ahead. For variety, instead of heading up to San Francisco, Yosemite isn't too far from Merced.
i think mountain view is much more of a family friendly local, compared with SF's younger scene that's always on the go.
i agree with @diego about meetups/networking being a huge asset for all the entrepreneurs trying to get their shit off the ground in SF.
Honestly, San Francisco is far too expensive to live and work in if you are self-funding.
Add in a huge amount of local design talent, a city that people outside of California want to live in and would be willing to move to and engineers that are generally happier/more well-rounded.
I honestly can't come up with a good reason to be down in the Valley.
PA / MV are lovely small friendly towns with streets you can find a good array of shops, restaurants etc, lots of sunshine.
SF is a cloudy windy big city with lots of homeless people begging, run down streets, etc
Just providing a counterpoint. If I had to work in SF, I'd be miserable.
YC founder Ron Conway?
Here are the comments I left on that article, with one line of context added between them. I got no response on sfgate (no surprise!)
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I'm surprised that the number of tech jobs in SF still hasn't surpassed the 2000 level. SF still felt like a tech backwater then; now it doesn't so much. However, I believe the research. Likely the SF tech workers were just really poorly deployed in 2000.
I imagine fairly small in number of employees, but the nonprofit tech sector in SF has also become really important over the past half-decade, in particular Wikimedia Foundation and Public Library of Science. The Internet Archive is an old stalwart that has recently expanded. (I work for a smaller related nonprofit, Creative Commons, that moved from Stanford to SF in 2004, and (sadly) is moving from SF to Mountain View (where Mozilla is another significant tech nonprofit) next month.) I think there's an interesting cluster here.
Clearly Oakland/Berkeley/Emeryville is the future. Because I say.
Re number and % of tech jobs in SF in 2000 vs 2011:
(34116/.144)-(32180/.174)=51974
Has SF lost >50k "nongovernment office" jobs in ~10 years or am I missing something?
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Related to my first comment, Mozilla is opening an SF office this summer http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_i...
For a SOMA commute during peak hours, living near the BART station in Orinda is more convenient than most of San Francisco.
http://brevity.org/pic/misc/downtown-transit-eastbay.png
(Explanation of method here: http://brevity.org/code/google/transitheatmap.html)
One thing about SF public transit I've learned: Aside from BART, it is slow. If you live within 4 miles of your destination, biking most likely is faster. (Case in point: I live in a 35-50 min grid. By bike I'd get to the Embarcadero BART in under 25 minutes.
I haven't seen this number before (2.5-3.5%). If they accepted 2.5-3.5% when they accepted 44 companies, that's 1760-1257 applications. If they accepted 2.5-3.5% when they accepted 64 companies, that's 2560-1829 companies. So this comment gives us a range of between 1257-2560 applications.
Good luck everyone! :) I'm applying this winter.
Now, they are starting with both iPhone and android apps,
saying they need to nail mobile distribution, and saying
that maybe will never build a website at all, because it's
unnecessary.
This is especially true with location-based services like
photo-sharing, since the website is secondary, just in the
background.