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Personal anecdote:

Even 5 years ago calls with customers and investors invited questions like "so are you in the city or in the South Bay?" Raising money in particular was very hard if you were not in the Bay Area.

Now nobody even asks where you are located and if you say you are distributed/remote everyone shrugs. Angels and VCs don't seem to care at all.

It's been a stark and noticeable shift and it pre-dates COVID. COVID has just accelerated the geographic diversification trend dramatically.

I feel like this is a key point.

There's long been strong financial pressure for the tech industry to disburse: it's incredibly expensive. Ideally you'd start a tech company somewhere where office and engineers are cheap. But the companies stay in SF because employees and VCs are there. VCs and employees are there because companies are here.

And even though Sand Hill VCs could fund companies anywhere in the country, in practice, they didn't (much). If that's changing, I feel like that's the trigger for a big tech diaspora as much or more than remote eng work.

I've been in recent conversations with several top firms on and off Sand Hill and nobody cares or even asks where anything is located.

> Additionally, you need to be in New York if you want to "play in the big leagues" in the world of finance, fashion, art, etc.

I'm still a little worried about these (less finance); I keep hearing about people moving back home and not looking back because broker fees + rents shot up to where they used to be. Currently only 60% of jobs lost in NYC came back, vs ~90% nationally.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/14/nyregion/nyc-economy-jobl...

It's hard to imagine the bay area going the same way as Detroit, if only for the fact that it has excellent geographic advantages. It's one of America's biggest Pacific shipping ports, and having access to the Asian markets will always be a huge strategic advantage. On top of that the very stable Mediterranean climate will always be a draw for Americans looking to live somewhere that's not too hot and not too cold.

Besides, many of the current problems of the bay area could be solved by building denser housing and better public transportation. The whole region would be improved if so many of the NIMBYs weren't opposed to "Manhattanization".

Venezuelans had similar access to natural beauty, and control over oil. Internal strife dispensed with their civil society in a matter of years. It’s now a humanitarian disaster.

> Besides, many of the current problems of the bay area could be solved by building denser housing and better public transportation. The whole region would be improved if so many of the NIMBYs weren't opposed to "Manhattanization".

High crime and political instability are California’s biggest issues. Fixing “the markets”, be it the housing market or Wall Street, is unlikely to be a panacea for this. America’s problems go much deeper than markets, and it may already be too late to course correct.

I can’t claim to know much about Venezuelan politics, but wasn’t the crisis in that country largely a result of over-dependence on natural resources? That might have described California in the gold rush days, but the state’s economy has since become extremely diversified.

Basically I think as long as Northern California is a relevant political and economic entity the bay area will stay vital

I hear people every so often saying that Seattle or SF or {insert prosperous liberal city} is going to be the next Detroit. It's hard to express how preposterous that assertion is. Detroit filed for bankruptcy. It's major industries needed massive government subsidies in order to survive.

To think anything like that would happen to SF anytime in the next 50 years is absolutely absurd.

The Lindy effect is not some immutable law. It's an observation and it does not necessarily have to be always true. A friend of mine was funded by a Tier 1 VC and has an office in Palo Alto. But all of engineering is in Princeton, NJ. He is thinking of opening another office somewhere in Texas if needed.