San Francisco is becoming a tech hub again, Y Combinator CEO says
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They then post negatively about SF online for the rest of their lives.
I think you gave a biased opinion (as we all do, that's fine). There are plenty of people over 40 in SF [1] and plenty of people who choose to live their full lives here. You may not be friends with them, but they exist.
What I also notice is that most anti-SF people need you to agree SF is bad. They are unwilling to accept that anyone could like it (despite it being one of the most in-demand places to live in America, which they hand wave away as being a jobs thing).
It's truly bizarre, because I comp it to a city like Paris which has many of the same cleanliness & "law and order" problems, but it has nowhere near the amount of people who demand you say it's bad.
[1]https://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US0667000-san-franc...
Honestly, that's why it's so polarizing - if you like the walkable layout/high density thing, you probably don't care about the better personal economic opportunities vs. Europe and if you're looking to get rich, you want a compound on the beach anyway.
Lived there for a while in 2014. It’s not as bad as people make it out to be, so people who live there are easily able to ignore it. Then when they leave, they can’t stop talking about how bad it was because it really is bad. Humans can endure/ignore a lot without saying something or attempting to fix it.
Every time I visit the supposedly 'great and affordable' cities I find myself in a car way more often, I find myself visiting homogenous chains way more often, and I generally find myself way more isolated in bubbles of my own economic class/social circle (largely due to driving everywhere).
To each their own (though, as implied, most anti-SF people think SF is an objective bad and aren't afraid to tell you that).
>Humans can endure/ignore a lot without saying something or attempting to fix it.
This is exactly the language someone like me uses to describe the horror of America's stroad-dominated landscape (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroad#:~:text=The%20word%20st....)
> Jamali: It’s kind of interesting — so that narrative is there, but are you saying at the same time that there is this comeback happening, that maybe a lot of people outside of San Francisco haven’t appreciated? A comeback that’s being driven by the tech industry?
> Tan: Yeah, at the end of the day, what we want is prosperity. And the coolest thing in the world is that at Y Combinator, we get to see two or three people come together from any background, from any country in the world, and they have a fair shot here. They get half a million dollars, and they can go and try to create something that touches a billion people. And that’s really what we try to do every day. And if they succeed, they’ll have thousands of employees, and these are good, high-paying jobs in tech. And that will actually create so much prosperity for the whole community, that that’s actually why San Francisco is so awesome.
Not so much in the interview, but a common claim is that many of the most important AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are located in the city, so there's a bit of an AI boom going on.
For general context though, Garry's part of the crowd that's committed to staying in San Francisco and getting involved in local politics to make the city better. Whether or not you agree, he's definitely going to have an intentional pro-SF bias in general, which he'd acknowledge.
I think the stronger claim as to why SF is the hub is: where else is the center if not there?
Seattle/NY/Boston/Austin/LA/Miami has some activity (probably in roughly that order), but hard to really call them the center of anything.
Did it? Based on what data?
Almost all of the world's largest companies (including those in Silicon Valley) require some level of office attendance for most employees.
However RTO will fall, because people never want to change, but they was forced to change on time and they discover that's a good change, you will not pull them back even offering shorter workweeks and side benefits. You'll just push back low skilled labor and with them no company can go much further.
There will always be tech there, but the next FAAMG won't be located there until they hit the 100M milestone.
I say this as someone that lives in an area far past its peak. The money is still here, the knowledge is still here, but the growth is gone.
None of the FAAMG, assuming F is FB and M is Microsoft, happened in SF (city).
FB, Apple and Google happened at about 40 milestone and Amazon & Microsoft happened in Seattle.
Secondly, SF city may be down, but the greater Bay Area including Silicon Valley is going to remain a major hub for a really long time.
Well, that’s my prediction, and hope, anyway.
The things people say.
I think SF makes the most sense for childless males between 22 and 30. After that I would find a new home base.
Some, like me, bet on WFH and become expats abroad to enjoy a balanced life.
Walking around drunk at night is risky for anyone, but males of our species tend to be more tolerant of the risks and better equipped to GTFO.
It really is the best place to be for startups given the ecosystem and it still really isn't even close.
San Francisco, as a small part of the Bay Area, is a bigger question given the problems it has with poor governance, but the Bay Area which dominates almost the whole tech stack is not.
Even at the federal level, actions they are taking mean silicon valley will be trending the other direction.
Much of their problems are state level to be clear, but they are so far gone there's no chance of any short term recovery.
Forced relocation is a component of companies rolling back remote work.
Not to mention new COVID-19 variants ripping through the workers and their families. I have too many friends who are now permanently disabled by their last round with the virus.
$200K/year is practically the poverty line. It's all because of real estate cost.
200k/yr for 1000sq ft is pretty comical though.
Because honestly, unless you hit it big somehow or already have a house in SF before, I don't see how an average salaried worker can afford a family home there. Settle down and making a new family is just near impossible.
Rent impacts more than just your personal rent. People only work on SF if they’re paid enough to make rent/cost of living so labor prices rise. Shops also need to cover rent and labor costs which then spirals.
In my circles there is one person who lost her sense of smell, and another friend lost three elderly extended relatives but otherwise I haven't personally seen much more. Is this a more recent thing?
(Work remotely)
You're not going to believe me, but you need to take an honest look at severity of current variants, availability of vaccines and treatments, and weigh that against how you want to live your life. You might reach the same conclusion, but it sounds like you're still fighting the last war.
It could also be the case that they're fine with the risk of covid when it comes to actually living life (travel, hanging out with friends and family), but doesn't want to take that risk just to make zoom calls in an office instead of at home.
It looks close on a map and seems like a lot of open land.
~1 hour commute each way. Doesn't sound like much until you start to add it up and factor in things like wear and tear and gas. Driving 17 highway is a lot of fun and beautiful, but it is like playing Russian roulette with accidents.
Glad to hear SF bouncing back!
- San Francisco
I remember when San Francisco was so awesome as a kid. Now every time I visit it feels more and more like Blade Runner :/ Seattle is suffering the same fate. Meanwhile someplace like Chicago is vibrant with life and culture, with affordable housing everywhere. I can't help but think it's the tech that's the problem, not the other way around.
That's one of the big issues with tech: it isn't really tied to place. It has global reach via cyberspace, with entire decades of work existing purely as bits and bytes in the cloud. Only a software engineer would even have the slightest clue of the vastness of various compute systems composed of millions upon millions of lines of code. People work day and night on this stuff, and the general public only sees the tip of the iceberg.
I think this makes for a challenging recipe to balance in a local economy
Honestly these things come and go, as they do in all big cities. Adapting to change, especially for large groups of people, is alway rough and tumble. I’m sure they’ll get it figured out eventually. Just in time for it to change again…
Also, most residents as Chicago disagree with your assessment of their housing affordability.
https://www.chicagobusiness.com/crains-forum-affordable-hous...
I don't think Chicago is magically more affordable or anything, just significantly more so than West Coast tech hubs, while still being very livable (transportation, food, culture, art, diversity, etc.) It does lack nature compared to the West Coast, but there are some really well maintained parks and awesome museums.
Point is, cities are in part defined by who lives and works there. Tech workers as a class don't really seem to contribute as much "liveliness" to a city, IMO. We make our money, hoard it or spend it on luxury cars and housing, then mostly keep to ourselves. Not very community or civic minded. Not EVERY worker, obviously, but it's a stereotype I've seen true more often than not in my limited personal experiences.
The mixture of hyperwealth and soul-crushing shit-on-the-street-people-huddled-around-burning-garbage-cans poverty right out there on display for everyone, and the lower-working and middle class getting uncomfortably squeezed in the middle is what makes SF look like a sad parody of Blade Runner.
You can't blame tech. There was tech for years, and housing filled up all the orchards and farm land south of San Francisco. Then, at some point, there stopped being farms to build on. The same thing will happen to Chicago if growth continues; people are only willing to commute so far.
Maybe floating settlements in the Bay? If Japan can build a floating airport (Narita), can't we build a floating apartment or two?
IIRC there's also a strict 1-for-1 policy: for every foot of land you take from the bay, you have to reclaim a foot of land for the bay elsewhere. Despite this, people will still fight it.
I think you mean Haneda airport; and it's not floating, it's built on landfill (apparently the literal garbage kind):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haneda_Airport#Domestic_era_(1...:
> The Transport Ministry released an expansion plan for Haneda in 1983 under which it would be expanded onto new landfill in Tokyo Bay with the aim of increasing capacity, reducing noise and making use of the large amount of garbage generated by Tokyo. In July 1988, a new 3,000-metre (9,800 ft) runway opened on the landfill. In September 1993, the old airport terminal was replaced by a new West Passenger Terminal, nicknamed "Big Bird", which was built farther out on the landfill. New C (parallel) and B (cross) runways were completed in March 1997 and March 2000 respectively.[12]
> ....The fourth runway (05/23), which is called D Runway,[33] was also completed in 2010, having been constructed via land reclamation to the south of the existing airfield.
And then add rampant NIMBYism on top of that, especially from people who bought in early, and it's a disaster for subsequent generations of would-be residents.
Sure, there can be lots of factors. But the original comment was about adjacent land -- which is present in the East Bay, South Bay, Eastside etc.
If your statement is now "these places might have more affordable housing if they had different geographies, demographics, regional economies, public policy, infrastructure investments and history", then I agree with the statement, it says almost nothing.
Folks like Richard Ellis and WeWork have every incentive to try and get someone, anyone, in tech to evangelize or at least attempt an acknowledgement of their slum-lord ant piles of dirt that have bled startups and established players alike for decades now.
WFH is here. its not going anywhere. the KPI's are real and established. its is a perk that snipes hot talent from places like Salesforce and Alphabet. It is, decidedly, to the encumbrance and disadvantage of commercial real estate and the octogenarian city councils that have gilded their pockets with daily commuters.
Gitlab has been remote first since day one
Github went fully remote earlier this year[0] (while not a startup, worth noting IMO)
Close (CRM)
Zapier (if I recall correctly)
Sourcegraph
Timescale
Supabase
I'm sure there's more
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/09/github-lays-off-10-and-goe...
Airbnb: https://www.airbnb.com/d/liveandworkanywhere
EDIT: Automattic, Buffer
I can buy the real estate argument to some degree, but it just isn't as simple as a giant conspiracy to get everyone back in a box so they can monitor us.
> For example, the vast majority of employed people in computer and mathematical occupations report having remote-work options, and 77 percent report being willing to work fully remotely.
> Another of the survey’s revelations: when people have the chance to work flexibly, 87 percent of them take it. This dynamic is widespread across demographics, occupations, and geographies. The flexible working world was born of a frenzied reaction to a sudden crisis but has remained as a desirable job feature for millions. This represents a tectonic shift in where, when, and how Americans want to work and are working.
I can definitely understand your position with regards to wanting (rightfully demanding, even) to be treated respectably and with humanity and deceny where you live and work, but arguing SF is more accepting than all non top tier cities because of the political climate is a reach. There are plenty of non top tier cities tolerant of others.
I'm happily 100% remote, working from the comfort of my SF home for a company based in NYC. I enjoy that being remote gives me control over my physical working environment (I don't have to constantly wear headphones in an open plan office, etc), and removes a commute from my daily schedule. I _also_ appreciate that SF is a dense city, where I can easily live without a car, use a relatively decent public transit system, where my dietary preferences are generally easily met, and where my race and sexual orientation are thoroughly unremarkable.
Is the startup ecosystem going to be able to pay enough to drag folks there in the current high benchmark rates for longer (perhaps forever?)? To be determined. YC has deep pockets [1], but you don't fight the Fed [2] [3].
[1] https://www.ycdb.co/top-companies/exit-value
[2] https://www.axios.com/2023/09/23/fed-interest-rates-venture-...
[3] https://www.axios.com/2023/09/21/fed-reserve-plan-inflation-...
I hope you're correct, but empirically this appears to be wishful thinking, at least among larger organizations. How many tech big-cos have implemented a mandatory return to office policy in some capacity? Some big ones off the top of my head: Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Snap. It's my observation that smaller companies tend to follow larger companies culturally, especially as they scale.