In 2024, it really is better to run a startup in SF
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Not mentioned: with 10% of total US software engineers.
When discussing startups maybe that's not relevant, but the article says "tech employees", not "big tech and startup employees". A lot of people forget that most companies who employee tech workers are neither big tech nor startups, which in turn means that most tech employees are at neither. This is likely increasingly true with the end of free money.
The word tech really got co-opted.
Cars no
Aircraft no
Pills no
Banks no
Self-driving car yes
Software yes
Fintech yes
Tablet yes
Do I have that right?
(If so, this is not reassuring me that their cited statistics are in any way meaningful.)
Meanwhile, those of us in the 90% of US developers and 99% of worldwide developers will keep on innovating and building new stuff regardless of the semantic games you want to play to keep your Bay-centric worldview.
Here's a general way of putting it:
Today, yes even in 2024, areas with concentrations of talent in [insert field] outperform those without those talent concentrations, despite higher costs.
If you disagree, it's best to disagree with this thesis. If you don't disagree with the thesis, then it just becomes a matter of establishing 'does this area really have a concentration'.
Example: media, NYC.
Another example: AI startups, SF.
I'll also mention that SF isn't fully standalone here. It's strength is largely due to the strength of the Bay Area as a whole and the companies with HQs there (Google, Meta, Apple, etc).
I'd continue to live here even if I didn't work in tech.
Outperform in terms of company performance? Company performance per person?
I'd be curious to hear from someone on the hiring side, how hard is it to get someone talented to move out from the SF Bay Area assuming you match compensation?
This all works better with face-to-face meetings, weak personal connections that allow to reach the right-looking person you won't otherwise discover, and even serendipitous meetings in environments that tend to attract birds of a feather.
SF, with all its bitter and needless shortcomings as a municipality, is still an excellent place to meet the right people for a startup. Even with the extreme ease of video calling these days, physical proximity has a certain edge.
Tech must stop accepting the NIMBY environment which has existed in California for 40-50 years and shift it to a YIMBY environment for housing, if the cost of living is ever going to get under control.
Ironically, the local NIMBYs have been blaming tech for the mismatch between cost of living and wages (for those outside of the tech sector), but one only need look south to LA to see a place with even greater cost-of-living vs. wage mismatch.
The days of working out of a garage to get a startup going are disappearing, because so few own garages, and so many garages are already converted to decrepit living spaces.
Biotech is particularly at risk in the SF Bay area, due to generally lower salaries than tech, and longer riskier payoffs from startups.
If Harris wins, I hope to see sweeping changes, as the NIMBY democrats in the area hopefully lose both influence locally, and are subject to some national policies to improve the housing situation.
Any reason this is more realistic with Harris in charge?
1) For the first time ever, national level Democratic politicians are speaking publicly about housing supply and adopting YIMBY language
2) Harris adopting YIMBY policies will have great influence over both the faux-progressive SF faction and the centrist-to-right-wing Peninsula NIMBY democrats. Their choice will be to defy a hugely popular national politician that originated in the Bay Area, or break from the Democratic infrastructure and lose influence.
3) The Biden administration has, in the past two months, really switched focus to hyping up YIMBY policies, with several announced policy changes on their blog. I believe this is the administration finally realizing that housing costs are the last big segment of inflation that has not been tamped down. With Harris' & Obama's & Walz's much more strident YIMBYism than Biden, I think this will increase, with lots more national level policy pushing local zoning decisions and code decisions towards more housing.
4) If Harris does lose, local politicians can blame her YIMBY policies in contrast to Trump's strident NIMBYism and anti-apartment politics. Generally, the voting populace in local elections is majority YIMBY, and the small number of hyper-motivated folks that organize and decide local elections are NIMBY, and the NIMBY faction will be paying attention to this loss.
Overall, YIMBYism has crossed the party lines up until now. In highly Republican areas, like San Diego or Utah, Republican elected officials embrace YIMBYism. In Democratic strongholds, Democtratic elected officials embrace YIMBYism. There's a problem that with the Harris/Trump political split on YIMBY/NIMBY, this divide might get pushed towards the local level. In which case, blue cities will tend towards more YIMBYism, and redder cities (like San Diego) may go more NIMBY. Up until now, within California, I'd say that San Diego and Oakland have been the most YIMBY, with Berkeley starting to catch up. We will see what happens after the November election!
However, after COVID we aren't back to the same level of conferences and other forms of gatherings that used to exist. I don't know if it still makes sense in the short term.
So are they actually moving to SF city, or just some place in the bay area?
As someone who lives in the deep south bay, communing to SF is out of the question as it would take an hour+ to do one-way. I also just don't like SF in general.
Your question is completely valid and misses what the bay is.
It's not SF or San Jose, or Oakland or the North or East bay... its all of it.
Depending on your politics you will hear SF is either gritty or beautiful. The reality is that is has always been both... Zodiac Killer, Patty Hearst, Jim Jones... LSD culture... The founding of the valley (hardware) and software (BSD, Ingress(all the work of stone breaker), Burning man, The first dot com Bubble... the resurgence of tech while the mortgage market burned.
Move to the bay, move around the bay, at some point you will find a place to call home, and people to be your "tribe".
The first two examples are founders who moved from Europe to San Francisco. Given the entrepreneurial ecosystem in most mid-to-large U.S. cities and more favorable ways of working, I would imagine that you could get a win by moving to any U.S. geography with >1M people versus being a software entrepreneur in a EU regulatory environment. San Francisco is one of the examples... but Chicago probably is, too.
And if you're a founder, there are all sorts of things you need for your business beyond software engineers. You need access to capital, and most VCs are based in the Bay Area and would prefer you be there too. You need access to talented advisors, and later on, experienced hires. Those are also often in SF. It's not impossible to do elsewhere, just more challenging.
Neither of those examples make the case that it's better to hire your engineering team in SF, or that your rank-and-file employees should be there. Yet the article jumps to imply that's the case.
If you’re working yourself to the bone at a startup may as well do it somewhere nice.
Someone (Y-Combinator?) should rent some of SF's spare office/living space (expensify?) and host far-flung company tech teams for 2-week work vacations where they collaborate with local companies.
This would work particularly well for collaboration between customer-facing AI companies and infrastructure AI companies, or for coordinating infrastructure bits.
A step below could be having an organized way to set up meeting points, - like designated cafes, lobbies, and co-working spaces where there's a good chance of meeting likeminded people, investors and others interested in expanding their network overseas.
My plan right now, is to travel to the west coast in October, but I don't really want to fill up my time with 1-2-1 meetings, as it is serendipity and broad "exposure" I'm longing for.
Applying for YC is obviously a way to get that, but three months away from my kids is holding that back.
It's really all about the money. The only ones who can compete at those obscene amounts of money are saudis or sth. If they decided to build a liberal utopia for people who want to be rich, they would have end up with the best universities and the best tech talent. But nobody wants to be rich just to be stuck in a repressive hellhole.
Since time to market (i.e., time to engagement with the real problems) is the key factor in success in these businesses, introducing delays by spending more time seeking collaborators can be a strategic mistake.
To me, the real problem is that deciders make the converse mistake: of quickly choosing those they know over those they have to learn about. It's less work and less emotionally risky, but it's a trap that leads you to defer issues about how you're trying to build teams until you have conflicts - particularly if people avoid conflict. Starting when you don't really know each other makes it easier to scale past the point where everyone really doesn't know each other.
i've lived in both SF and NYC and worked on my own startup in both
NYC has a pretty vibrant startup ecosystem but doesn't compare with SF, except for some reason there's way more healthcare founders in NYC (prob bc bay area healthcare scene is dominated by large hospital systems that are impossible to sell to)
but SF is such a disgusting city overrun with homeless people and crime NYC isn't exactly the prettiest either but pick your poison i guess
i personally prefer south bay over SF hope SF gets its act together since I don't feel safe living there
They're also nearly fully remote, and they also have an office in SF.
Having an office somewhere doesn't tie to remote work or not. These are separate topics.
By making RTO required for my startup, am I introducing a filter that will filter out many employees I wouldn't want anyway?
There are real benefits to working side by side in office, just like for the business and employee there are real benefits to remote work. Hiring is so difficult already, having a filter that will get rid of the applicants not willing to put 100% into the startup seems like a good trade.
Ok, with that said, now is the time I am destroyed by the work life balance mob.
This is where your a step out of pace.
> by the work life balance mob
And this is where they are missing the boat.
Pay me enough to live, and save, give me a giant cut (not the meager equity of the last 25 years) and a place to show up to 3-4 days a week.
The whole point of a startup, of putting in that work is that you're making a bet. A bet on the idea, and the team, the team is making that bet too. The table stakes for startups have changed, and you're going to need a much more egalitarian distribution for your first 10-50 hires now if you want to attract talent.
Most of the AI stuff is in the cloud anyway, there’s little to no point in having an office in San Francisco
I must say, I still work a hybrid schedule, much from home (I live in the neighborhood too). I also must day that opening a physical location in SF has been one of the best investments I have ever made in my business.
I now have people, target customers I used yo have to work hard to find and get time with, introducing themselves to ne coming by to day hello daily. Same thing with startups and VCs, there are a dozen or more VCs in walking distance to my office.
It's like being a diamond cutter in the diamond district.
I also want to note that opening an office somewhere does not necessarily tie to remote work or not. I work remotely often and it's a huge part of my quality of life, I also have an office in SF. I don't see either changing, and they are not tied.
- Google Maps/Yelp - set it up and look professional - Hired folks to send out targeted advertising postcards to potential clients in the area - Linkedin, etc. marketing (there are folks that can help you with this) - Organic marketing, I 3d print trinkets, bought stickers, etc. and hand them out, etc. - Being here when people email/call - Applicable trade shows (I go to medical device conferences in the spaces I work in, investor conferences I went to OpenSauce, it was great!)
I run a hardware design firm, I design hardware (mostly medical devices). So there is always going to need to be a physical component to my business due to the fact we make physical objects.
e: described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41362166
I've been thinking of it like more of a music studio.
I have a bunch of equipment, all setup and ready to use, and then when I, or a group (clients) need to get our work done we show up and do it, when we can do our work elsewhere we do. The point is the studio is here when we need it.
In addition to 3d printers, CNC machines, CAD computers and similar engineering stuff I also have it setup with fancy cameras, video switchers and microphones so it's like a livestream studio. That allows me to give fancy looking "webinar" type zoom calls and client videos so that people can feel like they're working right in the studio with me.
I had been calling it my "Design Lab", maybe I need to change it to "Design Studio"?
This is a good analogy. The old wisdom is that it's better go to go a restaurant surrounded by other restaurants than one that is off by itself; perhaps an implicit acknowledgment of the effects of competition and talent-pooling.
How much this still applies in today's remote-everything world, that is an interesting question indeed.
India is seeing a similar trend in many founders moving their startups to Bangalore despite higher costs and (often) lower quality of life than their starting cities, just because it has the largest talent pool of developers.