Comment by JCM9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JCM9 | Hacker News Reader

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I do agree SF and the Bay Area have lost their allure and there are now much better places to live with opportunity and culture in tech. I don’t fully agree with the AI focus of the article. Yes it’s a bubble and the billboards are depressing, but comical if you view in the context of companies trying to out grift each other for your $$. However it wasn’t that long ago that the same billboards were saying everything would be on the blockchain now and that didn’t turn out so well.

I’d say the main sad thing is once the Bay Area was taken over by VC bros in fleece vests and mega corps it lost its soul. In some ways the place became the thing it started out fighting against, and so have many of its companies. Eg Salesforce started as the rebel solution to big bloated clunky tech, and now Salesforce is the big bloated clunky tech that a new generation groans at using.

SF turning into an almost literal dumpster fire hasn’t helped as any good “hub” also needs a clear downtown, and most folks actively avoid going into SF these days.

I think like most things the internet 'ate' SF now you can work remote and most importantly start new companies remotely. OFC scale, capital and in-person still matter, but Australia, UK, Germany, Spain, all now have significant tech hubs, with VC scale capital, decent talent pipelines and same access as everyone else. Its only a matter of time over the next few cycles as more and more future 'big tech' comes from elsewhere in the world.

Hard disagree . They might be good as incubators, but no one comes close to the us in terms of scaling and access to capital.

"Access to capital" meaning "Forced to work on MBA-infected bullshit because that's all that gets funded."

I suspect the answer is a bootstrap economy - small businesses that are actually small, growing sustainably but not trying to be unicorns, freezing out the VC clown show as a matter of policy.

It's not as if there aren't plenty of pain points that could do with fixing outside of web/social marketing and corporate colonisation.

And in Europe it's different ? It's the same just with much lower sums

> I think like most things the internet 'ate' SF now you can work remote and most importantly start new companies remotely.

Absolutly. I used to work in SF. My startup is remote and we operate in europe. slack + regular meetups is all we need.

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