Peninsula is losing out to SF itself for a lot of companies, too.
For a startup, having service providers in an area is important, but investors are more important, and remain reluctant to do anything remote to themselves.
Peninsula is losing out to SF itself for a lot of companies, too.
For a startup, having service providers in an area is important, but investors are more important, and remain reluctant to do anything remote to themselves.
What places do you like?
Within the Bay Area: Santa Clara, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Atherton, Woodside, Los Altos, Cupertino, and most of San Mateo County overall.
Otherwise: Seattle, Berlin, non-Berlin Germany, Portland (OR), Montreal, sort of Toronto, Amsterdam, .... Probably Texas, but I've never actually been there.
For some period of time 1-4y: Japan, Qatar, China, Indonesia, Las Vegas, Utah, Montana, ND/SD, etc.
In the Northeast, NH or VT.
Most of these don't really have enough diversity of tech companies to be viable for me, or a good enough ecosystem to start companies. (SV excepted; Seattle is borderline. HK/SIN don't do much in the kind of companies I like)
I guess Switzerland, Austria, Liechtenstein, Czech Republic, etc. go on the "potentially good" list, too.
The things I hate about SF are really threefold: 1) I've spent "enough" time here to be bored with it, at least outside work related things. It's genuinely not a world-class city (outside of tech, and food) -- LA, NY, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, etc have it beat)
2) Absurd costs due mostly to demand and somewhat due to government policies -- this has been well covered. It essentially means you must always be working in tech, unless you've had a huge exit, unless you moved here sufficiently long ago or accept a sufficiently low quality of life.
3) Aside from costs, crazy government and social policies. I can get that people disagree on political issues, but SF (and CA as a whole) are just badly governed -- they collect taxes like a high-services-returned socialist state, but provide services like a low-tax state. There are a bunch of structural reasons this is unlikely to change, so it's not really worth investing any effort in CA politics. I'd actually prefer living in a place which is at the current time more fucked (say, TX, TN, KY, Indonesia; whatever), but where there's enough of a desire to fix things that the trend is positive. Or where the people are actually pretty sane and reasonable overall (Seattle; many of the Northern European countries).