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Comment by anon808 | Hacker News Reader

Daly City is 9.7 miles from the reddit office, for all practical purposes it sounds like Yishan wanted to just move offices in the same city; the Daly City part doesn't seem like it's important. Or am I missing something?

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I think the conflict is more cultural than people realize: an office in Daly City is tremendously easier to reach and if you're coming from South Bay -- essentially you exit the freeway and park.

On the other hand, getting to a point in SF from the freeway and parking usually takes at least 30 minutes (in addition to the 30+50 minute drive from the starting point in the South Bay or Peninsula). SOMA area is reachable by Caltrain, but Caltrain is unreliable, doesn't run as frequently nor is SOMA the only place where people have offices (and walking to further reaches of SOMA, or the area of Market, or FiDi is an often dangerous - especially at night - 20-30 minute walk).

Daly City is reachable from SF by BART, but that supposes you live near a BART station in SF and the Daly City office itself is close either the Daly City or Colma BART station. In general I'd say it's easier for an SF resident to get to certain parts of Daly City (those accessible by part or by San Mateo county buses running from SF are easy if you live near BART) than it is from someone in South Bay to get to SF. Driving is very easy if you live near 280/35/19th Avenue -- getting to Daly City from Mission especially is not particularly difficult).

That brings the cultural issue: different people prefer to live in SF vs. South Bay or Peninsula (some live in one place whereas they'd prefer to live elsewhere, of course). To hugely (but completely meaninglessly) over-generalize you can imagine the Peninsula as the OSI stack: physical and network layers are further south, middle-ware is in the Peninsula (Oracle in Redwood City), and presentation (end-user applications like AirBnb) are in SF (again, this is only loosely so: there are web app startups in South Bay and there are systems and middle-ware companies in SF). Intuitively it makes sense: I can't imagine starting a Foursquare in San Jose (there isn't a critical mass of people -- not all of them geeks -- cloistered around any given landmark to gain sufficient traction).

In many types of companies, you want both: which is why companies always seek to locate in either transit accessible parts of South Bay/Peninsula (Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Mateo downtown areas), run buses, locate in SoMa, or have multiple offices (this sounds like a "no-go" for Reddit, but Square, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, and my own employer -- Cloudera -- all do this). Yet, if a company has a very strong SF-oriented identity (at least for its Bay Area office), a compromise location (especially if the compromise isn't just an SF office near 4th and King) could definitely upsetting existing employees who might also feel that they are no longer as valid as potential new employee the company wants to hire from South Bay.

I commuted on Caltrain for 5 years and found too reliable!

Let me put it this way: I found Caltrain to be reliable on average, but the 75th percentile to be terrible. Major delays are going to happen multiple times a month.

s/but completely meaninglessly/but _NOT_ completely meaninglessly/

oops.

Plus many folks in sf don't have cars, prefer not to drive, and want to avoid paying $1k/mo for a car (parking in mission is often $350/mo; insurance at $60; gas + note).

Yes: this is one key point, avoiding car ownership (and making do with zipcar et al for weekend trips) is pretty much the only way to make SF affordable.

(Background: I'm deep in South Bay, but that's taste and preference not an absolute view I want to impose on others).

> Intuitively it makes sense: I can't imagine starting a Foursquare in San Jose (there isn't a critical mass of people -- not all of them geeks -- cloistered around any given landmark to gain sufficient traction).

It's not uncommon for a startup's initial userbase to be geographically far removed from the company's headquarters. Facebook's was in the Ivy & NESCAC colleges in New England even after the company moved to Palo Alto. AirBnB's was in NYC. Twitter, I've heard, took off in Austin after SxSW. Orkut got Brazil despite originating in Mountain View. WhatsApp first took off in the Ukraine and then India, also despite being based in Mountain View.

I don't know why this is - intuitively, I'd expect it to be where the founders are, because that's who they can directly talk to. But the data doesn't seem to bear that out. Maybe it's because of random chance - if you model a successful startup as a cluster of users who happen to have an unfulfilled need and an entrepreneur who happens to stumble upon the solution to that unfulfilled need, then it makes sense that many initial userbases will be geographically separated from the company simply because there are more people far away from you than people close to you.

San Francisco attracts startups and talent because it's a cool, fun, sexy place to live. Bright young talent demands those sorts of conditions.

Daly City is a suburban hellhole. If “cities” like Daly were desirable places to live, Provo, Utah and Tacoma, WA would be IT meccas.

The traffic in that region guarantees an ungodly commute by car for anyone who wanted to stay in SF and drive to Daly for work (1 hour commute = $40k in pay worth in happiness http://www.npr.org/2011/10/19/141514467/small-changes-can-he...). The public transportation is… lacking.

I can’t speak for Yishan’s motivations, but if I were on the board, I would push for his replacement simply due to the talent attrition that would inevitably occur if he got his way.

SF cool, fun, sexy? Have you ever been there? I found it dirty, scary, and smelly.

Well, it's a city a lot of people like but certainly those adjectives could be applied to just about any good-size city--and it's why a lot of people also don't really like cities period. I'd add that, if your experience with SF is going to a show at the Moscone or elsewhere nearby, that general area (Market, Tenderloin, etc.) is definitely less nice than much of the rest of the city. But it's also fair that SF, for a variety of reasons, also has more street people of various sorts than most cities do.

Honestly I loathe the place. Not for any of the reasons you just listed. (“scary”? SF??)

I was born in New York City, grew up in L.A., started a company in SF, and live in Chicago, but the only place I've ever been held up at gunpoint was in San Francisco at 4th and Mission.

I mean you were on Mission street. I raise an eyebrow to the "loathsome gentrification" stories that pop up pretty regularly.

You got stuck up in front of Denny's?

That sounds like bad luck. Within San Francisco, 4th and Mission seems like one of the less likely places to be held up at gunpoint since it's so busy.

What are your reasons, out of curiosity? I'm a reasonably-sized guy, so I rarely feel personally scared, but I don't have to look far to see some really sketchy situations.

So is every world-class city.

That's what makes it cool, fun and sexy.

Yeah, that sounds like a better description of my 3.5 years here. Of course, don't tell any of the SF-lovers exactly where you live, because they'll just blame your experience on you not living at exactly the right block. Live in Soma? Oh, that place has no night life. Live in the Mission? Oh, you're too close to the BART station. Live in the avenues? Too far away from the city center. And so on.

"dirty, scary, and smelly"...Have you ever been to the East Coast? I would say SF is on par as far as dirty and smelly goes. Scary? I think it's pretty underwhelming but I come from NYC/Philly/Baltimore area so that might bias my viewpoint.

And yet plenty of "bright young talent" seems to do just fine in the rest of SV. "Demands" is overstating it a bit.

"Suburban hellhole?" It's important to realize that many people hate cities, and would much rather live in suburbs. Why are there so many huge suburban areas around (most) large cities in the US?

You have to contextualize those demographic moves.

The post-war American suburban drive was in large part driven by economics and policy. Mortgage subsidization from the 30s with the Home Owners' Loan Corporation and the GI Bill in the 50s made loans available to mass consumers, while the HOLC's discriminatory redlining policy and the deindustrializing of cities (driven chiefly by lowered shipping costs) caused dense urban areas to become less desirable.

Mixed in with this you also had suburban-oriented urban planning (lots of highways, little public transit investment), brand new car driving infrastructure, low energy costs, lots of cheap land to expand to and in the 70s and 80s rising urban crime.

If you were looking to live somewhere, you had lots of incentives to prefer the suburbs. Today, most of these trends (energy cost, crime, job markets) have changed course.

"cool, fun, sexy"? It's a disgusting place with a corrupted government and 40 years old development policy and an even older infrastructure. Fun, sexy? How about not being able to find a single coffee shop open after 9:30PM on a freaking Saturday near Market St?

Any real world class metropolis like Hongkong, Shanghai, Tokyo or New York would blow SF out of the water in the "cool, fun, sexy" department.

I happen to agree with everything you just said, but by American standards, it’s… well it’s in the top ten, I guess.

Compare Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, or New York City to Daly City and then tell me where San Francisco falls on the scale.

I moved to SF from my college town of Springfield, Missouri. It's a town of 150k people surrounding by the rural Ozarks. Obviously, there's nowhere near as much art, music, comedy or "culture" as in SF, but it's immensely easier to get around, and much more convenient to do normal errands like buying groceries, household items, etc. And don't even dare compare rental and home prices. I certainly won't claim Springfield is a "better city," and I don't know exactly what criteria you have in mind, but for day to day life it's far more convenient.

This is what people overlook when they trash the Midwest or "flyover country". I guess they may think it's cool to ostracize people who live in "Provo, UT" (which is nice, by the way) because they don't go to enough art festivals, but the business of day-to-day living is much less complicated in those places. If you just want to raise a family and go do simple recreational things together, your life will be immensely bettered by not living in a high-population urban district; you'll have a lot more money and a lot less headache. Image-obsessed twenty-somethings, like the ones often employed by tech startups, may think it's cool to ostracize suburbia and ignorantly claim that no one with "real talent" will want to live there, but most of them will be singing a different tune as they enter their 30s and try to live an actually significant life.

Market street is not a very vibrant part of the city. Nevertheless:

http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=coffee&find_loc=San+Fra...

It's expensive. Difficult for commuters, even if you live in the city, just to get around. It's style over substance, and it attracts brogrammers, not "bright young talent", which can exist anywhere.

The guy grew the company 5x. I don't think attrition is the issue.

I assume he left because it wasn't his company anymore, it was run by the board. If the board can override his will as CEO and accept losing the CEO over office location, that by default means the board did not really value him. I would expect that hurts. Some things you can't prove with data, these are subjective decisions that fall into the realm of a CEO's responsibilities to look out for his team. It wouldn't be so far fetched to believe that Yishan felt that the board did not allow / trust him to do his job.

It's almost certainly not really just about office location.

One could say the same thing about the mandate to move to SF or lose your job. Not everyone wants to live in the city. You might call suburbia a hellhole, but some of us see the city that way, particularly given its cost of living.

9.7 in San Francisco miles is a long commute.

I've never lived/worked in SF, but I had pretty much the same thought. Living in NYC, 9.7 miles is an almost unfathomable distance.

When Citibank built the tower in LIC, I'm sure there were people that weren't happy, but I doubt they lost many employees. That's about 7 miles driving distance from wall street.

Also strongly depends if "Daly City" was "Daly City three minutes walk from BART" or "Daly City in an office park by a freeway somewhere"

Which is practically all of Daly City.

with a highly competitive job market, especially where many of the people in a city with poor public transit do not have cars, 9.7 miles is annoying enough to cause people to choose somewhere else to work.

When I lived in the East Bay, it would be really hard to accept a move to Daly City (from downtown SF), because it's another 20 min each way. And East Bay BART riders wouldn't even have to change trains! For CalTrain riders, it's a doubling of the commute or more.

Maybe a part of the solution to the highly competitive job market could have been not annoying your current employees by forcing them to move to a city with poor public transit?

Was that board's decision, or Wong's?

Sounds like a nice bike commute. Especially with the weather there.

There's nothing like biking 10 miles in the cold fog along a freeway...

You have a really interesting definition of cold.

Apparently it is "you might have to wear a jacket".

The standard California definition.

I saw someone wearing earmuffs in 55 degree weather in downtown mountain view.

you haven't met the drivers out here. They're bad, there mostly aren't physically separate bike lanes, and you often don't even get a ticket for killing a bicyclist. It's not worth it.

edit: Also -- sample size of 13 -- 70+% of the people I know who bike commute daily have been hospitalized. I also know someone who did 6 months in a nursing home after some bitch ran a red light, hit him, and cracked his pelvis; he won multiple surgeries and the inability to stand up for months.

That's a good point. I'm too NL centric here, old ladies here would have no problem with a bike trip on that distance but not having bike lanes changes the picture quite a bit, especially if the drivers do not exercise care.

My mom routinely does 100 km trips and she's in her seventies.

NL's infrastructure is orders of magnitude more bike friendly than California.

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