I got a pretty competitive offer from a San Diego startup about 3 years back. They flew me down, wined & dined & afterwards we talked a bit of technology. They even did a real-estate tour to sort of close the deal.
I turned them down after a lot of thought.
Based on the outcome of that startup now, I was right. But you never know...
There is a fantastic passage in William Goldman's books where he talks about why all successful screenplays have basically been written out of crummy motels in Hollywood Blvd and tiny apartments in theatre district in NYC. Most successful screenwriters like Goldman for example are millionaires and film companies can easily afford to put them up in some exotic hotel in Vail or other foreign locales etc. Why pick crummy hovels to do your best work ?
The same goes for Kurosawa ( Seven Samurai etc.) who did all his best work in some tiny hotel room even though his palatial house was much better furnished. Essentially, there is something called work-culture that happens best in work-cities, and when you think about tech work, the work-cities are basically crammed rows of desks in mountain view, Palo alto, soma SF,....
You don't think of jira tickets and Tahiti in the same breath. And those were the vibes I got out of San Diego - it was so nice and relaxing and I didn't see myself or my other colleagues getting any serious work done. You just felt like kicking back and watching the clouds or going surfing and lying on the beach. It's too holidayish. I would go there for a vacation, but not to actually get work done.
Like it or not, most tech work isn't particularly pleasant, and that matches the crummy efficient silicon valley vibes...rows of laptops, hardly any space, minutes away from pools of urine and filth on Market Street...I mean, it is what it is. I love Silicon Valley and I don't see work moving away from here given the nature of this work-city.
Professors at school used to say the same thing about why the top math journals and papers come out of Minnesota and Chicago and Boston, as opposed to universities in more pleasant climes - because the weather in those places is so awful you have no choice but to stay cooped up in the library working on your papers :)