Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

tomtunguz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 417 posts

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#141

Post by ihaveajob »

aswanson wrote: post #138
kevinburke wrote: post #6

Both top-level comments have mentioned housing prices. I grew up in the Bay Area and want to stay here and I am trying to work to change policy to help build more housing. Unfortunately due to law, bad policy and NIMBY's the market is not going to solve this problem on its own, without political change rents and housing prices will keep increasing. Here are some political actions you can take to help: - call your Sta…

Are the Bay Area public schools good? Or is it the thing to do to send kids to private school there like every other urban center?

It varies, but many of them are world class. That affects housing prices dramatically. People make calculations of where to buy a house depending on how many kids they expect to have: 0-2, buy somewhere cheap and send the kid to private school; 3+ and you need to buy somewhere with a better public school.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#142

Post by stenlix »

aswanson wrote: post #138
kevinburke wrote: post #6

Both top-level comments have mentioned housing prices. I grew up in the Bay Area and want to stay here and I am trying to work to change policy to help build more housing. Unfortunately due to law, bad policy and NIMBY's the market is not going to solve this problem on its own, without political change rents and housing prices will keep increasing. Here are some political actions you can take to help: - call your Sta…

Are the Bay Area public schools good? Or is it the thing to do to send kids to private school there like every other urban center?

Many of the Bay Area public high schools are very good. Schools like Monta Vista, Lynbrook, Gunn, and Palo Alto high school are top in the state if not the nation.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#143

Post by thearn4 »

_pmf_ wrote: post #112
TrickyRick wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which ones would that be? Of the top of my head I only know of the Hololens being developed mostly for professional use, any other AR/VR tech is all gaming, gaming, gaming.

> Which ones would that be? Oh, I did not imply that there are any, just that the only largish applications besides games and "experiences" are probably fancy vanity applications for businesses.

It seems like a smart space to try to develop something for. On the business side though, most of what I've seen are flashy and would probably get used less than a dozen times before being ditched for being to cumbersome.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#144

Post by amyjess »

Naritai wrote: post #129
narrator wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does everyone have to squeeze into San Francisco and the peninsula? Can't you tech workers gentrify West Oakland at least? Guess a few street thugs are a force more powerful than million dollar home prices. I bet those guys are really proud of the chaos they create that forces all of you to avoid their neighborhoods.

Did you miss the part where BART is packed every commute hour? There are huge numbers of people in Oakland and the rest of the east bay. But the most efficient transportation system is one that doesn't have huge rush hour stresses, i.e. ones where people live close to where they work. So if the offices are getting built in SF, then so must be the housing.

> So if the offices are getting built in SF,

This is the problem. Embrace edge cities, people. There's no reason to expect hundreds of thousands of people to commute to a downtown area. Scatter the businesses throughout the suburbs, dammit. Start locating new startups not just in Oakland but even farther out, in places such as Walnut Creek or Santa Rosa. Hell, maybe a tech influx could get the crime down in Stockton.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#145

Post by 0xB31B1B »

nailer wrote: post #119
narrator wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does everyone have to squeeze into San Francisco and the peninsula? Can't you tech workers gentrify West Oakland at least? Guess a few street thugs are a force more powerful than million dollar home prices. I bet those guys are really proud of the chaos they create that forces all of you to avoid their neighborhoods.

npm and uber are in Oakland. Edit per comment below: uber Oakland office was going to 3000 people, but yeah, now it's been reduced to a few hundred: http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/03/20/uber-scales-back-initi...

Uber is in SF, Palo Alto and Seattle, oak office is very small and hasn't opened yet.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#146

Post by ihaveajob »

santaclaus wrote: post #33
vidoc wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Riding BART into and out of SF as a commute is ridiculous at a new level nowadays. Especially given the shocking number of uneducated people who insist on keeping their backpacks on their shoulders despite the train being packed. Totally pisses me off!

Ok, while we are on BART gripes: what is the deal with people trying to squeeze their way upstream and board the cars before everyone has fully detrained? In NYC peeps form little ad-hoc queues to the left and right of the doors, let the exiters exit, then enter in two quick streams. In the Bay, I feel like MFing Moses trying to part the sea when exiting a train. Don't even get me started on the weird station lines t…

It's even more annoying given that passengers waiting to board know EXACTLY where the door will be when the train stops, thanks to those black edge marks. It might not be a bad idea to ask BART to add some floor marks telling people where to line up on crowded stations.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#147

Post by ghaff »

Nav_Panel wrote: post #133
CodeCube wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so then build the offices in oakland ;)

This is actually what happened in parts of Westchester and Connecticut. All the executive staff were commuting from their suburban homes to their various headquarters in NYC, then they realized they could just move their office instead.

It was also the case that if you wind the clock back not all that many years, relatively few of the people working for, say, IBM (especially at the executive level) actually wanted to live in Manhattan.

Obviously the Bay Area as a whole has a problem with housing prices. (It has for a very long time but it's become extreme relatively recently.) But one of the big issues with housing prices in "prime" cities is that professionals weren't clamoring to live in them until quite recently.

Look at Boston/Cambridge as well. Teradyne was probably the only significant tech company with a major office in Boston until the dot-com/bomb and it later moved out. All the growth in Kendall Square and Seaport is recent. It's no wonder urban housing and transit hasn't kept up.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#148

Post by xr4ti »

narrator wrote: post #117
kevinburke wrote: post #6

Both top-level comments have mentioned housing prices. I grew up in the Bay Area and want to stay here and I am trying to work to change policy to help build more housing. Unfortunately due to law, bad policy and NIMBY's the market is not going to solve this problem on its own, without political change rents and housing prices will keep increasing. Here are some political actions you can take to help: - call your Sta…

Why does everyone have to squeeze into San Francisco and the peninsula? Can't you tech workers gentrify West Oakland at least? Guess a few street thugs are a force more powerful than million dollar home prices. I bet those guys are really proud of the chaos they create that forces all of you to avoid their neighborhoods.

Yes. Thugs. Drugs. Drive by shootings. The east bay is a burning trash heap with no redeeming value. Please do not move here.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#149

Post by amyjess »

golemotron wrote: post #135
nailer wrote: post #115

This is excellent opportunity for anyone who wants investment from west coast VCs but doesn't want to deal with San Francisco, Oakland or the bay area. San Francisco frequently has human feces on the sidewalk in many areas right near the city center, high housing prices and a combination of startup bros and angry hard left outrage culture folk. The bay area is a cultureless void and Oakland is still dangerous. Better…

SF culture has descended into purity spirals [1]. The last time I was there I was shocked by the amount of signaling that was happening. [1] - http://www.redgulls.com/2016/08/17/the-purity-spiral/

This is one of the reasons I'm considering a move to SoCal, but I will never, ever consider moving to NorCal.

One thing I've heard is that SoCal is full of superficial, shallow, materialistic people, and that people in NorCal are expected to have a cause. It doesn't have to be a left-wing cause, either; look at Curtis Yarvin, for example.

I'm somewhat SJW myself, but really I'm a consumerist at heart. I just want to live in a cookie-cutter suburb, eat tasty food, watch TV shows I enjoy, hack on code as a hobby, etc. I would be very uncomfortable in NorCal being surrounded by militant vegans and Bernie Bros on the left and dark enlightenment people and physical-removal ancaps on the right. On the other hand, SoCal sounds pretty close to paradise to me (it's actually between SoCal and Vegas for me... I can't decide which one I'd rather move to).

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#150

Post by wu-ikkyu »

nck4222 wrote: post #136
readhn wrote: post #66

It's a self correcting cycle. Money pours in - salaries and living expenses go up - real estate goes up. Money flows out - everything shrinks. What goes up must come down. Everything is cyclical. SF economy is no exception.

Uhh, ever hear about the depression, dot com bubble, great recession/housing market crash? You're basically advocating "Let's do nothing, the market always corrects itself." Which is true to an extent, but in the extreme it also ruins lives, the country, and itself left unchecked during this process. This is why a completely unregulated market is a horrible idea. Government needs to step in at certain times. This mig…

Isn't government intervention the reason why real estate prices are so high there in the first place?
Post reply on HN