The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups • Hacker News Board

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#171

Post by nck4222 » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 2:27 PM UTC

readhn wrote: post #164

nck4222 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> Uhh, ever hear about the depression, dot com bubble, great recession/housing market crash? All of these are cyclical repeating events. Look at the historical data. This is how humans function. Trying to control cycles is pointless and i would say impossible. You just have to be mindful of them and may be "pad" yourself when you reach the extremes. Markets are pretty efficient at deciding what things are worth at t…

>All of these are cyclical repeating events. Look at the historical data. This is how humans function.

Yeah, that's kinda my point. It's awful when left unregulated. And with the great depression/housing market crash, government stepped in to help people out and get the market going again once it was obvious the market had failed/was failing.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#172

Post by jdavis703 » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 2:27 PM UTC

ultimoo wrote: post #5

TL;DR: The investments are moving from the city proper to South Bay over the last 2-3 years. Mostly a good writeup backed by sufficient data points. If I may anecdotally share my observations, of the handful of people that I personally know who have founded Startups in 2016 and 2017 -- all of them are in their late 30s, and have dependents (spouse, children, pets). All of them currently live on the peninsula or in th…

The average house in Palo Alto is well over a million dollars. Despite popular opinion, the rank and file staff in tech companies can't afford this. I'm a software engineer and can barely afford to rent in Oakland...

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#173

Post by nojvek » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 2:28 PM UTC

sotojuan wrote: post #158

rl3 wrote: post #61

What are the best alternatives to the Bay Area? Off the top of my head I'm thinking Portland, Seattle, Boston, Austin and Chicago in no particular order. The annoying part is that there's so much talent concentrated in the Bay Area that it makes going elsewhere very difficult, especially if you have specific senior talent in mind that have already established their lives there. Hopefully telepresence tech gets so goo…

NYC? It's not as expensive as people say, especially if you have a tech salary (which is about twice the median household income). If you have a family I think that changes things, though.

I got a couple of offers from NYC, the living costs are still much higher than seattle.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#174

Post by kevinburke » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 2:28 PM UTC

abalone wrote: post #166

vedanta wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also YIMBY orgs almost everywhere. The south bay YIMBY twitter account has updates on what you can do as well. From following the YIMBY movement ( http://www.slate.com/articles/business/metropolis/2017/06/yi... ) it's hard to not take the YIMBY position. More needs to be built, but we can have ~10% BMR requirements as ways of increasing diversity in a neighborhood and preserving some local control/culture.…

10% is way low. SF has been negotiating for 25% and up.[1] BMR isn't just about culture and diversity. It's about teachers and service industry workers and everyone a functioning city needs. The gap is so large between market rate and affordability, and there are so many richer people still wanting to move into SF, that it is likely wishful thinking that market rate development will be "enough" to solve the problem.…

If you read policy documents YIMBY support all sorts of housing for everyone. Generally ambivalent about inclusionary housing requirements because a) it depresses the production of market rate housing by 2.5 to 6 units per one BMR unit and 2) historically it hasn't been very effective at adding new units. Post Prop C the housing pipeline in SF dropped off a cliff.

Targeting BMR is going to be insufficient in SF anyway when 96% of the city rents units that reset to market rate when someone moves out, only thing that's going to help is a lot more new units of all shapes and sizes, hence the legislation listed above.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#175

Post by gutnor » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 2:28 PM UTC

amygdyl wrote: post #15

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…

London native here, so I will only mention this one thought which arose last week, discussing the same issues after we'd been reading about the Apple headquarters... Could not transportable housing be sited on short lease plots, with the aim of being a rudimentary means to live in a city but without having permanent planning or zoning decisions implemented? Certainly if I was younger, I would be interested in prefab…

Londoner here. Building housing is not the biggest problem to solve though. I live in zone 2 and even there the housing density is not massive. You could probably double it without too much problem.

The problem is that the transport network is at capacity: road, bus, train, tube - everything is packed at peak time, the main roads are a continuous stream of busses, there are 3 train in 20 minutes, a dlr every 3 minutes, ... If you double the density, you need to double the transport links too.

Then there are the nurseries/schools/hospital. My GP has literally thousands of people registered despite a 3 street catchment area. It take at least a month to get a GP appointment.

What's the point of living in a cheapass flat if you need to pay 2000 GBP for nursery or similar for private school, you need to go to private GP when you get a cold and you are still miserable in the public transport and ambulance do not get to you faster than if you were in the middle of the country side. London is at capacity for people working in the City/WestEnd/CanaryWharf. You need to expand it outward (eg: Crossrail ) and start encouraging business centers off the convergence commute route.

BTW I don't think the cost of building is really a problem. The new build quality is appalling, a luxury unit cost little more than 50K to build and will be sold off plan for close to 1 million, years before the builder gets the council approval.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#176

Post by yardie » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 2:32 PM UTC

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #139

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!

Placing the backpack at your feet takes almost the same space, unless you are really fat, plus it becomes a tripping hazard and gets kicked.

Unless you are a slug, or have elephantitis, your torso and arms take up twice the volume of your legs.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#177

Post by nojvek » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 2:33 PM UTC

timothycrosley wrote: post #64

For people looking for an escape from San Francisco: come join us in Seattle! https://www.codementor.io/blog/best-cities-software-engineer... it's great here. And we have been building several times the housing to keep up with demand: http://www.spur.org/news/2017-06-15/keep-building-oakland .

Seattle housing market is still crazy. Not a lot for sale. Plus it rains for 6 months and miserable. If you like that then it's great. I love it in Seattle. You don't get as many startups here though. It's just the big companies doing business as usual.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#178

Post by fragmede » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 2:37 PM UTC

Complaining about housing prices and city living are easy targets; there's a secondary question - what are SF founder pitching VC's? and how does that compare to what founders are pitching down in the valley?

Is everyone in SF pitching yet another subscription box food delivery services? Drones? VR?

Also keep in mind this is VC investment money - it comes with a price, and in the graph of rounds, by region, series A rounds are down from a peak in 2014, but SF and SV are fairly close - it's the other rounds where SF has really fallen. An alternate explanation (based on the very limited data presented here) could be that SF companies are to keep going without accepting VC funding; either with large cash infusions from the blue chips, or by having enough customers give them enough money.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#179

Post by fatbird » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 2:39 PM UTC

crawshaw wrote: post #108

fatbird wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People should give up. People should leave the area. They should move where they can find a job and a cost of living that's reasonable. The fact that people don't give up is why landlords can afford to charge $2,800/month for a 1 bedroom. You can't rent at $2,800/month if no one will sign the lease.

Many do. The cost to society is enormous. If housing and labor markets were entirely elastic, and those are the only two factors your people need to consider, then "go away" could be a reasonable government policy. But people are more than their income and their cost of living. Consider a recovering opioid addict making minimum wage. Medicaid for health care. They are recovering, not relapsed, because of great suppor…

This is a great comment and I wish I saw more like it on HN, where such webs are frequently ignored when discussing the latest opportunity for disruption.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#180

Post by abalone » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 2:40 PM UTC

OkGoDoIt wrote: post #71

_delirium wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can BART overcrowding be addressed in part by improving BART itself? It'd be one thing if it were already moving such large numbers of people that it'd be infeasible to expect higher capacity, but its current ridership isn't even all that high. The Chicago "L", for example, has a similar number of track-miles (though more stations), but moves twice as many people on an average day. How is BART moving half as many and…

Yeah, especially coming back from China where you don’t have to worry upon missing a train since the next one will be there in a couple minutes. BART trains come extremely infrequently, it’s especially annoying when you just missed the train and you’d almost rather get out of the station and walk/Uber but you’ve already paid. What is the reason for this? Do they not have enough trains? Is it a safety issue? Do they n…

According to BART it's due to insufficient train cars and outdated control systems. They say they're working on it.[1]

Reading between the lines it sounds like there is a money problem constraining it, and then we get to the controversial issue of how they manage costs.

[1] https://www.bart.gov/guide/faq#frequent_trains