Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are massive swaths of the US with much cheaper living than SF and better infrastructure, markets, and basic rights than Russia, China, or Brazil.
I would strongly recommend Canada, especially the Kitchener-Waterloo area. The rents are very reasonable (~$700 USD for a one bedroom apartment, in the safest neighbourhood in Waterloo) and there are tonnes of resources and help available there for early stage startups (Velocity - a free incubator that provides mentorship & office space, Communitech, etc) Not having to worry about things like health insurance is very…
The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups
271–280 of 417 posts
Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The simple fact is that if you own a Bay Area home, you will oppose increased supplies because it makes your home less valuable." Yeah, this is a bit of "yimby" rhetoric that's pretty simple-minded. People don't oppose new construction because of abstract fears like "property value"...they oppose them because of concrete fears, like changing the character of the neighborhood, or increasing traffic. I'm not saying I…
I would not consider property values abstract in any sense of the word, especially when your "concrete" fears directly affect those values. Writing off the whole notion that people fear their property value falling is illogical.
When you go to planning meetings, people are not generally complaining about property values. They're complaining about neighborhood character, traffic, parking, etc. I'm not going to say it never happens, but when it does, you should dig deeper. There are always real concerns.
Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone living in the Midwest and telecommuting to SFBA, that's almost unbelievable to me. I pay less than that for my brand new and quite nice 5/4 house on almost half an acre of land. With all of the remote work available, why would you stay here? I manage a team with two remote-friendly job openings currently. You could work for me and go live in Telluride, CO for less than that East Bay 1br and still have mone…
There's not much remote work available. Those jobs are the most desirable and also the very hardest to get. In the past 10 years, i've received 100s of calls from desperate recruiters looking for Software engineers: and every single time, it's because they're looking to fill positions of companies in Palo Alto or San Francisco. Anytime, I ask them to find a position outside of the penninsula or SF, they turn up empty…
Having remote-friendliness in my pocket, I can be choosy and can hire strong senior-level folks. I think it's inevitable that the rest of the Valley catches on and figures out how to make remote work for them. When this happens, I think we'll see who things:
- A leveling-up of remote salaries. Not such a big deal at my company and on my team, because we don't hold someone's remoteness against them and we pay fair SFBA salaries. Other companies (GitLab, etc.) adjust salaries based on cost-of-living. This is a reduced-fare lunch for them but probably not sustainable. Other companies are going to catch on and snap up top talent at average SFBA comp levels and the salary-savers will be forced to level up.
- SFBA talent will start leaving the Bay Area for more affordable and enjoyable areas. We'll see engineers moving to Central American beach towns, Colorado ski towns, back home to flyover states, etc.
Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups
#274Both 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…
Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even then you need to be able to hire engineers. It's no accident that the companies located in that vast swathe hire a lot of remote employees.
Alternately, you can do what TI did and grow your own. When Texas Instruments decided to establish their headquarters in Richardson, TX, they faced a shortage of talent as Richardson hadn't really been built out yet. So the founders of TI (Cecil H. Green, Eugene McDermott, and J. Erik Jonsson) started their own university with an explicit focus on STEM subjects. Eventually, they gave control of the university to the…
Interesting. I had two German friends in high school. They used to carry TI calculators, and I think I remember them telling me that TI was founded by Germans. Is that right? (I can google the info, but thought of asking since you have some background there.) The founder names you mentioned do not seem German (based on what I know of that), except for Jonsson, which seems more Scandinavian.
Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
AirBnB doesn’t cause 3 bedroom tract houses in Cupertino to cost $2 million. There is AirBnB in Houston and it has almost an unmeasurable effect of prices. I don’t know if the Bay Area has rent control, but those types of policies (along with planning commissions and other bureaucracies have more deleterious impacts than a thousand AirBnBs. The simple fact is that if you own a Bay Area home, you will oppose increased…
"The simple fact is that if you own a Bay Area home, you will oppose increased supplies because it makes your home less valuable." Yeah, this is a bit of "yimby" rhetoric that's pretty simple-minded. People don't oppose new construction because of abstract fears like "property value"...they oppose them because of concrete fears, like changing the character of the neighborhood, or increasing traffic. I'm not saying I…
Traffic goes down when we have mixed use zones vs. Euclidean zoning.
Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And the best way to fix Bart overcrowding is to build apartments near where people work so they don't HAVE to commute. Why not build businesses where people live? Apple can spend 5 billion on its new campus in the middle of nowhere, but the public has to shoulder the cost for transit. 90 percent of Google's and Apple's domestic workforce could probably do at least 70 percent of their work from home. Apple prides it…
Apple should have build a couple apartment towers next to it.
Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups
#278Both 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…
How does any of that help when the real issue is the distorting effect of prop 13 on the market? Insane housing prices are being driven by an illiquid market, adding more housing isn't going to change that.
I can guarantee you that if you built a million apartments, then prices would go down.
Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alternately, you can do what TI did and grow your own. When Texas Instruments decided to establish their headquarters in Richardson, TX, they faced a shortage of talent as Richardson hadn't really been built out yet. So the founders of TI (Cecil H. Green, Eugene McDermott, and J. Erik Jonsson) started their own university with an explicit focus on STEM subjects. Eventually, they gave control of the university to the…
>So the founders of TI (Cecil H. Green, Eugene McDermott, and J. Erik Jonsson) started their own university with an explicit focus on STEM subjects. Interesting. I had two German friends in high school. They used to carry TI calculators, and I think I remember them telling me that TI was founded by Germans. Is that right? (I can google the info, but thought of asking since you have some background there.) The founder…
Cecil H. Green was an Englishman who spent some time in Canada before moving to the US. Eugene McDermott and J. Erik Jonsson were both born in the US; I can't find much on McDermott's ethnic background (but I'd guess Scottish or Irish), but Jonsson's parents were Swedish immigrants.
By the way, due to their philanthropic and political work (Jonsson was the Mayor of Dallas for a while, and he helped greenlight DFW Airport), their names are all over Dallas. There's a major arterial in the suburbs (McDermott Road), the main branch of the Dallas Public Library (J. Erik Jonsson Central Library), a bridge named after Eugene McDermott's wife (the Margaret McDermott Bridge; she was a philanthropist in her own right) etc. And of course half the buildings at UTD were named after the founders.
One of the early donors to UTD, though, was of German descent: Karl Hoblitzelle. He was born in the US, but he was ethnically German, and both his parents had German surnames (I don't know if his parents were born here or if they were immigrants). Like the other three, his name is all over the place here: I first heard of him because of Hoblitzelle Hall at UTD, and there's also a Hoblitzelle Park in Plano, plus plaques dedicated to him all over Downtown Dallas, and probably more I can't remember. He founded the Majestic Theatre, which is the only part of Dallas's historic Theatre Row that hasn't been bulldozed in favor of office buildings (and it's still a functional theatre!).
Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups
#280It'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.
In a sense, I think you are right. This is a comment from a recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14763198 Is seems to me that the problem is the amount of money flowing into SF and once that dries up, housing prices will go with it.