Sam Altman: Bay Area is no longer the obvious place for startups

At least from the talent side, everything I see seems to say the opposite. I see startups in Philly and other cities struggle to retain any kind of talented employee, losing engineers to the west coast companies and business side to everywhere else. We even had a senior marketing employer leave for a brewery because apparently even a local brewery is more competitive compared to VC funding.

I like the contrarian attitude and I believe it's somewhat true, but hard to reconcile what I see on the ground.

The VCs love the cheap talent narrative but it rings hollow.

Last paragraph:

> This is particularly true in Silicon Valley, where a recent think tank report estimates that 17 percent of workers in “highly technical occupations” are native Californians, with 40 percent hailing from India or China and 29 percent from other non-U.S. countries.

And I thought Toronto was multicultural (~51% born outside of Canada)! I wonder what is the rate regardless of occupation?

Edit to answer my own question:

> More than a third of city residents (35.6%) were born outside the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco

I've been working on the logistics of this and it's pretty tough.

If everyone at your "semi off grid" live/work community works in tech, you have plenty of money but little free time, and end up bringing in most of the maintenance of the environment, which is expensive and alienating. It's much the same kind of way that it's unaffordable to live in SF if you're a janitor.

If you have some residents working in tech and the rest maintaining the built environment, it's uncomfortably landed-gentry-and-underclass-of-serfs, with people toiling the land.

The best model I've found is something like the East Wind Community, but you need a business model that is highly accessible to all potential residents, and an extremely high level of social cohesion, and I don't think tech fits the bill. You also have to live somewhere extremely remote in order to be able to afford the land to be self-sustaining in any significant degree. https://www.eastwindblog.co/

I'm interested to hear what other people think though. I think that the fact that we have so much of the space in cities set aside for office space is a little ludicrous.

And the rest of us are waiting it out hoping others get fed up and leave soon. The NIMBYs have a lot to answer for.

> I still expect a significant % of the $10B+ startups will get created here, so it makes sense for investors to still focus here. But I bet a lot of the ~$100M startups will happen elsewhere.

> There are still some things—e.g great startup executive talent, particular kinds of engineering talent—that are much harder to find outside the bay area.

This is spot on and it becomes a real bottle neck if you want to scale your startup beyond $500MM valuation.

Obviously you often can’t choose if you want to be a $100M startup or a billion dollar startup, and by the time you’ve passed the $100M mark it can be too late to refocus on the Bay Area and you might lose momentum by dealing with all kinds of things that shouldn’t matter.

We’ve run into serious talent recruiting issues when we reached this stage and we “solved” it by opening offices in SF and Mtn View. But it was not ideal and a huge waste of money/time.