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Why entrepreneurs are leaving the Bay Area for their next startup

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21–30 of 162 posts

Re: Why entrepreneurs are leaving the Bay Area for their next startup

#21

We don't need high-tax, low freedom SF. People can do work over the internet. Look at GitLab. Hundreds of employees and no physical location. Imagine making a 6 figure income but living in a place with minimal state and local income taxes. We are entering the period of fully digital corporations. The ultimate form of this is the DAO (see Bisq, Maker, Augur sort of).

i dont know why this is being downvoted. There's no reason for every company in the world to pile down into one city where the locals don't even want the growth.

I guess it's not commonly known but SF by population count is only 10% tech. The other 90% is mostly anti-tech. There's even protests against more tech moving into the city and the occassional attempt at anti-tech regulation (no bus laws, no free lunch laws, etc). i think they succeeded with the no bus laws: I know at least one startup that was shut down for providing bus service for workers.

Re: Why entrepreneurs are leaving the Bay Area for their next startup

#22

We don't need high-tax, low freedom SF. People can do work over the internet. Look at GitLab. Hundreds of employees and no physical location. Imagine making a 6 figure income but living in a place with minimal state and local income taxes. We are entering the period of fully digital corporations. The ultimate form of this is the DAO (see Bisq, Maker, Augur sort of).

You seem to assume SF salaries will be offered in places that are also super cheap? Do you expect founders and investors to ignore the cost of living reality in Nowheresville just cause?

Why on earth would the value someone added to a company have anything to do with the cost of living where they live? Either you support remote or you don't but I would not expect different remote salaries based on where that remote employee lives.

I know some companies do this, but I can't imagine it's a practice that will continue once remote work becomes the norm as it makes little sense.

Re: Why entrepreneurs are leaving the Bay Area for their next startup

#23

We don't need high-tax, low freedom SF. People can do work over the internet. Look at GitLab. Hundreds of employees and no physical location. Imagine making a 6 figure income but living in a place with minimal state and local income taxes. We are entering the period of fully digital corporations. The ultimate form of this is the DAO (see Bisq, Maker, Augur sort of).

You seem to assume SF salaries will be offered in places that are also super cheap? Do you expect founders and investors to ignore the cost of living reality in Nowheresville just cause?

Sure, if you're young and single and saving aggressively, you can still come out ahead in SF.

But Even at half or 1/3 the salary, you'd still come out ahead in many areas across the country, if you have a family of 4. In SF, it's not just the extreme housing costs, but also the 3K-4K/month day care costs (if you can get it), and all the other COL.

Re: Why entrepreneurs are leaving the Bay Area for their next startup

#24
post #2

I wonder why entrepreneurs don't come to Poland to build their product. Warsaw or Wroclaw in particular are vibrant, tech-oriented cities where life is about 1/4 of SF. If I had to bet my future on being able to building something with 1M, I would want to get 4 months instead of 1 for the money. Of course, SF might have better investing ecosystem, but once you got the money development should be done in a more approp…

Political climate, for one thing.

(recent anti-LGBT sentiment, anti-refugee/migrant sentiment, anti-EU sentiment and general right/nationalist movement uptick)

Re: Why entrepreneurs are leaving the Bay Area for their next startup

#25

> ...one thing there is a lack of outside the Bay Area are the people who really know how to scale a fast-growing tech company This reinforces the notion that new tech startups don't really need to save money. They need to dominate their niche. They need to scale up fast and become the biggest player first.

there are lots of ways to start a successful business that don't involve millions of dollars of seed money. you don't have to grow into a multinational conglomerate to be a sustainable enterprise, you know. if you have to huge for your business to make sense at all, maybe you just have a stupid idea. statistically, it is more likely that you are wrong than that you are a zuck-level-genius.

Re: Why entrepreneurs are leaving the Bay Area for their next startup

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to assume SF salaries will be offered in places that are also super cheap? Do you expect founders and investors to ignore the cost of living reality in Nowheresville just cause?

Why on earth would the value someone added to a company have anything to do with the cost of living where they live? Either you support remote or you don't but I would not expect different remote salaries based on where that remote employee lives. I know some companies do this, but I can't imagine it's a practice that will continue once remote work becomes the norm as it makes little sense.

[deleted]

Re: Why entrepreneurs are leaving the Bay Area for their next startup

#28

SV isn't the best fit for a lot of startups. It really shouldn't be the default location for all startups especially since there are different options that offer different things (NYC, Denver/Boulder, Austin etc). The Bay Area has 3 things that set it apart from anywhere else and startups that really need this have no other real choice: Investors who are willing to invest super early Lots of top tier engineers An ext…

what is your startup working on?

Re: Why entrepreneurs are leaving the Bay Area for their next startup

#29

SV isn't the best fit for a lot of startups. It really shouldn't be the default location for all startups especially since there are different options that offer different things (NYC, Denver/Boulder, Austin etc). The Bay Area has 3 things that set it apart from anywhere else and startups that really need this have no other real choice: Investors who are willing to invest super early Lots of top tier engineers An ext…

V An extremely optimistic culture Except on HN where people tend to skew quite negative. Lol

Re: Why entrepreneurs are leaving the Bay Area for their next startup

#30
This is the key part of this article (emphasis mine):

> This kind of story is often framed as a tug of war between Silicon Valley and the rest of the country. But Silicon Valley isn't going any where, and for every startup or founder who leaves the Bay Area, someone else graduates from Stanford or wants to move here. This is about tech becoming a bigger part of the overall economy.

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