Let's see a hypothetical:
Patrick Gonnagle went to Stanford and really likes living in the Bay area. He also invented the idea of facebook for dogs and made a crap-ton of money in the dotcom era. Nowadays, he spends most of his time trying to out-do his peers in the nuevo-crap-ton-o'-money crowd with his extensive collection of Pia Zadora's underpants.
The rest of the time, however, P-Gon (as he likes to be called) finds smart, idealistic, entertaining, and attractive young people, mostly from Stanford, and gives them large sums of money in exchange for a significant share of any future large sums of money their idealistic and entertaining activities will bring in.
The idealistic and smart people like to get advice, recognition, and affirmation from P-Gon, and he likes to keep an eye on his investments (not to mention the advantage of showing off his cadre of minions to his peer group). So, they all have to live, work, eat, etc. in close proximity. P-Gon lives at the top of the Transamerica pyramid (literally; he built his 12,000 sq ft bedroom on the very pointy top of it). Fortunately, the I&S folks are being showered in cash (well, not literally; P-Gon has a swimming pool full of giant tapioca balls and $1000 bills that he makes them do laps in (hence "funding round")), so they have plenty of money to pay for suitable hovels.
Lather, rinse, repeat for a couple of generations and you discover that rents are stupid ridiculous in the area of the giant fountain o' money. Which theoretically could be somewhat remedied, maybe, except that P-Gon doesn't want horrible brutalist high-rise apartment complexes blocking his view of the Tenderloin.