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Stripe to move to South San Francisco

sfchronicle.com

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Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#171

Post by lsc »

dawg- wrote: post #149

I am not in the bay area, in fact I've never even been to the West Coast. So I am going to ask what may seem like a stupid question to some of you. I mean this in as polite a way as possible, but why wouldn't established companies like Stripe just fuck off to another city entirely? It's a successful company with a great product - that I'm sure many people would like to work for. They could surely lure talent from the…

> Is there some hidden reason that companies like this insist on staying in the same area despite the many potential advantages of looking elsewhere?

the long term root is that there is a huge productivity advantage to clusters of workers. (or, at least many people believe so) Around here, if you strike up a random conversation in public, it's very likely you will do so with someone who does something relevant to what you do, and this is good for getting new ideas and really good for getting new contacts. Right now? there's a huge concentration of programming know-how in silicon valley and san francisco, and building that sort of cluster somewhere else would be really difficult. (I think Los Angeles has a similar situation, only with the movie industry.)

I literally found someone to buy my company at a (non-industry) party. (I mean, I did a bad job of it, I was drinking too much and complaining loudly about how much it sucks to run a company and how I had fucked up like three really good chances to sell the thing and generally being a downer, which is rude, I think, at a party, but also not how you maximize the value of the company you sell. Still, I got an impactful amount of money, and more importantly, I got someone else to run the damn thing so I could go get a job that paid without dumping my existing customers.) I've solved technical problems in similar sorts of ways; it's completely normal to go hang out with friends and actually solve problems over drinks or pizza or whatever. (which yes, is a culture some people hate, and I totally understand that, but some of us like it, and like it or not, it's certainly effective.)

Another bigger microeconomic factor that people who don't live here don't understand is that California laws and cultural norms are set up to privilege people who have been here longer. If you bought a place here in '08? Silicon valley isn't very expensive at all; our property taxes are largely fixed based on what we paid for the place when we bought it. This is kinda true (but to a much lessor extent) for rents; I know a lot of people paying under 2/3rds what they'd pay in rent if they moved in today, even without rent control. with rent control, paying under 1/3rd what they'd pay if they moved in today is not uncommon. This means that the sticker shock you get from the outside looking in isn't actually what most of the people who have lived here long term are paying.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#172

Post by ghaff »

mc32 wrote: post #170
ghaff wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all fairness, significant HQ moves often have a major cut in headcount as a well-understood side effect if not an actual motivation. But, yes, companies can and have moved their HQs a lot more than ten miles. It's probably harder in an industry and at a time when more people figure a job with a given company is pretty ephemeral though.

Maybe but I think people will figure out the talent deserts have more oases than people think. There are more options for talent than just SV. Remember much of the US talent in SV come from other parts of the country. Many would stay local if given the opp to stay local. So instead of drawing talent to SV, SV could seek the talent in those markets (where talent is growing).

Oh I agree with all that. I don't live in SV/SF myself and have no real interest in doing so. But so many people have the attitude that you can't have a tech career if you don't live in SV that it would probably be difficult for an existing company to move out of the area without losing a lot of people (or at least letting them work remote).

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#173

Post by watt3rpig »

rayiner wrote: post #128
baby wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a national issue and SF is a symptom. Instead of pushing for healthcare, housing, more aids, and so on, people are just blaming it on mental health.

It’s not “national issue.” Aid and housing are local issues. San Francisco and California in general have much worse homelessness problems than many other places in the country. (For example, Mississippi has one of the lowest homelessness rates in the country.)

Mississippi just throws them in jail.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#174

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

mc32 wrote: post #170
ghaff wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all fairness, significant HQ moves often have a major cut in headcount as a well-understood side effect if not an actual motivation. But, yes, companies can and have moved their HQs a lot more than ten miles. It's probably harder in an industry and at a time when more people figure a job with a given company is pretty ephemeral though.

Maybe but I think people will figure out the talent deserts have more oases than people think. There are more options for talent than just SV. Remember much of the US talent in SV come from other parts of the country. Many would stay local if given the opp to stay local. So instead of drawing talent to SV, SV could seek the talent in those markets (where talent is growing).

Maybe people in the abstract would, but at the level of individual people and companies talent isn’t fungible. If Stripe were to lose 100 senior engineers in a move to Salt Lake City, but could pick up 110 new ones at 90% of the price, it’s not obvious that would be a net win.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#175

Post by all_factz »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #148
kevingadd wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What alternative solution actually fixes this, though? All you can really do is build more housing (to fix housing undersupply caused by the excess office space) and limit growth of office space (to prevent the imbalance from getting worse). The fact that companies can open up offices somewhere else shouldn't be very surprising, and it shouldn't be shocking that people will choose to live where they already live unle…

> What alternative solution actually fixes this, though? Lower the cost of building housing. Streamline permits, zoning, and environmental review. Publicly commit, in other words, to driving down housing prices over a decade. (Note: not land prices! That’s the compromise.) This makes it cheaper to... Build enough shelters for the transient homeless population. Now that they’re a stable problem, we can focus on the gr…

I’ve lived in the SF Bay Area pretty much my whole life and I just want to say you hit the nail on the head. Do you know of any politicians who are working to make this happen? I’m pretty liberal, but I sometimes feel we live in such a bubble here that even ideas like these are a third rail...

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#176

Post by hinkley »

abalone wrote: post #135
austhrow743 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>SF is just trying to tie jobs to adequate housing construction If that was the case wouldn't a tax by number of employees be what to push through?

It actually used to be that way (payroll tax) until the tech industry pushed through the gross receipts tax. But taxing office square footage is also a reasonable approximation for headcount.

It isn’t. This encourages companies to pack people in like sardines.

I’ve worked, for instance, in two or three offices that were right as the OSHA limits for bathrooms per capita (I’m still pretty sure Amazon was in violation). These are not pleasant working environments.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#177

Post by mc32 »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #174
mc32 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe but I think people will figure out the talent deserts have more oases than people think. There are more options for talent than just SV. Remember much of the US talent in SV come from other parts of the country. Many would stay local if given the opp to stay local. So instead of drawing talent to SV, SV could seek the talent in those markets (where talent is growing).

Maybe people in the abstract would, but at the level of individual people and companies talent isn’t fungible. If Stripe were to lose 100 senior engineers in a move to Salt Lake City, but could pick up 110 new ones at 90% of the price, it’s not obvious that would be a net win.

Not in that year, but long term it can be a win (obviously depending on their goals).

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#178

Post by usaar333 »

paulie_a wrote: post #84
dmode wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is surely exaggerated right ? I know CEOs of large startups who live in mansions in Woodside, Berkeley, Mill Valley etc

My sample size is small but a company that raised 40 million and the CEO is considering leaving sv because his wife need to make rent with a roommate is not a great sign of the real estate. Sv isn't special. People are going to other tech hubs which are sprouting like crazy. Sv was when it made products. But sass can be done anywhere. People are leaving sv and housing prices are the reason. It's going to lead to brai…

Sounds like that CEO might be paying himself too little.

Fwiw, housing prices (rents) have barely budged in much of the Bay Area for the past 4 years. If the exodus hasn't already happened, I doubt it will.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#179

Post by selimthegrim »

masahiko wrote: post #81
dmode wrote: post #62

As someone who has worked in South SF for years, it is pretty bad for employees. It is a cultural wasteland with few restaurants or interesting things to do. Transit is also poor as both BART and Caltrain are in awkward locations. And the fog is worse. This will be like Uber’s move to Oakland, which got rolled back pretty quickly

Fog is worse than where? I work in SSF as well... A) its where businesses like Stripe should be in the coming years (it wont be creative, it'll be internet infrastructure) B) there is a ferry to Oakland (to help alleviate the absurd traffic jams over the bay bridge) and C) bring some variety (right now SSF is all pharma and med device) into SSF. There is no reason why SSF couldn't be a thriving, cool place to live an…

The ferry terminal with 12 bike spots (like downtown Oakland BART station which has 8) and no current ferry service to Pier 41? Why doesn't Stripe fork over some $$$ for that if they're so serious?

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#180

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

mc32 wrote: post #177
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe people in the abstract would, but at the level of individual people and companies talent isn’t fungible. If Stripe were to lose 100 senior engineers in a move to Salt Lake City, but could pick up 110 new ones at 90% of the price, it’s not obvious that would be a net win.

Not in that year, but long term it can be a win (obviously depending on their goals).

One perspective is that the exchange permanently hamstrings the company. You spent let's say 3 years on average, training those engineers to be the best people in the world at solving Stripe's problems, but now they're gone with (unless you're gonna do double payroll for a while) only an arms-length handoff to the new staff. That's 300 person-years of training, gone forever. Arguably even worse, it propagates upwards; there will be some number of valuable, important projects which can no longer get done because the needed expertise was lost.
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