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

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

#191

Post by alexnewman »

DrAwdeOccarim wrote: post #159
jeffasinger wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that biotech is actually better in Boston than the bay area by a pretty wide margin.

The difference between Boston and SF for biotech is so interesting. SF has a lot of future-tech looking biotech companies, super cool DNA sequencing, longevity, synthetic biology, whereas the Boston area is much more pragmatic. It is so funny how west coast vs east coast biotech really is--romantic futurism vs pragmatic present. The other way to look at the divide is protein vs nucleic acid. A lot of very interesting…

uhm synthago is here in cali

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

#192

Post by zemo »

nemonemo wrote: post #93
ulfw wrote: post #13

One of the biggest reasons so many startups moved (or started) in the Bay Area was because VCs didn't bother traveling and funded mostly local companies. Has that changed?

If the VCs are that lazy, and assuming they still seek for the most profit, wouldn't VCs move to the bay area to find the unicorns? Wouldn't it create a virtuous (or vicious depending on the perspective) cycle of formibg a cluster of the companies and VCs in the area? Eventually too much of such cycle would give way to the increased cost of living. But I see a tendency of more moderation in employee compensation by b…

agglomeration is not unique to VC and it's not simply a matter of people being lazy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration

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

#193

Post by tehlike »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #131
burlesona wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Austin rent has gone through the roof, and they’ve got a strong nimby and zoning problem just like SF so it’s just going to get worse. It’s on the exact same track, just ten or so years behind.

Austin doesn't have Prop 13, and Texas imposes reasonable property taxes. Unless those things change, it's HIGHLY unlikely real estate in Austin will approach The Bay area in terms of prices.

It wont. you can also appeal assesments.

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

#194

Post by usaar333 »

diogenescynic wrote: post #168
eanzenberg wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why dont they? Or are there 2 people willing to take the place of every person leaving?

Commute times and rent control. I’d love to move to North Bay but I have to be in San Jose twice a week for meetings. We need better public transit and we could solve a portion of these problems.

That's 55 miles from a low density area. I'm not sure there is anywhere where public transit wouldn't take over an hour each way.

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

#195

Post by ummonk »

zeckalpha wrote: post #178
ummonk wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Bay Area has less than 1/30th the US population and yet the majority of US unicorns and decacorns have hailed from here. It's wildly disproportionate.

This seems tautological. Do you have a source?

How is that tautological? It's clearly an empirical statement. My source is my own observations of decacorns as well as IPOs during the last year.

That said, feel free to skim through this (slightly outdated) list and note how a large fraction of the US-based companies are based in SF or SV: http://fortune.com/unicorns/

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

#197

Post by alexnewman »

Actually it’s simple. the people who come to san francisco now vs when i came here is totally different. i’m happy to have all these pretty people but their ability to network into opportunities is the major reason why none of those opportunities fail.

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

#198

Post by shambolicfroli »

nindalf wrote: post #126
myspy wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yey, living in SF where junkies shoot on the street and everything is littered with excrements because fuck you good social security system. Let‘s live there! Plus, everything really expensive to live there. And if I work at Google I drive two hours with a bus there. I don‘t know but reading about that place it‘s insanity. And the output is Hit and miss. I know of no startup in the last ten years that‘s any substanti…

If you’ve lived in any place long enough, most of your friends and support network do as well. Think about that.

How could a company facilitate a mass move, I wonder. Putting "anchor friends" in the new place.

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

#199

Post by shambolicfroli »

nostrademons wrote: post #157
enraged_camel wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Only a small portion of SF is matches the dystopian vision you claim. Actually, I’m pretty sure the vast majority of people in the Bay Area have very long commutes.

If you work in tech and a short commute is important to you, you can make it happen anywhere in the Bay. I had a 2 mile commute when I was working at Google - it was 5 minutes by car, and about 12 minutes by bike. I've got a 30 foot commute now - I work from home. I've put about 30k miles on my 10 year old car. Many of my friends are the same - live in Mountain View, work at the Googleplex, ~10 minute commute. Well,…

Is there a map of commute-time average traffic speed in the bay area, and how it would compare to an e-bike rider?

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

#200

Post by shambolicfroli »

burlesona wrote: post #121
randomacct3847 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define nicer. To me housing affordability is a massive lever that drives quality of life. You can find a place for 300k in Austin (renovated) what would cost 1.5m in SF.

There isn’t a neighborhood in the entirde Austin metro where you can walk to all your daily needs. The summer heat is brutal and the winters are surprisingly chilly given how hot the summer is. You don’t have anything like the natural beauty of California at your doorstep. For me though the walkability is the biggest thing. There’s not a single neighborhood in Austin that can compare to the quality of life in my “mid…

I read an article (a month or so back) saying that Austin's great quirkiness was a fluke, of an economic downturn creating a transitory surplus of very cheap housing.
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