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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

#191

Post by droopyEyelids »

tshaddox wrote: post #109
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > The feel of San Francisco is already lost, when a small single apartment runs $3000 a month. > And homeless are everywhere. Maybe a $3k per month "small single apartment" contributes to "homeless are everywhere."

When people say “homeless are everywhere” regarding SF, they’re probably referring to the extremely troubled people who are conspicuously doing drugs or screaming incoherently on the streets. I don’t think those people would suddenly be fine if only the SF apartments were $500 a month instead of $3000. Of course, there are a lot more homeless people in SF than the very conspicuously unwell people I mentioned. There a…

I'm curious about the ratio of those unwell folks who are native to the area compared to those who are transplants.

I can certainly imagine a 'homeless pipeline' where the children of the parents who get priced out of housing end up doing drugs on the street, but I also know about bussing the homeless and homeless moving to SF because they don't want to deal with a serious winter.

According to Wikipedia: As of 2014, the city is believed to have approximately 7,000 homeless residents. As of 2015, approximately 71% of the city's homeless had housing in the city before becoming homeless, while the remaining 29% came from outside of San Francisco

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#192

Post by friedman23 »

gwbas1c wrote: post #165
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…

I remember when Stripe emailed me as a job candidate. At the time, I was sitting in the bar directly behind their office, and basically replied that they (one of the Collison brothers) could come right now and have a beer with me. (I was sitting in the Rose and Crown, and they were in the office behind the Wine Room on the same block.) * > why wouldn't established companies like Stripe just ... off to another city en…

> Good weather

The weather in San Francisco is overrated, it's always cold and windy and there are never any seasons.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#193

Post by friedman23 »

mbesto wrote: post #163
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…

> bay area by moving to a lower cost of living area where mid-level employees can afford to buy an actual house relatively close to work? Stripe is not hiring "mid-level" employees. Or at the very least that is not the type of people they are compensating to run critical roles. Good luck telling a Senior Staff Engineer who makes $500k (plus probably a couple of million in RSUs) that they have to move to Albuquerque,…

> Albuquerque, NM

This is not the only other option. Imagine telling an engineer, hey I'll pay you $500k a year in Atlanta, Miami, Philadelphia, Chicago, or Boston? Rent is immediately cut in half and some states have no income taxes. Their disposable income essentially triples.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#194

Post by ThrustVectoring »

Gasparila wrote: post #46
PopeDotNinja wrote: post #23

I can tell you recruiting for South San Francisco was way harder than recruiting for SF. If I lived in SF without a car, that'd be a deal breaker for me. They're going to start losing people, or see a huge spike in chronic working from home. I guess they have to move somewhere at some point, and no move is without trade-offs. Regarding the gross receipts tax, couldn't they just move their HQ-on-paper to any place tha…

The law has you pay taxes of 1% of gross revenue * percentage of global employees working in an SF office. Even if the headquarters moved (and I'd guess it is already a Delaware registered company legally), they'd still have to pay.

Wouldn't this allow another tax dodge, where hiring employees to do nothing in the lowest-cost area you can find winds up saving more money in SF gross receipts taxes than they cost in salary?

For example, if you have $10M/yr in tax incidence and 100 employees all in SF, you could have an on-paper workforce of 1000 Nigerians at the national median wage of roughly $1k/yr, saving $9M/yr in taxes.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#195

Post by nickv »

friedman23 wrote: post #192
gwbas1c wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when Stripe emailed me as a job candidate. At the time, I was sitting in the bar directly behind their office, and basically replied that they (one of the Collison brothers) could come right now and have a beer with me. (I was sitting in the Rose and Crown, and they were in the office behind the Wine Room on the same block.) * > why wouldn't established companies like Stripe just ... off to another city en…

> Good weather The weather in San Francisco is overrated, it's always cold and windy and there are never any seasons.

Except its going to be 84 and sunny today. Summers are brutal but the rest of the year is pretty nice.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#196

Post by AdieuToLogic »

nitrogen wrote: post #108
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your conflating fees charged to Merchants (by processors) and rewards offered to Card Holders (by issuers). While often the same bank performs, or is a partial owner involved in, both processing and issuing, the percentages you quote are largely disjoint. > I'm reading that Visa typically charges 2.3% to merchants ... The Discount Rate[0] a Merchant pays varies significantly based on the line-of-business, charge-back…

Again, issuer costs have no bearing on Merchant fees nor the profitability of processors. If this is true, then where does the cash back come from if not as a cut of the merchant fees?

> > Again, issuer costs have no bearing on Merchant fees nor the profitability of processors.

> If this is true, then where does the cash back come from if not as a cut of the merchant fees?

Interest rates + membership fees charged by issuers to Card Holders.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#197

Post by keiferski »

fierarul wrote: post #93

> Though Stripe also strongly opposed last November’s Proposition C, which raised business taxes to fund more homelessness services, the company said that wasn’t a major factor for the move. It would be PR suicide for a company to admit that the increased tax to fund homlessness was a major factor for the move. To accounting though a tax is a tax.

Yeah, I don't really get the point of mentioning something like this. Does anyone expect them to say, "Yeah, we moved because we don't want to pay to help the homeless." PR 101.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#198

Post by lsc »

dawg- wrote: post #187
lsc wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wha…

Thanks for the insight, again I fully admit that I don't know the details of the housing/jobs market over there so it was really interesting to hear your perspective. I think the movie industry example is an interesting connection to make. For the last few years Atlanta has overtaken LA as the top producer of feature films in the country, largely due to crazy huge tax incentives for movie studios, and has earned the…

>But I wonder if a city could ever follow the model of Atlanta and try to build a "new Silicon Valley" from scratch with aggressive policies that lure companies/employees from existing tech hubs?

It's totally possible. I think the problem right now is that for profitable tech companies, right now engineers are still super cheap (like most of big tech makes rather more than 500K per employee, and pays less than $250K.) - from that perspective, it doesn't really make sense to try to save money on employees... the opposite, really. If they have to pay another $100K/head 'cause the cost of living is so high, that's a smaller bite than anything that might disturb the massive profit. (this is also the root of the argument that we should unionize, even though we make silly money compared to most other workers. Facebook captures a lot more of the surplus value created by labor, say, than Walmart does, even if by any other reasonable standard, we are treated so much better than a walmart floor associate. I mean, I'm not arguing for or against unionization, I'm just saying that's why some people want to unionize even though we already are better off than nearly any other class of worker.)

The other thing to think about is Detroit. Detroit was totally one of these cluster cities; it was the place to be if you were working with cars in a period when there was a lot of innovation to be had in cars. And then the industry changed (or rather, innovation slowed a lot... like, there just wasn't that much more you could do with cars; just small incremental improvements) - automobile manufacturing scattered to the wind and Detroit is kind of a husk.

Will that happen to the software industry? will innovations start being small and predictable? will the P/E of Facebook drop to match the P/E of Ford? I mean, silicon valley has already been through one of these changes; silicon valley is called silicon valley 'cause they used to make the silicon here, and they've really successfully switched to writing software.

I mean, I'm personally long silicon valley (and while I think it's overvalued now, I think it's a good long term bet) - I think it will turn out more like New York than like Detroit, but... who knows?

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#199

Post by ww520 »

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…

At least in regarding to move to somewhere out of state, CA has one advantage:

CALIFORNIA CODES, LABOR CODE SECTION 2870-2872

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#200

Post by alexhutcheson »

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…

Moving offices is really disruptive to people's lives, and causes a huge amount of turnover in your workforce. A brief excerpt from Peopleware[1]:

"The typical person being moved today is part of a two-career family. The other half of that equation is probably not being moved, so the corporate move comes down hard on the couple’s relationship at a very delicate point. It brings intolerable stress to bear on the accommodation they’re both striving to achieve to allow two full-fledged careers. That’s hitting below the belt. Modern couples won’t put up with it and they won’t forgive it. The company move might have been possible in the 1950s and 1960s. Today it is folly."

They also cite a case study of a major project at Bell Labs which was moved from New Jersey to Illinois. The authors interviewed the former manager of that project:

"I asked him what he saw as his main successes and failures as boss. “Forget the successes,” he said. “The failure was that move. You can’t believe what it cost us in turnover.” He went on to give some figures. The immediately calculable cost of the move was the number of people who quit before relocation day. Expressed as a percentage of those moved, this initial turnover was greater than the French losses in the trenches of World War I."

(FWIW, that's just one of many insights from that book - I highly recommend it.)

[1] https://amazon.com/dp/B00DY5A8X2/

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