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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

#221

Post by DoreenMichele »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #175
dmode wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only a small portion of SF is matches the dystopian vision you claim. Even those portions are not any worse than other urban areas. There is a reason why housing here is extremely expensive. People want to live here.

> Only a small portion of SF is matches the dystopian vision you claim. Even those portions are not any worse than other urban areas. If you believe that you either live an extremely sheltered existence in SF or you've not visited recently. San Francisco is pretty bad no matter where you go (except, perhaps, for the affluent areas like Sea Cliff and St Francis Woods). Out in the Outer Sunset I saw what looked like so…

Some stats on how bad homelessness is (or was recently -- post is from May 2018) in California:

https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/california-...

Some of them have been deported from other states (thanks Las Vegas!), some of them still have a very romanticized view of San Francisco

From what I gather, both of these statements are true. But it is also my understanding that our best data suggests that only about 10 percent of homeless come from elsewhere. The vast majority supposedly wind up living on the street in whatever place they last had housing in.

I'm not sure how reliable such data is. I suspect data on homeless folks is somewhat hand-wavy.

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

#222

Post by tptacek »

dmode wrote: post #208
inferiorhuman wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only a small portion of SF is matches the dystopian vision you claim. Even those portions are not any worse than other urban areas. If you believe that you either live an extremely sheltered existence in SF or you've not visited recently. San Francisco is pretty bad no matter where you go (except, perhaps, for the affluent areas like Sea Cliff and St Francis Woods). Out in the Outer Sunset I saw what looked like so…

I work near Civic center and go there everyday. You know, like, Chicago has 500 murders a year. Nothing in SF and Oakland even comes close to that. Oakland used to be the crime capital in the US. People can actually live in West Oakland now. Oakland hill homes now run at $2mn. Drug use in SF has been prevalent since, what like 60s. I have been living in SF since well before the boom. Mid market and Tenderloin used to…

What's your point, regarding Chicago? Chicago is much larger than San Francisco; it's 5 times larger by area and over 3 times as many people. Chicago isn't one of the country's top cities by murder rate. Further, Chicago murders are largely confined to west and south sides of the city, a result of redlining, and most people in the city (even fewer professionals) don't live in those areas.

It's true, San Francisco used to have sketchy areas (I lived in Bayview in the late 1990s) and now basically doesn't, since the worst apartment in Bayview probably costs more than my house in Chicago does. Ok, you win. But the comment you're responding to is about quality of life in San Francisco. Nobody in Chicago is going to ask for your popcorn and swing a stick at you if you don't comply. We don't have tent cities on our main-drag sidewalks. The CTA goes pretty much everywhere and isn't an open-air drug market. We manage this despite being a larger city, with our own real pressures, and having nothing resembling the tax base San Francisco has.

San Francisco is broken. I'm sure it's fixable, but people probably need to stop pretending things are OK first.

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

#223

Post by kordlessagain »

titanomachy wrote: post #108
abrichr wrote: post #73

Last paragraph: > This is particularly true in Silicon Valley, where a recent think tank report estimates that 17 percent of workers in “highly technical occupations” are native Californians, with 40 percent hailing from India or China and 29 percent from other non-U.S. countries. And I thought Toronto was multicultural (~51% born outside of Canada)! I wonder what is the rate regardless of occupation? Edit to answer…

San Francisco != Silicon Valley.

"Silicon Valley" has come to have two definitions: a geographic one, referring to Santa Clara County, and a metonymical one, referring to all high-tech businesses in the Bay Area.

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

#224

Post by smallgovt »

vincentmarle wrote: post #79

> I still expect a significant % of the $10B+ startups will get created here, so it makes sense for investors to still focus here. But I bet a lot of the ~$100M startups will happen elsewhere. > There are still some things—e.g great startup executive talent, particular kinds of engineering talent—that are much harder to find outside the bay area. This is spot on and it becomes a real bottle neck if you want to scale…

The flipside of this is that SF's high burn rate kills many startups that otherwise would have been $100M companies. In particular, startups that are margin-sensitive.

I totally agree that you often can't choose if you're a $100M or a $1B startup, but if you're a founder, I think it often makes a lot more sense to optimize for the $100M scenario, given that it's more likely. The caveat is the founder who's already made f-u money, and whose true goal is to shoot for the moon.

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

#225

Post by kordlessagain »

temp1928384 wrote: post #29

I suspect the VC industry itself will be disrupted at some point (the irony of the VC industry is that the biz model has remained basically the same for 50 years when everything else has changed). It will become incrementally easier to raise money from non-traditional sources at better terms as "accredited investor" laws are relaxed e.g. through a Security Token Offering.

Or society collapses and innovation is taken to a personal survival level where capital is pointless.

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

#226

Post by BadassFractal »

stouset wrote: post #130
BadassFractal wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your likelihood of being in the 500M+ valuation bracket is so infinitesimally slim, that optimizing for that case is almost pointless.

Agree with the assumption, disagree with the conclusion. Optimizing for that as a founder only doesn’t make sense, but when your investor money is trying to chase after $1B+ grand slams to make up for the dozens of failures, it probably makes a lot more sense.

Sure, and optimizing for those massive returns is the VC's problem, not the founder's problem. You're one out of dozens, if not hundreds of their investments. They'll be fine.

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

#227

Post by DrAwdeOccarim »

alexnewman wrote: post #191
DrAwdeOccarim wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yea, but they're much more of a supplier than a biotech. Like IDT or ATUM.

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

#228

Post by Bahamut »

randomacct3847 wrote: post #205
Bahamut wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case, taxes and rent only would account for about a $50k difference at those numbers - not enough to make up the gap between Austin and SF if we're talking $200k and $300k, and I'd imagine $200k isn't as easy to hit in Austin as $300k+ in the Bay Area.

The difference is buying. A 300k house in Austin would be 1.5m in SF. Again, if you’re single and renting and ok with roommates SF makes sense, but if you’re buying 300k/year will not be enough to afford a 1.5m place (which probably won’t be renovated and in a bad location)

It is more than enough to buy - not sure what you're expectations are around buying here. Sure, it maybe possible to buy instantly in Austin, to my understanding in not as great neighborhoods if you want it cheaper, as I hear house prices have gone up there as well, but in 5-10 years of working at $300k+, it's very possible to buy in most of the Bay Area.

The benefit becomes compounded in the Bay Area if you have a spouse also working, and timelines accelerated.

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

#229

Post by alexnewman »

DrAwdeOccarim wrote: post #227
alexnewman wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uhm synthago is here in cali

Yea, but they're much more of a supplier than a biotech. Like IDT or ATUM.

Are you sure? I think synthago is critical to crispr technology across the world. I think they are expanding into new fields and are no longer just sending supplies to universities. That story is the old story

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

#230

Post by Johnny555 »

temp1928384 wrote: post #214
Johnny555 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd take that with a big grain of salt, I spent over a decade of my 20 years living in SF looking elsewhere to move to since I couldn't afford the real estate. So I'd be counted as one of the ones that want to leave, but I never left until finally I moved down the Peninsula.

I'm confused by your logic. Isn't the median home price in the Peninsula a multiple of the median home price in SF or OAK?

I don't keep up with the home price trends, but I bought a 2 bedroom condo on the peninsula within walking distance of Caltrain for less than any one bedroom I could find in SF.

Median price doesn't matter as much as the point-in-time price for what the homebuyer is looking for. A 3 bedroom house in Palo Alto can distort the price curve when all you want is a small condo in Burlingame.

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