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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

#281

Post by Tade0 »

alexhutcheson wrote: post #200
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 accom…

Isn't South San Francisco just 10 miles from San Francisco?

For some cities this would equate to moving to another part of the same city.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#282

Post by bernierocks »

“Taxes don’t have a lot of impact on business decisions. It’s something that has been exaggerated for years”

If I'm paying 50% in taxes as opposed to 10%, I will be making different business decisions.

Most SF startups incorporate in Delaware because of the low corporate taxes.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#283

Post by damon_c »

cloverich wrote: post #208
friedman23 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Depends on personality, but compare it to other climates where for parts of the year you can't comfortably go outside. Northeast you get snowed in regularly, 40 straight days of darkness and rain in northwest, 90+ days of 100 (ish) degree weather here in Austin. Probably grass is always greener type thing.

I prefer to divide climates into two categories.

1. Places where during certain times of year, sitting on a bench for a few hours will cause you to die from exposure to the elements.

2. Other places where you can sit on a bench all day on any day of the year and walk away from it.

The Bay area is definitely in category 2 and that is a nice thing.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#284

Post by thruhiker »

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…

There are many people who work in tech who highly value location and quality of life. I've lived in the Midwest, the South, and now Seattle. If you enjoy the outdoors, hiking, skiing/riding, sailing, mountain biking, kayaking, etc., but you want to earn strong compensation with the security of having many employment options there are relatively few good options.

There are other chicken and egg dynamics such as a large city is likely top have a large airport with lots of direct flights which is helpful for business and leisure travel.

Employers, especially startups and growth companies, want to hire top talent (and poach top talent from similar firms). That means they want to be located where there is a baseline of other similar firms.

Remote work is slowly changing that dynamic but the gravity of the city is strong.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#285

Post by product50 »

cjlars wrote: post #5

Articles misses that this is in response to SF's gross receipts tax. Payment processing is an ultra low margin business, no way they can compete while paying ~1% of revenues to the city.

Literally Stripe wrote a blog post on this on how Prop C will really hurt companies like them which have high gross receipts but very thin margin. But at the time, half the people accused them of being intolerant to homelessness and the city that supports them. Marc Benioff, the sponsor of Prop C, can do this given he has a SaaS company with high margins and the fact that he has political ambitions.

This is an expected outcome given that. What this means is more cars on streets as South San Francisco has pretty bad infra and driving/taking shuttles is the only way to get to the new Stripe office.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#286

Post by gamblor956 »

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.)

It's a national issue. That many states solved by shipping their homeless to California (like Texas, Oklahoma, and most of the Midwest do) or to their own local private prisons (like Mississippi and the rest of the South do).

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#287

Post by majormajor »

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…

> 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?

Nobody wants to take a huge paycut regardless of house prices - there are lots of other things in the world you can use money for (including saving for retirement, if you're practical) that aren't particularly regionally inflated.

The people who've been at successful companies for longest also tend to have been pretty well compensated overall, so ownership of something nearby isn't always so out of reach for them. So your most important contributors are the least motivated for this move. Doesn't seem like a good recipe.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#288

Post by secabeen »

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 mean this in as polite a way as possible, but why wouldn't established companies like Stripe just fuck off to another city entirely?

People have mentioned the dual-income problem, but even without that, people have friends, and schools, and communities, and lives that they've built up where they live. When I moved cross country, it took two years after we arrived to develop our first close friends, and probably five years before we felt that we were as connected to our new home as we were to the one we left.

Moving across town doesn't disrupt these connections and communities for your employees, but moving across the state or country does.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#289

Post by Kalium »

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?

You might be surprised by how many "Silicon X" places there are. Most of them are trying to lure companies. Only a few - like Atlanta - seem to understand that they need educational and financial infrastructure first.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#290

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

bernierocks wrote: post #282

“Taxes don’t have a lot of impact on business decisions. It’s something that has been exaggerated for years” If I'm paying 50% in taxes as opposed to 10%, I will be making different business decisions. Most SF startups incorporate in Delaware because of the low corporate taxes.

> Most SF startups incorporate in Delaware because of the low corporate taxes.

That is not true. Most startups everywhere incorporate in Delaware because Delaware has the most robust legal system (e.g. the Court of Chancery) dedicated to handling corporate disputes. More info: https://whyy.org/articles/why-do-so-many-corporations-choose...

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