Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

tomtunguz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 417 posts

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#371

Post by sliverstorm »

crawshaw wrote: post #361
sliverstorm wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moving obviously doesn't work in all cases. But urbanizing doesn't permanently remove the problem, it delays it. Ultimately any plot of land has a maximum carrying capacity. If some of these issues are not solved, what's to say that a decade after we urbanize, we won't be right back here with this same problem? Personally, I have definitely noticed many people who have convinced themselves they have to stay despite t…

You claim demand to live in the Bay Area exceeds housing technology carrying capacity. Do you have any evidence for this? No city on Earth is full. (Indeed, estimates of human population growth show planetary population stabilizing at less than one tenth our global carrying capacity, so this is not surprising.) It would be extraordinary for the Bay Area to be the first, and so calls for extraordinary evidence.

I did not say demand exceeds housing technology carrying capacity. I said if the peninsula urbanizes (i.e. denser building, maybe 2-4x, not mega skyscrapers with bunks) demand will keep up. That should not be an extraordinary claim, given how many bedroom communities and commuters already surround it.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#372

Post by crawshaw »

sliverstorm wrote: post #371
crawshaw wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You claim demand to live in the Bay Area exceeds housing technology carrying capacity. Do you have any evidence for this? No city on Earth is full. (Indeed, estimates of human population growth show planetary population stabilizing at less than one tenth our global carrying capacity, so this is not surprising.) It would be extraordinary for the Bay Area to be the first, and so calls for extraordinary evidence.

I did not say demand exceeds housing technology carrying capacity. I said if the peninsula urbanizes (i.e. denser building, maybe 2-4x, not mega skyscrapers with bunks) demand will keep up. That should not be an extraordinary claim, given how many bedroom communities and commuters already surround it.

Why are you limiting the possible technologies? Skyscrapers work.

Housing is a cost of living. Driving the cost of being alive as low as possible should be a high priority. We should use the tools we have to do it.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#373

Post by timothycrosley »

mercutio2 wrote: post #347
timothycrosley wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same people who make 300-400k in San Francisco, also do so in Seattle. I don't know where your getting your information from, but all existing stats disagree with you for a reason.

And your source for this is... Glassdoor? I have hired many people who worked for Seattle BigCos, and I know many people who have gotten offers from Seattle BigCos trying to lure them away from the Bay Area. And I’ve chatted with people doing competitive analysis on what offers to make to engineers. The Bay Area generally has 20-30% higher total comp after the first 2-3 years. Somewhat amusingly, the headline salarie…

Even if you were right, and someone made 20% more total compansation, they would loose more than half of that right off the bat due to the mutliple layers income tax in San Francisco, and easily the rest and then some to increased housing cost. Not to mention Seattle tends to have a much more relaxed and healthy working culture, so your probably working less hours too.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#374

Post by technofire »

rl3 wrote: post #61

What are the best alternatives to the Bay Area? Off the top of my head I'm thinking Portland, Seattle, Boston, Austin and Chicago in no particular order. The annoying part is that there's so much talent concentrated in the Bay Area that it makes going elsewhere very difficult, especially if you have specific senior talent in mind that have already established their lives there. Hopefully telepresence tech gets so goo…

"Pittsburgh has some important advantages over most would-be startup hubs." --Paul Graham, 2016[1]

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/pgh.html

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#375

Post by Zahlmeister »

epicureanideal wrote: post #193
vedanta wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also YIMBY orgs almost everywhere. The south bay YIMBY twitter account has updates on what you can do as well. From following the YIMBY movement ( http://www.slate.com/articles/business/metropolis/2017/06/yi... ) it's hard to not take the YIMBY position. More needs to be built, but we can have ~10% BMR requirements as ways of increasing diversity in a neighborhood and preserving some local control/culture.…

BMR is a scam in my opinion. It just prevents wages rising as they would naturally need to if housing became increasingly unaffordable to the point that workers can't even commute in. It recruits people into a program of lucky allocation rather than working for more. Busy or I'd write more. Look how rent control turned out.

Wages don't naturally rise just because rent is higher, if anything the converse is true.

You'd end up paying 25$ for a coffee just so that the barista can afford their overpriced housing.

If you're just raising the cost of living, but not the standard, you're not gaining anything for anyone.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#376

Post by dmode »

amyjess wrote: post #149
golemotron wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SF culture has descended into purity spirals [1]. The last time I was there I was shocked by the amount of signaling that was happening. [1] - http://www.redgulls.com/2016/08/17/the-purity-spiral/

This is one of the reasons I'm considering a move to SoCal, but I will never, ever consider moving to NorCal. One thing I've heard is that SoCal is full of superficial, shallow, materialistic people, and that people in NorCal are expected to have a cause. It doesn't have to be a left-wing cause, either; look at Curtis Yarvin, for example. I'm somewhat SJW myself, but really I'm a consumerist at heart. I just want to…

This comment about NorCal is hilariously wrong. Literally a AM talk show talking point. NorCal (rather Bay Area) is composed of endless suburbs (such as San Mateo, Belmont, palo Alto, Fremont, Dublin) where 99% of the folks are bothered about more mundane stuff like sending kids to school, or shuttle them to extracurricular activities, or getting Boba team. The only place where you would be remotely surrounded by military vegans is probably Berkeley. Even that is unlikely. In Bay Area you will most likely surrounded by a lot of immigrants.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#377

Post by dmode »

rdl wrote: post #131
timothycrosley wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seattle. Lose ~2-5 thousand a year in income on average as a Software engineer, save 1-2 thousand a month on rent, and no income tax: https://www.codementor.io/blog/best-cities-software-engineer...

Seattle is full/horrible. Do not move here if you are a San Franciscan. Especially don't bring your government philosophy, tax policies, or aversion to reality here.

Don't be fooled by Seattle's position on income taxes. Seattle has some of the highest regressive taxes. For example, alcohol taxes in WA are 10x higher than CA https://taxfoundation.org/how-high-are-taxes-distilled-spiri...

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#378

Post by ido »

epicureanideal wrote: post #193
vedanta wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also YIMBY orgs almost everywhere. The south bay YIMBY twitter account has updates on what you can do as well. From following the YIMBY movement ( http://www.slate.com/articles/business/metropolis/2017/06/yi... ) it's hard to not take the YIMBY position. More needs to be built, but we can have ~10% BMR requirements as ways of increasing diversity in a neighborhood and preserving some local control/culture.…

BMR is a scam in my opinion. It just prevents wages rising as they would naturally need to if housing became increasingly unaffordable to the point that workers can't even commute in. It recruits people into a program of lucky allocation rather than working for more. Busy or I'd write more. Look how rent control turned out.

Rent control works great when it cover the entire rental stock.

See e.g. Berlin vs LA: https://goo.gl/aNHzGQ

In Berlin all rents are controlled by default[1]. And despite similar purchase prices, rental prices are half of LA's.

[1] only newly built units or those renovated for more than 1/3 the value of the unit are allowed to be rented without price restrictions. This keeps the vast majority under rent control.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#379

Post by matthewwiese »

cbcoutinho wrote: post #360
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some guys a few cubes over from me talking about how "Not for sale in California" is a marketable feature on engine powered equipment.

Does that mean that the product doesn't meet Californian regulations? How is that a selling point?

California emissions regulations being more stringent than elsewhere (i.e. in the Midwest) means that us flyover rednecks take pride in our big ol' machines that drink up dinosaur guts. Take for example all the stupid-big Ford and Ram pickups chugging along downtown streets here.

The implication being that, even if housing prices were equal, some might prefer to live in SF or Seattle as opposed to Pittsburgh or Columbus due to "culture fit" (hah, a buzzword applied to something novel).

At least, that's how I assume the parent intended their anecdote to be.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#380

Post by et-al »

ido wrote: post #378
epicureanideal wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BMR is a scam in my opinion. It just prevents wages rising as they would naturally need to if housing became increasingly unaffordable to the point that workers can't even commute in. It recruits people into a program of lucky allocation rather than working for more. Busy or I'd write more. Look how rent control turned out.

Rent control works great when it cover the entire rental stock. See e.g. Berlin vs LA: https://goo.gl/aNHzGQ In Berlin all rents are controlled by default[1]. And despite similar purchase prices, rental prices are half of LA's . [1] only newly built units or those renovated for more than 1/3 the value of the unit are allowed to be rented without price restrictions. This keeps the vast majority under rent control.

There's too many variables to say that rent control for the entire housing stock is what keeps Berlin's rents down.

For starters, Berlin is known to be one of the cheaper German cities until recently ("poor but sexy"). In addition, the climate, geographies, and economies between LA and Berlin are significantly different.

Post reply on HN