Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not correct at all. When Twitter was launched, SF was overflowing with startups on every corner. In fact it was the second wave of SF startups, being a handful of years after the dot com crash. The only thing even slightly surprising about Twitter's location was that they were way down in South Park instead of more solidly in South of Market. They moved to the Tenderloin building in 2012.
> SF was overflowing with startups on every corner. Can you name a handful of known startups headquartered in SF in the early 2000s? I tried searching for stats on this but it seems more difficult than I have time for. So I turned to chatgpt, which (FWIW) agrees with my recollection: In the year 2000, Silicon Valley startups were predominantly located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, particularly i…
There were launch parties in SF every week in the late 1990s. Often multiple per week. The startups coordinated to not conflict. It was a very active scene. The first wave ended in the early months of 2000. There were a few very slow years after that, but things were picking up again around the time of Twitter's 2006 launch (and 2007-2008 scaling).
We in SF didn't consider ourselves part of Silicon Valley back then, so that might be throwing off the search results. The relabelling came later, when the never-formally-defined scope of "Silicon Valley" expanded to include SF city (but still skipping the bedroom communities between the city and the Valley proper).
(Edit: sibling of GP is correct, SF was mostly internet and media startups, agencies, etc. The Valley got most of the hardware startups. Twitter was a descendant of Blogger/Odeo/Pyra/etc, so SF city was an entirely expected location)