Share this postThoughts
- There is no reason for a startup to be in the San Francisco Bay Area anymore, and lots of reasons to not.
- That’s not to say that the Bay Area isn’t great. For me, it’s one of the places in the US with saner politics, better weather, and despite soaring prices, a really beautiful independent culture of artists, writers, and musicians.
- But it’s incredibly, prohibitively expensive.
- A small two bedroom home will easily set you back over a million dollars to buy. To rent a two bedroom apartment, you’re likely talking three or four thousand dollars a month.
- The “low income” threshold for a family of four in San Francisco is an annual take-home of $117,400.
- The result is that even though tech salaries are so high as to be a cause of inequality throughout the area, it’s non-trivial for someone earning a quarter of a million dollars a year to own their own home.
- Which means families either need to earn astronomically more, or move out to somewhere cheaper.
- It also means that creative technologists who aren’t independently wealthy and don’t want to work for a larger company need to move out somewhere cheaper.
- Which also means that if you want to hire people who have families or have built a non-traditional career, you probably need to cast your net further afield.
- The good news is that investors are casting their nets further afield. There’s no need to live in San Francisco or Silicon Valley to raise money anymore.
- The Silicon Valley community is becoming more diffuse. I know of people moving all over the country. It’s no longer about being where everyone else is, because there is no one place.
- Everyone’s used to remote working after the pandemic.
- Paying Silicon Valley salaries to everyone at your company, regardless of location, is the right thing to do - but a startup can still reduce costs in other ways, like office space, and hire a greater diversity of people.
- So why not live in a place where you can afford a home with a garden, and give your company a greater chance of success in the process?
Actions
- I’ve been helping to clean out the house we’ve been staying in since the summer. There’s a lot still to do, but we’ve made good progress. I’ve got a lot of scrubbing and packing ahead of me.
- I’ve been working on a huge project, and the social aspects are proving harder than the technical ones. I need to spend time consciously researching tactics to make some of these interactions more productive.
- On a similar note, I want to do more internal blogging this week. I find it to be a really good way to asynchronously share thinking.