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Zero Tier looks awesome and the Irvine area is great. Are you hiring? :) 1. I think that SF/SV's status as a "tech capital" is not fragile. Even if a dramat

Zero Tier looks awesome and the Irvine area is great. Are you hiring? :) 1. I think that SF/SV's status as a "tech capital" is not fragile. Even if a dramatic push or pull happened it would be a slow drain. The dot-com crash was a quick flush, but that was predicated on the market realizing a majority of companies being revenue-negative wasn't sustainable. Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook aren't going anywhere in the next few years. Despite newspapers reports of doom, most tech companies in the region are profitable. Tech employees' families are sticky and won't move unless the push or the pull is substantial enough to end friendships and uproot community ties. 2. Agreed, the SF/SV housing crisis has a large political aspect to it. I foresee it continuing indefinitely. Owners often immediately switch sides from YIMBY to NIMBY once they get their deed. The area is more geographically constrained than SoCal. Even if massive development were permitted, it would take half a decade before price reductions started to occur. It would be simple to plan this in a way to preserve the existing character of neighborhoods, but it would require centralized planning; only dramatic legislation at the state level would make this possible. 3. You should or you shouldn't live in SF. SF's culture has waned dramatically but Haight-Ashbury and Mission are still vibrant. I agree the SF counterculture is on the decline. Oakland has a lively art scene though it is also being choked by SF-like house price increases. I agree that it is at a turning point where many different things could happen. I think that a rational person might still move to the area due to the feedback loop of successful companies congregating to where developers and capital firms exist, and developers moving to the region to get jobs at good companies. Though it doesn't feel like it to me, I can't help but admit it's a good thing because this price pressure will eventually push companies to open campuses in other metro areas. In the meantime, we can only hope and wait.

api 10y ago
I agree that feedback loops are indeed sticky. New York has been the financial capital for a long time and is likely to remain so for a long time, for example. I wasn't necessarily arguing that SF will completely lose its "tech capital" title (though nothing's impossible), just that SF real estate is overvalued and that the craziness of this is likely to soften in the future as multiple factors conspire against it. ... though I do have to say: we are in uncharted territory. I have to reiterate that the Internet is young and is nowhere close to being fully assimilated by the culture. The net makes geographic diversification easier than it's ever been by orders of magnitude, and once more conservative industries adopt it this could have massively disruptive effects. To give you an idea of how big such shifts can be: in the 19th century something like 90% of Americans worked in agriculture. An effect of this magnitude could occur in relation to geography and place-advantage. The initial visionaries of the Internet predicted this, but they were overly optimistic about how long it would take. Personally I think they might turn out to be right but it'll take another 10-20 years to fully metastasize. A maximum disruption scenario would be the "full virtualization" of centers. No more financial, tech, etc. "center" in physical 3d space. These things move to the cloud. ... and yes we are about to grow our team but our new team members are already identified. :)

api 10y ago

I agree that feedback loops are indeed sticky. New York has been the financial capital for a long time and is likely to remain so for a long time, for example. I wasn't necessarily arguing that SF will completely lose its "tech capital" title (though nothing's impossible), just that SF real estate is overvalued and that the craziness of this is likely to soften in the future as multiple factors conspire against it. ... though I do have to say: we are in uncharted territory. I have to reiterate that the Internet is young and is nowhere close to being fully assimilated by the culture. The net makes geographic diversification easier than it's ever been by orders of magnitude, and once more conservative industries adopt it this could have massively disruptive effects. To give you an idea of how big such shifts can be: in the 19th century something like 90% of Americans worked in agriculture. An effect of this magnitude could occur in relation to geography and place-advantage. The initial visionaries of the Internet predicted this, but they were overly optimistic about how long it would take. Personally I think they might turn out to be right but it'll take another 10-20 years to fully metastasize. A maximum disruption scenario would be the "full virtualization" of centers. No more financial, tech, etc. "center" in physical 3d space. These things move to the cloud. ... and yes we are about to grow our team but our new team members are already identified. :)