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 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. :)