15 ms·

I'm curious why more bay area startups haven't come to Oakland. (maybe it's happening and it's just not obvious?) Always felt like there was plenty of potentia

by akozak 8y ago

I'm curious why more bay area startups haven't come to Oakland. (maybe it's happening and it's just not obvious?) Always felt like there was plenty of potential office space relatively close to BART but maybe that's wrong.

alexk 8y ago
We moved from SF to Oakland more than a year ago and could not be happier! Here's the view from our Gravitational's Oakland office right now: https://imgur.com/2p9BX1b https://imgur.com/2p9BX1b
- danenania 8y ago
  Where in Oakland is that? Looks nice!
  - alexk 8y ago
    This is Embarcadero West, right near Jack London Square!
    - akozak 8y ago
      That's a great spot, and right next to the ferry for SF commuters. Good find.
- lioeters 8y ago
  Looks great, refreshing view in Oakland!
infecto 8y ago
I think its slowly happening. Square just took the building Uber was building out, all 356,000 sqft. This is going to make them the largest tech company in Oakland. And some company named Marqeta just put their name on a building...no idea how long they have been here but they now have enough money to have their name on both sides. Its slow but its definitely changing.
- akozak 8y ago
  Hot tip for startups: A lot of ppl who work for the big co.s (me included) live or have migrated to the east bay for housing over the years but hate the commute.
  - fourstar 8y ago
    Hot tip? How does this solve anything? People who work at big tech companies migrate to Oakland pushing those who have been there out by driving rents higher. And you think those companies will forfeit their offices in the city/SV? Maybe you can kindly migrate back to where you came from?
    - woah 8y ago
      Build the wall?
      - fourstar 8y ago
        Housing would be more appropriate.
      - umeshunni 8y ago
        Obligatory liberal hypocrisy link: http://marketurbanism.com/2017/01/27/the-disconnect-between-liberal-aspirations-and-liberal-housing-policy-is-killing-coastal-u-s-cities/ http://marketurbanism.com/2017/01/27/the-disconnect-between-...
        shmooth 8y ago
        oh those poor flailing and flailing liberal coastal cities! maybe Republicans can teach them something, by, for example, the coastal city of......Knoxville, TN. :-D
    - akozak 8y ago
      I've been here for 15 years?
oids98d98s 8y ago
Startups with office space have VC money, and can afford SF (in theory). Tons of small shops, including consulting, freelancing, etc, in Oakland. Companies with people who need to go to SF on a semi-regular basis and who work best in person but don't need to be in SF.
nickelcitymario 8y ago
Take this with a grain of salt, because I'm from Canada and have only been to SF once, but: If I had to guess, I'd say race and class conflict. I wasn't used to how heavily divided a culture could geographically be, and it seemed to me that Oakland was far more heavily multi-ethnic and financially poorer than the rest of the area. Before the hate poors in: - Yes, Canada still has a racism problem. But I don't know of any areas around me that are strongly of one ethnicity versus another. The major exception being "Indian" reserves, which is a whole other topic. - Yes, it's ridiculous for me to comment after only one visit. But that's how strong the difference seemed to be. Every cab and uber driver I had was from Oakland. - SF was beautiful and I don't mean any disparagement. You're all wonderful people and I love you.
- tyre 8y ago
  Oakland is starting to become more attractive to people in SF precisely because of its diversity. "Really starting to enjoy Oakland—have you been to Drake's?" is the new climbing, hiking, etc.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- nostrademons 8y ago
  Multi-ethnic is not a problem in the Bay Area. Most of the people with money & skills are also immigrants, and many of them are various shades of brown or yellow. Poor is. The Bay Area is one of the least racist places I've lived in in my life, but it's also one of the most classist. There's still a big class stigma based on where you live. (Though sometimes gentrification flips this on its head - the Mission and EPA used to be poor, crime-ridden areas, but now they're rich, crime-ridden areas.) It's very strange - I think that people who are used to the race & class social systems of much of the rest of North America don't really know what to make about the Bay Area, because in some ways we've busted out of those social systems and just replaced them with other ones which are...weird.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
tyre 8y ago
It's possible but has it's own challenges. If the benefit of moving to Oakland is lower costs, than that has to be made up for partially by lower salaries (most of a startup's costs are in people.) Being near BART is fine, but not if your employees are coming from SF. Then they still need to pay SF salaries to make up for cost of living. Living in Oakland can be less compelling due to the housing stock. Oakland has many single family homes, which I personally feel is a good thing, but less compelling for many workers. (We can, of course, debate whether the kinds of workers who aren't in the life-stage to want/need a single family home are the right kinds of workers to go after, but that's a separate conversation.)
nostrademons 8y ago
A lot of really-early-stage startup activity (eg. solo engineer working on a project, or 3 guys working out of an apartment) seems to be happening in Oakland and the East Bay generally. It's the last place rents are affordable, so it's naturally attractive to people who need to go without income for a while. The commute over the bridges is terrible, so with the bulk of investment capital and experienced engineers living on the peninsula (and oftentimes more down by Palo Alto & Menlo Park than in SF), it remains difficult to scale East Bay companies. Unless you're someone like Elon Musk where you can just invest $100M of your own capital and need more semi-skilled manufacturing workers than skilled software engineers. Fremont/Milpitas is coming up as a bedroom community for mid-career engineers though (because if you work at Facebook it's just across the Dumbarton, while if you work at Google/Apple you can take 237 and avoid the bridges), so that may increase the engineering supply along the East Bay BART corridor. The East Bay really hurts from BART & Caltrain being two separate systems; it's easily BART accessible, but much of the peninsula's population only has Caltrain access, so you need a very time-consuming transfer to get there without dealing with the bridge traffic.
- djakjxnanjak 8y ago
  I think tech employment in downtown San Jose is going to blow up for this reason, once the BART tunnel goes in. Combined access from electrictrified Caltrain/BART/ACE/VTA/Amtrak is going to be killer for bringing in people from all over who don’t like being stuck in traffic. Google sees this coming and is building the new campus there. And that will push up prices for homes near any of those rail systems. It will also be possible to commute from SJ or Santa Clara to Oakland via BART, which may marginally improve recruiting there. It would be fantastic if Caltrain or somebody rebuilt the burnt-out rail bridge next to the Dumbarton, but that’s wishful thinking. It would be useful to integrate ACE, Caltrain, and Amtrak.
  - kenneth 8y ago
    I put almost zero faith in Bay Area governments fixing the mess that is Bart/Caltrain/etc.
paxy 8y ago
I feel like if a company decides it doesn't want to be in SF proper it's more worth it to go south rather than north.
jakelarkin 8y ago
agree with most of the other comments in this thread, but would add - BART is an extremely filthy and dangerous transit system by any 1st world standard, and I say this as a lifelong transit rider. - Oakland, Berkeley, & Richmond govs/regs are business unfriendly & tech hostile. It's a traditionally poor working class area undergoing massive housing displacement & the political class is all old money or non-profit types.
- e40 8y ago
  - BART is an extremely filthy and dangerous transit system by any 1st world standard, and I say this as a lifelong transit rider. This is hysteria. I have many coworkers who ride BART on a daily basis for 15+ years and not a single reported incident from any of them, other than stinky homeless people that very rarely ride during peak hours.
  - praneshp 8y ago
    > I have many coworkers who ride BART Have you personally taken BART on a consistent enough basis? I took it two days a week for a significant length of time and calling it filthy is not hysteria at all.
  - jakelarkin 8y ago
    http://www.ktvu.com/news/bart-investigating-3-violent-deaths-in-the-past-week http://www.ktvu.com/news/bart-investigating-3-violent-deaths... https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/BART-s-approval-rating-plummets-as-riders-13550578.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/BART-s-approval-... slightly depends on your entry/exit stations but I would regularly see crack/heroin use, defecation, deranged meth heads screaming and/or picking fights. I doubt I am alone in this.
  - i_am_nomad 8y ago
    Seconding a couple of other replies here: it is not hysteria. In the 20 years I've lived in the Bay Area, BART has gone from tolerable to completely revolting.
  - enahs-sf 8y ago
zavi 8y ago
Because Oakland is sketchy (way more so than gentrified parts of SF) - people want to live in SF, that's what the blog post alludes to also. Some parts look post-apocalyptic with dozens of tents in a single encampment. I bet you if city manages to clean up the homeless and finish the bike line across the Bay Bridge there will be an explosion of startups because it's a perfect place to be in otherwise.
- dmode 8y ago
  There are huge portions of Berkeley and Oakland which are awesome and where houses are as expensive as the peninsula. Piedmont, Montclair, Rockridge, Claremont etc
massivecali 8y ago
Oakland is dangerous and gross compared to SF, and that's saying something as I found heroin needles next to a bench eating lunch in a beautiful office courtyard. I was accosted outside of the Oakland station in broad daylight and local police couldn't have cared less. "The violent crime rate in Oakland, California, is 1,421 per 100,000 residents. Forty-nine people were murdered in the city in 2016." https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/the-most-dangerous-cities-in-america/32/ https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/the-most-dangerous-cities-i... Please let's make smarter choices about where to move businesses to, given numerous options. Oakland definitely should not be one of them.
- hk__2 8y ago
  Wouldn’t moving some businesses there eventually lower the crime rates? Violent crime is twice higher in Oakland, but property crime is about the same: 5,983 per 100,000 in Oakland [1]; 5,715 in SF [2] (6,168 according to [3]). [1] https://www.areavibes.com/oakland-ca/crime/ https://www.areavibes.com/oakland-ca/crime/ [2] https://sfgov.org/scorecards/public-safety/violent-crime-rate-and-property-crime-rate https://sfgov.org/scorecards/public-safety/violent-crime-rat... [3] https://www.areavibes.com/san+francisco-ca/crime/ https://www.areavibes.com/san+francisco-ca/crime/
  - massivecali 8y ago
    How would moving more businesses there lower the crime rate? Poverty is always touted as the source of crime in communities, but businesses moving from SF to Oakland wouldn't be employing Joe/Jolene poor person. If anything, doing so would just rehash the standard complaint about gentrification and alienation of current residents.
  - baby 8y ago
    didn't work at all for SF.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dmode 8y ago
eldavido 8y ago
I live in Oakland and I see more tech activity there every day. LaunchDarkly, VSCO, etc. It's an interesting discussion because the city is huge and has many good and bad parts. West Oakland along Broadway is basically SF west. Go east of Lake Merritt and things get bad pretty quickly.
baby 8y ago
It's cheaper but way more dangerous imo. That puts away a lot of people. Having said that it's changing and a lot of start ups do move there.
georgewfraser 8y ago
We (Fivetran) moved to Oakland over a year ago and it's been fantastic. Great office right next to BART, great restaurants, and it's a big recruiting advantage. SF sees itself as the center of the universe, but most of the people in the Bay area actually live over here.
erikpukinskis 8y ago
In general, I have observed socially that East Bay people are willing to take BART to SF, but SF people mostly won't come to the East Bay for any reason. Because it's rare, when an SF person does come out here to visit, I feel really loved. :)

by akozak 8y ago

alexk 8y ago

We moved from SF to Oakland more than a year ago and could not be happier! Here's the view from our Gravitational's Oakland office right now: https://imgur.com/2p9BX1b https://imgur.com/2p9BX1b

danenania 8y ago
Where in Oakland is that? Looks nice!
- alexk 8y ago
  This is Embarcadero West, right near Jack London Square!
  - akozak 8y ago
    That's a great spot, and right next to the ferry for SF commuters. Good find.
lioeters 8y ago
Looks great, refreshing view in Oakland!

infecto 8y ago

I think its slowly happening. Square just took the building Uber was building out, all 356,000 sqft. This is going to make them the largest tech company in Oakland. And some company named Marqeta just put their name on a building...no idea how long they have been here but they now have enough money to have their name on both sides. Its slow but its definitely changing.

akozak 8y ago
Hot tip for startups: A lot of ppl who work for the big co.s (me included) live or have migrated to the east bay for housing over the years but hate the commute.
- fourstar 8y ago
  Hot tip? How does this solve anything? People who work at big tech companies migrate to Oakland pushing those who have been there out by driving rents higher. And you think those companies will forfeit their offices in the city/SV? Maybe you can kindly migrate back to where you came from?
  - woah 8y ago
    Build the wall?
    - fourstar 8y ago
      Housing would be more appropriate.
    - umeshunni 8y ago
      Obligatory liberal hypocrisy link: http://marketurbanism.com/2017/01/27/the-disconnect-between-liberal-aspirations-and-liberal-housing-policy-is-killing-coastal-u-s-cities/ http://marketurbanism.com/2017/01/27/the-disconnect-between-...
      - shmooth 8y ago
        oh those poor flailing and flailing liberal coastal cities! maybe Republicans can teach them something, by, for example, the coastal city of......Knoxville, TN. :-D
  - akozak 8y ago
    I've been here for 15 years?

oids98d98s 8y ago

Startups with office space have VC money, and can afford SF (in theory). Tons of small shops, including consulting, freelancing, etc, in Oakland. Companies with people who need to go to SF on a semi-regular basis and who work best in person but don't need to be in SF.

nickelcitymario 8y ago

Take this with a grain of salt, because I'm from Canada and have only been to SF once, but: If I had to guess, I'd say race and class conflict. I wasn't used to how heavily divided a culture could geographically be, and it seemed to me that Oakland was far more heavily multi-ethnic and financially poorer than the rest of the area. Before the hate poors in: - Yes, Canada still has a racism problem. But I don't know of any areas around me that are strongly of one ethnicity versus another. The major exception being "Indian" reserves, which is a whole other topic. - Yes, it's ridiculous for me to comment after only one visit. But that's how strong the difference seemed to be. Every cab and uber driver I had was from Oakland. - SF was beautiful and I don't mean any disparagement. You're all wonderful people and I love you.

tyre 8y ago
Oakland is starting to become more attractive to people in SF precisely because of its diversity. "Really starting to enjoy Oakland—have you been to Drake's?" is the new climbing, hiking, etc.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
nostrademons 8y ago
Multi-ethnic is not a problem in the Bay Area. Most of the people with money & skills are also immigrants, and many of them are various shades of brown or yellow. Poor is. The Bay Area is one of the least racist places I've lived in in my life, but it's also one of the most classist. There's still a big class stigma based on where you live. (Though sometimes gentrification flips this on its head - the Mission and EPA used to be poor, crime-ridden areas, but now they're rich, crime-ridden areas.) It's very strange - I think that people who are used to the race & class social systems of much of the rest of North America don't really know what to make about the Bay Area, because in some ways we've busted out of those social systems and just replaced them with other ones which are...weird.
- dragonwriter 8y ago

tyre 8y ago

It's possible but has it's own challenges. If the benefit of moving to Oakland is lower costs, than that has to be made up for partially by lower salaries (most of a startup's costs are in people.) Being near BART is fine, but not if your employees are coming from SF. Then they still need to pay SF salaries to make up for cost of living. Living in Oakland can be less compelling due to the housing stock. Oakland has many single family homes, which I personally feel is a good thing, but less compelling for many workers. (We can, of course, debate whether the kinds of workers who aren't in the life-stage to want/need a single family home are the right kinds of workers to go after, but that's a separate conversation.)

nostrademons 8y ago

A lot of really-early-stage startup activity (eg. solo engineer working on a project, or 3 guys working out of an apartment) seems to be happening in Oakland and the East Bay generally. It's the last place rents are affordable, so it's naturally attractive to people who need to go without income for a while. The commute over the bridges is terrible, so with the bulk of investment capital and experienced engineers living on the peninsula (and oftentimes more down by Palo Alto & Menlo Park than in SF), it remains difficult to scale East Bay companies. Unless you're someone like Elon Musk where you can just invest $100M of your own capital and need more semi-skilled manufacturing workers than skilled software engineers. Fremont/Milpitas is coming up as a bedroom community for mid-career engineers though (because if you work at Facebook it's just across the Dumbarton, while if you work at Google/Apple you can take 237 and avoid the bridges), so that may increase the engineering supply along the East Bay BART corridor. The East Bay really hurts from BART & Caltrain being two separate systems; it's easily BART accessible, but much of the peninsula's population only has Caltrain access, so you need a very time-consuming transfer to get there without dealing with the bridge traffic.

djakjxnanjak 8y ago
I think tech employment in downtown San Jose is going to blow up for this reason, once the BART tunnel goes in. Combined access from electrictrified Caltrain/BART/ACE/VTA/Amtrak is going to be killer for bringing in people from all over who don’t like being stuck in traffic. Google sees this coming and is building the new campus there. And that will push up prices for homes near any of those rail systems. It will also be possible to commute from SJ or Santa Clara to Oakland via BART, which may marginally improve recruiting there. It would be fantastic if Caltrain or somebody rebuilt the burnt-out rail bridge next to the Dumbarton, but that’s wishful thinking. It would be useful to integrate ACE, Caltrain, and Amtrak.
- kenneth 8y ago
  I put almost zero faith in Bay Area governments fixing the mess that is Bart/Caltrain/etc.

paxy 8y ago

I feel like if a company decides it doesn't want to be in SF proper it's more worth it to go south rather than north.

jakelarkin 8y ago

agree with most of the other comments in this thread, but would add - BART is an extremely filthy and dangerous transit system by any 1st world standard, and I say this as a lifelong transit rider. - Oakland, Berkeley, & Richmond govs/regs are business unfriendly & tech hostile. It's a traditionally poor working class area undergoing massive housing displacement & the political class is all old money or non-profit types.

e40 8y ago
- BART is an extremely filthy and dangerous transit system by any 1st world standard, and I say this as a lifelong transit rider. This is hysteria. I have many coworkers who ride BART on a daily basis for 15+ years and not a single reported incident from any of them, other than stinky homeless people that very rarely ride during peak hours.
- praneshp 8y ago
  > I have many coworkers who ride BART Have you personally taken BART on a consistent enough basis? I took it two days a week for a significant length of time and calling it filthy is not hysteria at all.
- jakelarkin 8y ago
  http://www.ktvu.com/news/bart-investigating-3-violent-deaths-in-the-past-week http://www.ktvu.com/news/bart-investigating-3-violent-deaths... https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/BART-s-approval-rating-plummets-as-riders-13550578.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/BART-s-approval-... slightly depends on your entry/exit stations but I would regularly see crack/heroin use, defecation, deranged meth heads screaming and/or picking fights. I doubt I am alone in this.
- i_am_nomad 8y ago
  Seconding a couple of other replies here: it is not hysteria. In the 20 years I've lived in the Bay Area, BART has gone from tolerable to completely revolting.
- enahs-sf 8y ago

zavi 8y ago

Because Oakland is sketchy (way more so than gentrified parts of SF) - people want to live in SF, that's what the blog post alludes to also. Some parts look post-apocalyptic with dozens of tents in a single encampment. I bet you if city manages to clean up the homeless and finish the bike line across the Bay Bridge there will be an explosion of startups because it's a perfect place to be in otherwise.

dmode 8y ago
There are huge portions of Berkeley and Oakland which are awesome and where houses are as expensive as the peninsula. Piedmont, Montclair, Rockridge, Claremont etc

massivecali 8y ago

Oakland is dangerous and gross compared to SF, and that's saying something as I found heroin needles next to a bench eating lunch in a beautiful office courtyard. I was accosted outside of the Oakland station in broad daylight and local police couldn't have cared less. "The violent crime rate in Oakland, California, is 1,421 per 100,000 residents. Forty-nine people were murdered in the city in 2016." https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/the-most-dangerous-cities-in-america/32/ https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/the-most-dangerous-cities-i... Please let's make smarter choices about where to move businesses to, given numerous options. Oakland definitely should not be one of them.

hk__2 8y ago
Wouldn’t moving some businesses there eventually lower the crime rates? Violent crime is twice higher in Oakland, but property crime is about the same: 5,983 per 100,000 in Oakland [1]; 5,715 in SF [2] (6,168 according to [3]). [1] https://www.areavibes.com/oakland-ca/crime/ https://www.areavibes.com/oakland-ca/crime/ [2] https://sfgov.org/scorecards/public-safety/violent-crime-rate-and-property-crime-rate https://sfgov.org/scorecards/public-safety/violent-crime-rat... [3] https://www.areavibes.com/san+francisco-ca/crime/ https://www.areavibes.com/san+francisco-ca/crime/
- massivecali 8y ago
  How would moving more businesses there lower the crime rate? Poverty is always touted as the source of crime in communities, but businesses moving from SF to Oakland wouldn't be employing Joe/Jolene poor person. If anything, doing so would just rehash the standard complaint about gentrification and alienation of current residents.
- baby 8y ago
  didn't work at all for SF.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dmode 8y ago

eldavido 8y ago

I live in Oakland and I see more tech activity there every day. LaunchDarkly, VSCO, etc. It's an interesting discussion because the city is huge and has many good and bad parts. West Oakland along Broadway is basically SF west. Go east of Lake Merritt and things get bad pretty quickly.

baby 8y ago

It's cheaper but way more dangerous imo. That puts away a lot of people. Having said that it's changing and a lot of start ups do move there.

georgewfraser 8y ago

We (Fivetran) moved to Oakland over a year ago and it's been fantastic. Great office right next to BART, great restaurants, and it's a big recruiting advantage. SF sees itself as the center of the universe, but most of the people in the Bay area actually live over here.

erikpukinskis 8y ago

In general, I have observed socially that East Bay people are willing to take BART to SF, but SF people mostly won't come to the East Bay for any reason. Because it's rare, when an SF person does come out here to visit, I feel really loved. :)