4 ms·

Y Combinator Partner Harj Taggar: "San Francisco is Becoming Silicon Valley"

70 points by ryannielsen 15y ago

endlessvoid94 15y ago
I dunno. The incentives of living in SF versus, say, Mountain View or Palo Alto seem to be nightlife. And most founders I know aren't really going out very much. They're too busy with their startups. It would seem Mountain View is more ideal for that. Maybe MV is better for super-early stage startups with just two or three cofounders, and as soon as hiring occurs then SF becomes more appropriate. It seems to me that SF has more distractions. I of course could be totally wrong, and I'm curious why, if so, the trend continues.
- diego 15y ago
  No, the main incentive for living in SF for me is not driving. I work at Dolores Labs and live 5' away. Not worrying about driving makes a huge difference in lifestyle. It leaves more time for fun / productivity. It also makes it much easier to go to meetups.
  - endlessvoid94 15y ago
    Good point. Is that enough to make the city more attractive? Isn't office space cheaper in MV or PA?
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - aorshan 15y ago
      The BART (The SF subway system) is phenomenal. You can get around very easily and most places are within a convenient walk/bike ride and maybe a short taxi ride. I don't live in SF but I have visited it. Also it is a gorgeous city with lots of nice people.
    - drp 15y ago
      SF actually has an abundance of reasonably priced office space. I don't know the medians, but a quick glance at http://www.rofo.com/CA/Mountain-View http://www.rofo.com/CA/Mountain-View and http://www.rofo.com/CA/San-Francisco http://www.rofo.com/CA/San-Francisco shows similar price to square foot ratios.
      - acgourley 15y ago
        The rates are comparable per sqft if you're willing to be in a seedy part of town (mission, west soma). If you want to be in the nicer parts of SF, if you can even find a good listing, it will cost way more. That said I'm super happy with workout out of the mission near the 24th street bart. And it's very affordable.
    - usaar333 15y ago
      Office space is reasonably comparable. Housing is phenomenally more expensive, especially when compared to MV or Sunnyvale.
  - michaelchisari 15y ago
    I've been living in Chicago for four years now without a car. I'm getting one soon, but only for road trips and visiting my parents. I cannot express myself emphatically enough about how wonderful it is to not have to rely on a car. I've saved so much money and headache, and it's been such a freeing experience, I don't know if I could ever go back to having even a short driving commute.
  - SkyMarshal 15y ago
    In the past three months I've lived in Palo Alto, SF, and now Menlo Park, and have been to just about every stop on the Caltrain from SF to San Jose. SF may be easier to get along without a car, but I don't find SV particularly difficult. Some combination of Caltrain + Zipcar + Uber + taxi + bus + bike + short walks is always available.
    - barclay 15y ago
      The only hitch in that is caltrain stops running at midnight. Even if you're not out partying, but just having a later dinner, you always have to keep an eye on the time, and make sure you're in the cab (muni, etc) before 11:30 to get on that last train of the night.
      - jackowayed 15y ago
        Yeah. Though actually living north (say, in SF) and being social south is even worse. The last northbound train leaves Palo Alto at 11pm (every day but Sunday, when it's 9:30).
- lowglow 15y ago
  The most important thing to me in SF is having options when I don't feel like working. I can walk to the park where beautiful girls do non-programming things like laughing while blowing bubbles! I can go get a beer and watch a movie. I can walk and grab a quick bite at taqueria cancun. I can go to a club. I just love the energy and excitement here. I've met some of the most cultured and interesting people in SF, and I wouldn't trade those experiences for anything. :)
- thewordpainter 15y ago
  call me naive, but other than YC & 500 startups, when i think mountain view, i think the startups turned corporations (google, linkedin, etc). i think mountain view is much more of a family friendly local, compared with SF's younger scene that's always on the go. i agree with @diego about meetups/networking being a huge asset for all the entrepreneurs trying to get their shit off the ground in SF.
- lehrblogger 15y ago
  I live in NYC now and have spent enough time in SF, MV, and PA to know what it would be like to live there. It’s certainly expensive in Manhattan, but there are a number of advantages: * I don’t need a car. This has been as freeing for me as for others. * I don’t worry at all about logistics, ever. The subways run all night, taxis are ubiquitous, and walking is safe and pleasant. * Everything is close by, so I don’t need to worry about meetups at the opposite end of the bay. * I can find good food nearby regardless of the time of day. This city never fully sleeps, which is great because you can set your own schedule. The city is also distracting, but after a while you get used to it and build up the self-discipline to stay in and work. I’m not convinced this is any harder here than it would be in any other place that I had friends.
  - randall 15y ago
    +1 to the meetup issue. Thankfully, most meetups in NYC are in Manhattan or near-Brooklyn. Most times it'll be a 30 minute passive commuting commitment anywhere you go, so it's definitely better than bay area. I lived in the East Bay, and it was such a pain to go to any Silicon Valley anything.
- pjhyett 15y ago
  Just like there are diminishing returns coding for many hours without resting, trying to build a business without having a social life will ultimately have damaging effects. Knowing how to communicate is half the battle and you're not going to learn how to do that sitting in front of a screen all day. I think we've all read the stories of founders not sleeping for days and ruining their personal lives in the process and I just don't see how any of that is necessary. San Francisco's distractions should be seen as a benefit, not a hindrance.
- usaar333 15y ago
  This is what my company did. Honestly, San Francisco is far too expensive to live and work in if you are self-funding.
- tzs 15y ago
  I've been out of California for almost 20 years, so maybe things have changed, but when I lived in Silicon Valley and worked at a small young company I often wondered if it would make sense for small young companies to hop over the mountains to the San Joaquin valley. Suppose, for instance, you were in Merced (as it was 20 years ago--it has changed a lot since then I believe). Not much nightlife or culture, but most of the time you'd be working too hard for that anyway--you'd only have time for the occasional movie and Merced had sufficient movie theaters to get all the major releases. When you could get a weekend off, you'd just drive up to San Francisco and stay for the weekend in a nice hotel. The difference in housing costs between Silicon Valley and Merced were such that even if you were buying a house in Merced, you'd be paying so much less than rent on a decent Silicon Valley apartment that even if you headed up to San Francisco every other weekend for the culture and stayed in an upscale hotel and ate at good restaurants, you'd still come out ahead. For variety, instead of heading up to San Francisco, Yosemite isn't too far from Merced.
- hasenj 15y ago
  I'm in the valley for a visit right now. My impressions: Mountain View and Palo Alto are beautiful, wonderful places. SF is a scary place. It's an old city, and it reeks of shit. I was going through some neighborhood once by car and everything around me felt like GTA4. I took this picture about a block or two away from the caltrain station http://i53.tinypic.com/2ivy8mv.jpg http://i53.tinypic.com/2ivy8mv.jpg
Alex3917 15y ago
"Now, they are starting with both iPhone and android apps, saying they need to nail mobile distribution, and saying that maybe will never build a website at all, because it's unnecessary." So I've heard that in Vermont the local tradition is to build the barn first, and then live in the barn until you can afford to build the house. This seems like the digital equivalent.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
kloncks 15y ago
One factor in YC's boom is the added incentive that every startup accepted by YC automatically now receives a $150,000 investment when they graduate, courtesy of Yuri Milner and YC founder Ron Conway's SV Angel fund. YC founder Ron Conway?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- prayag 15y ago
  Ron Conway is also an investor in YCombinator. Source: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/y-combinator http://www.crunchbase.com/company/y-combinator
kordless 15y ago
I've been living in Orinda/Moraga for 4 years now and make the daily commute to the city. It's 25 minutes by BART, and another 15 or so combined on both ends to make the connection. Having the city and office so close, yet basically living in the boonies (with the cows and turkeys) rocks.
- neilk 15y ago
  I have done the math on this. For a SOMA commute during peak hours, living near the BART station in Orinda is more convenient than most of San Francisco. http://brevity.org/pic/misc/downtown-transit-eastbay.png http://brevity.org/pic/misc/downtown-transit-eastbay.png (Explanation of method here: http://brevity.org/code/google/transitheatmap.html http://brevity.org/code/google/transitheatmap.html)
  - jamesjyu 15y ago
    Biking, however, expands the green to a significant portion of SF.
  - usaar333 15y ago
    Really cool calculation. This is to get to Embarcadero Bart I assume? One thing about SF public transit I've learned: Aside from BART, it is slow. If you live within 4 miles of your destination, biking most likely is faster. (Case in point: I live in a 35-50 min grid. By bike I'd get to the Embarcadero BART in under 25 minutes.
mlinksva 15y ago
It feels like that, but some data say SF as of a few months ago had less tech jobs than in 2000, see http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/26/BUG41IHABH.DTL http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/26/... Here are the comments I left on that article, with one line of context added between them. I got no response on sfgate (no surprise!) ... I'm surprised that the number of tech jobs in SF still hasn't surpassed the 2000 level. SF still felt like a tech backwater then; now it doesn't so much. However, I believe the research. Likely the SF tech workers were just really poorly deployed in 2000. I imagine fairly small in number of employees, but the nonprofit tech sector in SF has also become really important over the past half-decade, in particular Wikimedia Foundation and Public Library of Science. The Internet Archive is an old stalwart that has recently expanded. (I work for a smaller related nonprofit, Creative Commons, that moved from Stanford to SF in 2004, and (sadly) is moving from SF to Mountain View (where Mozilla is another significant tech nonprofit) next month.) I think there's an interesting cluster here. Clearly Oakland/Berkeley/Emeryville is the future. Because I say. Re number and % of tech jobs in SF in 2000 vs 2011: (34116/.144)-(32180/.174)=51974 Has SF lost >50k "nongovernment office" jobs in ~10 years or am I missing something? ... Related to my first comment, Mozilla is opening an SF office this summer http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_id=87452 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_i...
SoftwarePatent 15y ago
"At YC," says Taggar, "Every round we have more applications. But we only accept between 2.5 and 3.5 percent of those who apply. The first round this year we had 44 companies; this round we have 64 companies [almost a 50 percent increase]." I haven't seen this number before (2.5-3.5%). If they accepted 2.5-3.5% when they accepted 44 companies, that's 1760-1257 applications. If they accepted 2.5-3.5% when they accepted 64 companies, that's 2560-1829 companies. So this comment gives us a range of between 1257-2560 applications. Good luck everyone! :) I'm applying this winter.
Aloisius 15y ago
As crazy as it is to hire in San Francisco, hiring in the Valley is several times harder. Being in downtown SF, I really don't have to compete with Facebook and Google for engineers, especially anyone coming from the North or East Bay. Add in a huge amount of local design talent, a city that people outside of California want to live in and would be willing to move to and engineers that are generally happier/more well-rounded. I honestly can't come up with a good reason to be down in the Valley.
- speckledjim 15y ago
  No comparison for me. PA / MV are lovely small friendly towns with streets you can find a good array of shops, restaurants etc, lots of sunshine. SF is a cloudy windy big city with lots of homeless people begging, run down streets, etc Just providing a counterpoint. If I had to work in SF, I'd be miserable.
tzs 15y ago
Now, they are starting with both iPhone and android apps, saying they need to nail mobile distribution, and saying that maybe will never build a website at all, because it's unnecessary. This is especially true with location-based services like photo-sharing, since the website is secondary, just in the background. I'm surprised this would apply to photo-sharing. If I'm taking photos and sharing them, I want some control over the organization and layout, the ability to add annotations, and stuff like that. I don't want to do that from my phone--it is fine for quickly uploading them into some kind of default setup, but I want to manage my information on my nice big monitor.

70 points by ryannielsen 15y ago

I dunno. The incentives of living in SF versus, say, Mountain View or Palo Alto seem to be nightlife. And most founders I know aren't really going out very much. They're too busy with their startups. It would seem Mountain View is more ideal for that. Maybe MV is better for super-early stage startups with just two or three cofounders, and as soon as hiring occurs then SF becomes more appropriate. It seems to me that SF has more distractions. I of course could be totally wrong, and I'm curious why, if so, the trend continues.

diego 15y ago
No, the main incentive for living in SF for me is not driving. I work at Dolores Labs and live 5' away. Not worrying about driving makes a huge difference in lifestyle. It leaves more time for fun / productivity. It also makes it much easier to go to meetups.
- endlessvoid94 15y ago
  Good point. Is that enough to make the city more attractive? Isn't office space cheaper in MV or PA?
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - aorshan 15y ago
    The BART (The SF subway system) is phenomenal. You can get around very easily and most places are within a convenient walk/bike ride and maybe a short taxi ride. I don't live in SF but I have visited it. Also it is a gorgeous city with lots of nice people.
  - drp 15y ago
    SF actually has an abundance of reasonably priced office space. I don't know the medians, but a quick glance at http://www.rofo.com/CA/Mountain-View http://www.rofo.com/CA/Mountain-View and http://www.rofo.com/CA/San-Francisco http://www.rofo.com/CA/San-Francisco shows similar price to square foot ratios.
    - acgourley 15y ago
      The rates are comparable per sqft if you're willing to be in a seedy part of town (mission, west soma). If you want to be in the nicer parts of SF, if you can even find a good listing, it will cost way more. That said I'm super happy with workout out of the mission near the 24th street bart. And it's very affordable.
  - usaar333 15y ago
    Office space is reasonably comparable. Housing is phenomenally more expensive, especially when compared to MV or Sunnyvale.
- michaelchisari 15y ago
  I've been living in Chicago for four years now without a car. I'm getting one soon, but only for road trips and visiting my parents. I cannot express myself emphatically enough about how wonderful it is to not have to rely on a car. I've saved so much money and headache, and it's been such a freeing experience, I don't know if I could ever go back to having even a short driving commute.
- SkyMarshal 15y ago
  In the past three months I've lived in Palo Alto, SF, and now Menlo Park, and have been to just about every stop on the Caltrain from SF to San Jose. SF may be easier to get along without a car, but I don't find SV particularly difficult. Some combination of Caltrain + Zipcar + Uber + taxi + bus + bike + short walks is always available.
  - barclay 15y ago
    The only hitch in that is caltrain stops running at midnight. Even if you're not out partying, but just having a later dinner, you always have to keep an eye on the time, and make sure you're in the cab (muni, etc) before 11:30 to get on that last train of the night.
    - jackowayed 15y ago
      Yeah. Though actually living north (say, in SF) and being social south is even worse. The last northbound train leaves Palo Alto at 11pm (every day but Sunday, when it's 9:30).
lowglow 15y ago
The most important thing to me in SF is having options when I don't feel like working. I can walk to the park where beautiful girls do non-programming things like laughing while blowing bubbles! I can go get a beer and watch a movie. I can walk and grab a quick bite at taqueria cancun. I can go to a club. I just love the energy and excitement here. I've met some of the most cultured and interesting people in SF, and I wouldn't trade those experiences for anything. :)
thewordpainter 15y ago
call me naive, but other than YC & 500 startups, when i think mountain view, i think the startups turned corporations (google, linkedin, etc). i think mountain view is much more of a family friendly local, compared with SF's younger scene that's always on the go. i agree with @diego about meetups/networking being a huge asset for all the entrepreneurs trying to get their shit off the ground in SF.
lehrblogger 15y ago
I live in NYC now and have spent enough time in SF, MV, and PA to know what it would be like to live there. It’s certainly expensive in Manhattan, but there are a number of advantages: * I don’t need a car. This has been as freeing for me as for others. * I don’t worry at all about logistics, ever. The subways run all night, taxis are ubiquitous, and walking is safe and pleasant. * Everything is close by, so I don’t need to worry about meetups at the opposite end of the bay. * I can find good food nearby regardless of the time of day. This city never fully sleeps, which is great because you can set your own schedule. The city is also distracting, but after a while you get used to it and build up the self-discipline to stay in and work. I’m not convinced this is any harder here than it would be in any other place that I had friends.
- randall 15y ago
  +1 to the meetup issue. Thankfully, most meetups in NYC are in Manhattan or near-Brooklyn. Most times it'll be a 30 minute passive commuting commitment anywhere you go, so it's definitely better than bay area. I lived in the East Bay, and it was such a pain to go to any Silicon Valley anything.
pjhyett 15y ago
Just like there are diminishing returns coding for many hours without resting, trying to build a business without having a social life will ultimately have damaging effects. Knowing how to communicate is half the battle and you're not going to learn how to do that sitting in front of a screen all day. I think we've all read the stories of founders not sleeping for days and ruining their personal lives in the process and I just don't see how any of that is necessary. San Francisco's distractions should be seen as a benefit, not a hindrance.
usaar333 15y ago
This is what my company did. Honestly, San Francisco is far too expensive to live and work in if you are self-funding.
tzs 15y ago
I've been out of California for almost 20 years, so maybe things have changed, but when I lived in Silicon Valley and worked at a small young company I often wondered if it would make sense for small young companies to hop over the mountains to the San Joaquin valley. Suppose, for instance, you were in Merced (as it was 20 years ago--it has changed a lot since then I believe). Not much nightlife or culture, but most of the time you'd be working too hard for that anyway--you'd only have time for the occasional movie and Merced had sufficient movie theaters to get all the major releases. When you could get a weekend off, you'd just drive up to San Francisco and stay for the weekend in a nice hotel. The difference in housing costs between Silicon Valley and Merced were such that even if you were buying a house in Merced, you'd be paying so much less than rent on a decent Silicon Valley apartment that even if you headed up to San Francisco every other weekend for the culture and stayed in an upscale hotel and ate at good restaurants, you'd still come out ahead. For variety, instead of heading up to San Francisco, Yosemite isn't too far from Merced.
hasenj 15y ago
I'm in the valley for a visit right now. My impressions: Mountain View and Palo Alto are beautiful, wonderful places. SF is a scary place. It's an old city, and it reeks of shit. I was going through some neighborhood once by car and everything around me felt like GTA4. I took this picture about a block or two away from the caltrain station http://i53.tinypic.com/2ivy8mv.jpg http://i53.tinypic.com/2ivy8mv.jpg

Alex3917 15y ago

"Now, they are starting with both iPhone and android apps, saying they need to nail mobile distribution, and saying that maybe will never build a website at all, because it's unnecessary." So I've heard that in Vermont the local tradition is to build the barn first, and then live in the barn until you can afford to build the house. This seems like the digital equivalent.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

kloncks 15y ago

One factor in YC's boom is the added incentive that every startup accepted by YC automatically now receives a $150,000 investment when they graduate, courtesy of Yuri Milner and YC founder Ron Conway's SV Angel fund. YC founder Ron Conway?

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
prayag 15y ago
Ron Conway is also an investor in YCombinator. Source: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/y-combinator http://www.crunchbase.com/company/y-combinator

kordless 15y ago

I've been living in Orinda/Moraga for 4 years now and make the daily commute to the city. It's 25 minutes by BART, and another 15 or so combined on both ends to make the connection. Having the city and office so close, yet basically living in the boonies (with the cows and turkeys) rocks.

neilk 15y ago
I have done the math on this. For a SOMA commute during peak hours, living near the BART station in Orinda is more convenient than most of San Francisco. http://brevity.org/pic/misc/downtown-transit-eastbay.png http://brevity.org/pic/misc/downtown-transit-eastbay.png (Explanation of method here: http://brevity.org/code/google/transitheatmap.html http://brevity.org/code/google/transitheatmap.html)
- jamesjyu 15y ago
  Biking, however, expands the green to a significant portion of SF.
- usaar333 15y ago
  Really cool calculation. This is to get to Embarcadero Bart I assume? One thing about SF public transit I've learned: Aside from BART, it is slow. If you live within 4 miles of your destination, biking most likely is faster. (Case in point: I live in a 35-50 min grid. By bike I'd get to the Embarcadero BART in under 25 minutes.

mlinksva 15y ago

It feels like that, but some data say SF as of a few months ago had less tech jobs than in 2000, see http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/26/BUG41IHABH.DTL http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/26/... Here are the comments I left on that article, with one line of context added between them. I got no response on sfgate (no surprise!) ... I'm surprised that the number of tech jobs in SF still hasn't surpassed the 2000 level. SF still felt like a tech backwater then; now it doesn't so much. However, I believe the research. Likely the SF tech workers were just really poorly deployed in 2000. I imagine fairly small in number of employees, but the nonprofit tech sector in SF has also become really important over the past half-decade, in particular Wikimedia Foundation and Public Library of Science. The Internet Archive is an old stalwart that has recently expanded. (I work for a smaller related nonprofit, Creative Commons, that moved from Stanford to SF in 2004, and (sadly) is moving from SF to Mountain View (where Mozilla is another significant tech nonprofit) next month.) I think there's an interesting cluster here. Clearly Oakland/Berkeley/Emeryville is the future. Because I say. Re number and % of tech jobs in SF in 2000 vs 2011: (34116/.144)-(32180/.174)=51974 Has SF lost >50k "nongovernment office" jobs in ~10 years or am I missing something? ... Related to my first comment, Mozilla is opening an SF office this summer http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_id=87452 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_i...

SoftwarePatent 15y ago

"At YC," says Taggar, "Every round we have more applications. But we only accept between 2.5 and 3.5 percent of those who apply. The first round this year we had 44 companies; this round we have 64 companies [almost a 50 percent increase]." I haven't seen this number before (2.5-3.5%). If they accepted 2.5-3.5% when they accepted 44 companies, that's 1760-1257 applications. If they accepted 2.5-3.5% when they accepted 64 companies, that's 2560-1829 companies. So this comment gives us a range of between 1257-2560 applications. Good luck everyone! :) I'm applying this winter.

Aloisius 15y ago

As crazy as it is to hire in San Francisco, hiring in the Valley is several times harder. Being in downtown SF, I really don't have to compete with Facebook and Google for engineers, especially anyone coming from the North or East Bay. Add in a huge amount of local design talent, a city that people outside of California want to live in and would be willing to move to and engineers that are generally happier/more well-rounded. I honestly can't come up with a good reason to be down in the Valley.

speckledjim 15y ago
No comparison for me. PA / MV are lovely small friendly towns with streets you can find a good array of shops, restaurants etc, lots of sunshine. SF is a cloudy windy big city with lots of homeless people begging, run down streets, etc Just providing a counterpoint. If I had to work in SF, I'd be miserable.

tzs 15y ago

Now, they are starting with both iPhone and android apps, saying they need to nail mobile distribution, and saying that maybe will never build a website at all, because it's unnecessary. This is especially true with location-based services like photo-sharing, since the website is secondary, just in the background. I'm surprised this would apply to photo-sharing. If I'm taking photos and sharing them, I want some control over the organization and layout, the ability to add annotations, and stuff like that. I don't want to do that from my phone--it is fine for quickly uploading them into some kind of default setup, but I want to manage my information on my nice big monitor.