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I think in the long run, not being forced to live in the Bay Area if you want to be ambitious in tech will be good for the Bay Area. If you don’t feel forced to

I think in the long run, not being forced to live in the Bay Area if you want to be ambitious in tech will be good for the Bay Area. If you don’t feel forced to live there to make money, you’ll hopefully only go there if you actually like it. So perhaps the tech community will become less “transient”, more invested in the community, and not as big “haters” as they were. Or at least as they were perceived. I’m also pretty skeptical this is the bay area’s death knell. Web3 is a pretty bad example if you’re looking at funding, because if you interpret web3 as just “crypto” or decentralized, that suffers a legitimacy problem which makes all VC averse to it, not just the Bay Area VC (though of course a lot of crypto stuff does get funded still). And obviously it’s not only people in the Bay Area who work less than their stated 40 hrs or go to tech conferences… In the near-term, say 5-10 years from now, I think the Bay Area will represent maybe 50% of the “hot” tech industry (not counting giants based in the Bay Area which have already spread all over the world) whereas it was maybe 80% before. Obviously right now is an aberration because with remote work you don’t benefit much from the network effects.

anp 5y ago
I agree with this perspective and it’s part of the reason I’ve been considering moving into the city — it seems like a tech diaspora could relieve many of the pressures on SF in the coming years that would allow it to grow back in the direction of its prior reputation as a cultural center.
- throwhauser 5y ago
  If the Bay Area struggles to deal with an influx of tech workers, why would it struggle any less to deal with an influx of artists? There would be fewer dollars chasing the housing, but that doesn't make more housing available. The Bay Area has chosen stasis. That doesn't bode well for its revival as a cultural center.
  - almost_usual 5y ago
    You’re getting downvoted but it’s true. After the dot bomb there were the influx of ‘creative’ hipsters with an art degree their parents bought them gentrifying neighborhoods. Then they got priced out by techies. SF is an attractive place so it attracts people, the vulnerable communities with less resources get pressure.
  - majormajor 5y ago
    That sort of art scene is famously broke, so there's a financially-imposed limit on the influx. The hipster influx that was followed by the tech influx were both fueled by steadily rising disposable income (whether from trust-fund hipsters or highly-paid tech workers, later). I don't think a starving artist influx is likely though because there's a substantial cohort of independently-wealthy people (from the US tech industry, from other US industries, and from abroad) that are going to continue to live in places with desirable climate/amenities/scenery/cultural centers/etc even if the jobs of the newly-high-income move around. So it'll probably just go back to circa-2010-hipster-less-expensive-but-still-expensive levels.
  - opportune 5y ago
    A lot of people are trying hard to reverse the stasis. I think eventually we will be successful, but it will take a long time.
johndubchak 5y ago
You have excellent points here. I would also add that the Bay Area really missed the point from an innovation perspective when they started investing billions by and not leading with solving real problems. As an example you only need to look at the amount of money the FAANG companies spend at consuming your data to sell to advertisers - their investments in data mining for that data, various technologies for click-bait advertising, etc. rather than addressing holes in cybersecurity, technology that may help in the climate crisis, tracking child predators, sex traffickers, mass shooters/shootings etc. The Bay Area is known for caring about Social Networks, Apple products, Amazon's BS, Google (screwing search results around) and just now slowly increasing biotech...it doesn't have a track record of caring about innovation around important items but more around throwing large sums of money at trivially bullshit stuff - yes, my opinion, but this is a fact and has an impact.
- trhway 5y ago
  Innovation takes money and the BS tech is where they are made.
robbyking 5y ago
I agree wholeheartedly. I first moved to San Francisco in 1998 for reasons unrelated to tech, and despite becoming a software engineer I cheered the effect the dotcom crash had on the city. The people who made the city great were being forced out and replaced by young tech workers who largely didn't care about anything other than their careers. The app boom was similarly heartbreaking, only this time most tech workers didn't even need to explore the neighborhoods they lived in -- they could Uber to the front door of any restaurant they wanted, and take tech buses instead of riding their bikes or taking public transportation to get to work. A few years ago I read that the average tenure of a business on Valencia was less than 18 months, which is nothing short of a death sentence for a neighborhood like the Mission. Long times residents no long feel connected to (or were able to take pride in) their neighborhood, and most new residents don't care to to establish those connections -- why bother if the upscale boutique that replaced a multigenerationally owned family business is just going to be gone in a year an a half? I mourn what happened to the city I used to love, but I'm optimistic that the decentralization of tech will leave San Francisco a better place.
- astrange 5y ago
  > The people who made the city great were being forced out and replaced by young tech workers who largely didn't care about anything other than their careers. I mostly get the impression people leave because they don't want to deal with the school lottery system. As for retirees, they tend to have incredible housing wealth built up - and old people being replaced by young people over time, even if bad, is much better than the alternative. > A few years ago I read that the average tenure of a business on Valencia was less than 18 months, which is nothing short of a death sentence for a neighborhood like the Mission. If you want to have businesses in the Mission, they need cheaper startup costs. That doesn't happen when SF is designed to make new businesses take 2-3 years to open so the planning commission can determine they're sufficiently quaint and precious, and all their neighbors and competitors can sue them looking for bribes.
  - robbyking 5y ago
    > I mostly get the impression people leave because they don't want to deal with the school lottery system. In my experience that may be true for the small number of people who leave the city for Marin, Contra Costa or San Mateo counties, but members of the creative communities that gave the city the reputation it had before the tech booms typically don't have children. I can think of countless coworkers with children, but I only know two couples who decided to have children after moving to San Francisco.
wonnage 5y ago
web3 is an extended rug pull on the entire tech attention economy, nobody is missing out on anything there.
wtvanhest 5y ago
Web3 and crypto based businesses are absolutely the future and VCs are already actively dumping money in to highly risking projects.
- bushbaba 5y ago
  Still to early. People said the same about IoT, VR, BLE, and 5G. Most of it was marketing buzz. Don’t forget that web3 involves NFTs. And you can buy an NFT from yourself to make it appear it’s valuable even though it’s not. Wash sale rules along with plenty of others don’t apply to NFTs, yet.
  - wtvanhest 5y ago
    It’s definitely early, but not too early to see it once you dive in. NFTs are a very small off shoot of what web3 is about to offer. Jpegs and songs will be part of it, but not likely the biggest part. I don’t think I’ll ever be a buyer of NFT jpegs but I can still appreciate what is possible
    - jdhn 5y ago
      >NFTs are a very small off shoot of what web3 is about to offer. What else do you think web3 can offer besides NFTs? I'm genuinely curious because I hear a lot of rumbling about web3 but don't really see much being done other than NFTs.
    - bushbaba 5y ago
      Storing Media assets on the chain itself would be incredibly expensive. It’s why 99% of app NFTs is just a receipt pointing to a url. Now could the blockchain replace or augment dns. Totally. But not sure I’d call that web3.0
      - thomasrognon 5y ago
        IPFS is decentralized storage and is a big part of what web3 is. Many NFTs use IPFS urls and many dapps are hosted on it. Browsers can resolve them today via centralized gateways like ipfs.io and some browsers (like Brave) support IPFS natively.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
> So perhaps the tech community will become less “transient” This is the saddest part for me, as someone from here. I get that lots of my childhood friends were priced out. That’s life. But them being priced out by people who want to stay until their thirties and then leave just sucks. Your new friends price out your old friends and then leave too. It doesn’t exactly help as far as sense of community.
nscalf 5y ago
Define "good". I agree that the people in SF will be happier to be there (I'm someone moving out of SF because I feel like I can now, I moved there because I "had to"). But this tradeoff includes a massive decrease in the tax base, and losing the security of knowing that they will have a growing tax base from the creation of new billion dollar tech companies. The tech people that the Bay Area loves to hate pay for a huge amount of what the government does, and we all know they're not efficient with that money. Eventually the Bay Area will find a new equilibrium, but it won't look much like the current Bay Area does. I believe the Bay Area exists in it's current state because of the network effect of having this much tech money/talent in one place. If this goes away, what is left that outweighs high crime, drug abuse and homelessness, taxes, etc?
- yardie 5y ago
  You make it sound SF was a basket case before tech arrived. It's a city literally created from the Gold Rush. And probably has seen more boom and bust than most cities. I assume SF will find a happy medium where part of the population isn't forced onto the streets by overwhelming capital.
  - nscalf 5y ago
    I more so meant that taking away capital is a much more painful process than adding in capital. But you make a good point, it's not the first boom/bust the city has seen.

anp 5y ago

I agree with this perspective and it’s part of the reason I’ve been considering moving into the city — it seems like a tech diaspora could relieve many of the pressures on SF in the coming years that would allow it to grow back in the direction of its prior reputation as a cultural center.

throwhauser 5y ago
If the Bay Area struggles to deal with an influx of tech workers, why would it struggle any less to deal with an influx of artists? There would be fewer dollars chasing the housing, but that doesn't make more housing available. The Bay Area has chosen stasis. That doesn't bode well for its revival as a cultural center.
- almost_usual 5y ago
  You’re getting downvoted but it’s true. After the dot bomb there were the influx of ‘creative’ hipsters with an art degree their parents bought them gentrifying neighborhoods. Then they got priced out by techies. SF is an attractive place so it attracts people, the vulnerable communities with less resources get pressure.
- majormajor 5y ago
  That sort of art scene is famously broke, so there's a financially-imposed limit on the influx. The hipster influx that was followed by the tech influx were both fueled by steadily rising disposable income (whether from trust-fund hipsters or highly-paid tech workers, later). I don't think a starving artist influx is likely though because there's a substantial cohort of independently-wealthy people (from the US tech industry, from other US industries, and from abroad) that are going to continue to live in places with desirable climate/amenities/scenery/cultural centers/etc even if the jobs of the newly-high-income move around. So it'll probably just go back to circa-2010-hipster-less-expensive-but-still-expensive levels.
- opportune 5y ago
  A lot of people are trying hard to reverse the stasis. I think eventually we will be successful, but it will take a long time.

johndubchak 5y ago

You have excellent points here. I would also add that the Bay Area really missed the point from an innovation perspective when they started investing billions by and not leading with solving real problems. As an example you only need to look at the amount of money the FAANG companies spend at consuming your data to sell to advertisers - their investments in data mining for that data, various technologies for click-bait advertising, etc. rather than addressing holes in cybersecurity, technology that may help in the climate crisis, tracking child predators, sex traffickers, mass shooters/shootings etc. The Bay Area is known for caring about Social Networks, Apple products, Amazon's BS, Google (screwing search results around) and just now slowly increasing biotech...it doesn't have a track record of caring about innovation around important items but more around throwing large sums of money at trivially bullshit stuff - yes, my opinion, but this is a fact and has an impact.

trhway 5y ago
Innovation takes money and the BS tech is where they are made.

robbyking 5y ago

I agree wholeheartedly. I first moved to San Francisco in 1998 for reasons unrelated to tech, and despite becoming a software engineer I cheered the effect the dotcom crash had on the city. The people who made the city great were being forced out and replaced by young tech workers who largely didn't care about anything other than their careers. The app boom was similarly heartbreaking, only this time most tech workers didn't even need to explore the neighborhoods they lived in -- they could Uber to the front door of any restaurant they wanted, and take tech buses instead of riding their bikes or taking public transportation to get to work. A few years ago I read that the average tenure of a business on Valencia was less than 18 months, which is nothing short of a death sentence for a neighborhood like the Mission. Long times residents no long feel connected to (or were able to take pride in) their neighborhood, and most new residents don't care to to establish those connections -- why bother if the upscale boutique that replaced a multigenerationally owned family business is just going to be gone in a year an a half? I mourn what happened to the city I used to love, but I'm optimistic that the decentralization of tech will leave San Francisco a better place.

astrange 5y ago
> The people who made the city great were being forced out and replaced by young tech workers who largely didn't care about anything other than their careers. I mostly get the impression people leave because they don't want to deal with the school lottery system. As for retirees, they tend to have incredible housing wealth built up - and old people being replaced by young people over time, even if bad, is much better than the alternative. > A few years ago I read that the average tenure of a business on Valencia was less than 18 months, which is nothing short of a death sentence for a neighborhood like the Mission. If you want to have businesses in the Mission, they need cheaper startup costs. That doesn't happen when SF is designed to make new businesses take 2-3 years to open so the planning commission can determine they're sufficiently quaint and precious, and all their neighbors and competitors can sue them looking for bribes.
- robbyking 5y ago
  > I mostly get the impression people leave because they don't want to deal with the school lottery system. In my experience that may be true for the small number of people who leave the city for Marin, Contra Costa or San Mateo counties, but members of the creative communities that gave the city the reputation it had before the tech booms typically don't have children. I can think of countless coworkers with children, but I only know two couples who decided to have children after moving to San Francisco.

wonnage 5y ago

web3 is an extended rug pull on the entire tech attention economy, nobody is missing out on anything there.

wtvanhest 5y ago

Web3 and crypto based businesses are absolutely the future and VCs are already actively dumping money in to highly risking projects.

bushbaba 5y ago
Still to early. People said the same about IoT, VR, BLE, and 5G. Most of it was marketing buzz. Don’t forget that web3 involves NFTs. And you can buy an NFT from yourself to make it appear it’s valuable even though it’s not. Wash sale rules along with plenty of others don’t apply to NFTs, yet.
- wtvanhest 5y ago
  It’s definitely early, but not too early to see it once you dive in. NFTs are a very small off shoot of what web3 is about to offer. Jpegs and songs will be part of it, but not likely the biggest part. I don’t think I’ll ever be a buyer of NFT jpegs but I can still appreciate what is possible
  - jdhn 5y ago
    >NFTs are a very small off shoot of what web3 is about to offer. What else do you think web3 can offer besides NFTs? I'm genuinely curious because I hear a lot of rumbling about web3 but don't really see much being done other than NFTs.
  - bushbaba 5y ago
    Storing Media assets on the chain itself would be incredibly expensive. It’s why 99% of app NFTs is just a receipt pointing to a url. Now could the blockchain replace or augment dns. Totally. But not sure I’d call that web3.0
    - thomasrognon 5y ago
      IPFS is decentralized storage and is a big part of what web3 is. Many NFTs use IPFS urls and many dapps are hosted on it. Browsers can resolve them today via centralized gateways like ipfs.io and some browsers (like Brave) support IPFS natively.

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

> So perhaps the tech community will become less “transient” This is the saddest part for me, as someone from here. I get that lots of my childhood friends were priced out. That’s life. But them being priced out by people who want to stay until their thirties and then leave just sucks. Your new friends price out your old friends and then leave too. It doesn’t exactly help as far as sense of community.

nscalf 5y ago

Define "good". I agree that the people in SF will be happier to be there (I'm someone moving out of SF because I feel like I can now, I moved there because I "had to"). But this tradeoff includes a massive decrease in the tax base, and losing the security of knowing that they will have a growing tax base from the creation of new billion dollar tech companies. The tech people that the Bay Area loves to hate pay for a huge amount of what the government does, and we all know they're not efficient with that money. Eventually the Bay Area will find a new equilibrium, but it won't look much like the current Bay Area does. I believe the Bay Area exists in it's current state because of the network effect of having this much tech money/talent in one place. If this goes away, what is left that outweighs high crime, drug abuse and homelessness, taxes, etc?

yardie 5y ago
You make it sound SF was a basket case before tech arrived. It's a city literally created from the Gold Rush. And probably has seen more boom and bust than most cities. I assume SF will find a happy medium where part of the population isn't forced onto the streets by overwhelming capital.
- nscalf 5y ago
  I more so meant that taking away capital is a much more painful process than adding in capital. But you make a good point, it's not the first boom/bust the city has seen.