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Personal anecdote: Even 5 years ago calls with customers and investors invited questions like "so are you in the city or in the South Bay?" Raising money in pa
by api 5y ago
Personal anecdote:
Even 5 years ago calls with customers and investors invited questions like "so are you in the city or in the South Bay?" Raising money in particular was very hard if you were not in the Bay Area.
Now nobody even asks where you are located and if you say you are distributed/remote everyone shrugs. Angels and VCs don't seem to care at all.
It's been a stark and noticeable shift and it pre-dates COVID. COVID has just accelerated the geographic diversification trend dramatically.
- fishtoaster 5y agoI feel like this is a key point. There's long been strong financial pressure for the tech industry to disburse: it's incredibly expensive. Ideally you'd start a tech company somewhere where office and engineers are cheap. But the companies stay in SF because employees and VCs are there. VCs and employees are there because companies are here. And even though Sand Hill VCs could fund companies anywhere in the country, in practice, they didn't (much). If that's changing, I feel like that's the trigger for a big tech diaspora as much or more than remote eng work.
- api 5y agoI've been in recent conversations with several top firms on and off Sand Hill and nobody cares or even asks where anything is located.