San Francisco was a thriving tourist city with a hip downtown close to Silicon Valley and Berkeley. Major venture capitalists set up shop in the city for basica

San Francisco was a thriving tourist city with a hip downtown close to Silicon Valley and Berkeley. Major venture capitalists set up shop in the city for basically no other reason than they thought it was cool and they wanted to be around other cool VCs (this is based on the impression I got from Ben Horowitz's book). The whole "talent pool" was a self-fulfilling prophecy - there's no reason they couldn't have set up in more business friendly places like San Jose or Sacramento or even Nashville Tennessee for that matter. But it was always a bit of a flex of muscle to be in SF. San Francisco as a city never needed these businesses. But they came anyway. So in most cities you have city planners that work really hard to build a desirable environment for attracting talent and businesses. I think people miss the point of SF's political problems. And until Bob Lee's death, the VC class always had the money to kind of rise above San Francisco's problems and not see it for the dump it was increasingly becoming. It's as frustrating as it is needless - there are a hundred other cities in America better suited for VCs to set up shop in.