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Why Oakland's a Tech Start-up Game Changer

75 points by MilnerRoute 12y ago

ryanSrich 12y ago
Oakland is incredibly close to San Francisco. If you want all the benefits of being in Silicon Valley's startup network with only a fraction of the cost, then Oakland is your spot. The only downside is that many businesses already realize this and have begun driving up renting costs.
- teej 12y ago
  > have begun driving up renting costs The two bedroom I rented near the 19th St BART in Oakland was $1,700 in 2009 and is now on the market for over $4,000 a month.
  - ryanSrich 12y ago
    In Oakland? That seems about right, considering it's a 2 bedroom, a comparable spot in SF would be closer to $6 or $7k. Out of curiosity do you know the folks living their now? I'm always curious to hear who these people that are making enough money to justify a $4k rent payment. The Bay Area never ceases to amaze me. The rent prices are so crazy yet the pay increase is negligible.
    - justizin 12y ago
      A couple both making six figures is basically what's happening there, or someone has decided it's OK to be 'rent poor'.
    - 2arrs2ells 12y ago
      16th St BART is in San Francisco (in the mission). As crazy as rents are, they're not yet $6-7k for a 2BR in the city (unless you're talking super luxury).
      - teej 12y ago
        Sorry, I meant 19th st in Oakland.
    - dllthomas 12y ago
      19th St Bart is right by Pandora, which (per glassdoor) seems to have a number of jobs around $100k. Cutting the cost and time of a commute is worth paying for.
      - ryanSrich 12y ago
        That still seems way low to me. A qualified software engineer or designer can command a six figure salary remotely, thus eliminating a commute and the need to live in an expensive city. If Pandora is doing $150k for mid level developers then I'd say it's worth it, but not a penny less.
        dllthomas 12y ago
        Not all those jobs were development roles. http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Pandora-Salaries-E262334.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Pandora-Salaries-E262334.htm
  - deleted 12y ago
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- krakensden 12y ago
  The real estate market in oakland is crazy- wild amounts of office space have changed hands over the past few years. That said, SF has approximately "a downtown oakland" in office space in the pipeline.
fyell 12y ago
Great article. The diversity in tech is definitely apparent in Oakland. Not just in employee demographics, but in how companies tend to think in a different manner. The article mentions that start-ups in Oakland are driven by a social mission, and it's very true. I work at VSCO and we're based in Oakland. VSCO is not about giving likes, being popular, or generating money through ads. We are simply about empowering the community with the art of photography. Without trying to sound too self-righteous, I like to think that the tech companies coming to Oakland also share a sentiment of contributing to social causes bigger than themselves.
- krakensden 12y ago
  > I like to think that the tech companies coming to Oakland also share a sentiment of contributing to social causes bigger than themselves. I'm pretty skeptical. It's telling, too, that there was no mention of the big companies with their names on towers.
  - fyell 12y ago
    Your skepticism for the bigger companies is certainly just. My comments are more inclined to smaller start-ups like GoldieBlox and Qeyno.
    - krakensden 12y ago
      There's lots of little startups with lofty goals wherever you look. I don't think Watsi[1] means anything in particular for the character of San Francisco. [1]: or twitter for that matter, though I'm sure no one will agree with me
  - justizin 12y ago
    I interviewed with one of them, and they picked a fight with me about advertising because I felt my previous employer had taken the absolute lowest possible road. I continually tried to acquiesce, even noting that they had a paid option, and they basically said that they hate their paid customers, who they lose money on (why not charge us more?!?), and that they only ever did a paid option because they were forced to. Pretty sure I had been using their fucking service longer than anyone I interviewed with there, but whatever. ;)
tzs 12y ago
According to Wikipedia, "Oakland has the fifth largest cluster of 'elite zip codes' ranked by the number of households with the highest combination of income and education". That's a good sign. On the other hand, Oakland is also persistently near the top of the list of most dangerous cities in the US. One recent report put it at #2 [1]. That's generally not a good sign. Is there much interaction between the high income/high education areas (presumably where you'd want to put your start up), and the high crime areas? BTW, in addition to having one of the highest crime cities in the nation with Oakland, the Silicon Valley area also has one of the lowest. That would be Sunnyvale, which was the 10th on this recent list of safest cities in the US [2]. [1] http://247wallst.com/special-report/2014/11/11/the-most-dangerous-cities-in-america-4/ http://247wallst.com/special-report/2014/11/11/the-most-dang... [2] http://247wallst.com/special-report/2014/11/12/the-safest-cities-in-america/ http://247wallst.com/special-report/2014/11/12/the-safest-ci...
- hack_edu 12y ago
  To answer part of your question, the high-income/education zip codes are residential neighborhoods in the hills and more northern neighborhoods. This has been the case for a century. The zips on the lower end are also residential neighborhoods, but in the flats of the East and West parts of town. This area has been in stagnation since the early post-war years. Neither interact with each other almost at all, rarely even sharing schools. Neither are areas where any business would establish itself, because most all of Oakland are old fashioned post-war neighborhoods. Downtown Oakland, and the meat of the city's desk & cubicle type of office spaces are in the center near the lake and the bridge. This is a very small area without a whole lot of commercial development starts, current or planned. A surprising amount of high density residential real estate priced for upper-middle class types are slowly appearing. These projects are eating away at the old retail/warehouse space that would typically be turned into new commercial development. There is an alternate universe where Twitter moved to Oakland/Emeryville and brought the mid-Market/Castro-East craziness with it... [Also, there is plenty of violent crime throughout the Valley. It doesn't show up very well in crime statistics and reports because how closely intertwined it is with the poor, semi-homeless and meth. Nobody likes to talk about it, and it is very good at hiding in the bushes (literally).]
- 12y ago
nailer 12y ago
I don't live in the US, but it's weird: downtown San Francisco people tend to look down on Oakland, but every time I've been, San Francisco is unique in having human feces on the streets. In Oakland: there's a bunch of parks, a hacker space called the sudo room, a bunch of JS related companies included npm Inc are headquartered there and the last JSFest was there.
- justizin 12y ago
  Please do not try to understand this through such a narrow lens. San Francisco has human feces because it is one of the only cities in the USA which has not completely criminalized homelesness, because there are a lot of services there, and because once people decide that San Francisco is home, they really, really, really do not want to leave. First of all, there are plenty of human feces in Oakland, but again, let's try and crawl away from that lens. If you become homeless in Oakland, the best advice I can give you is to spend your last $5 on a BART ticket to San Francisco. Oakland and a lot of Alameda County's solution to these sort of problems are a humongous jail called Santa Rita which is comparable to the size of the nearby San Quentin prison. Most of the people in there are there for minor crimes related to homelessness or poverty, and their situations escalate once they enter what is a major portal to our for-profit prison system, which per-capita is the most heavily populated in the world.
  - nailer 12y ago
    I'm glad you acknowledge the problem, but I think you're understanding it through a narrow lens yourself: there are many cities worldwide with the the same levels of homeslessness as San Francisco (or higher), none are as filthy. Hell even in the US Portland has methheads everywhere: they don't shit on the street. SF has a unique problem. Your claims about for profit prisons may be true, but they don't change the fact that San Francisco is uniquely filthy.
    - RyJones 12y ago
      Agreed. San Francisco is the filthiest city I've ever worked in. That the residents appear A-OK with public activity that would at least warrant a visit by social services or the cops in other cities amuses and amazes.
Mz 12y ago
“Oakland has a unique opportunity. It has an opportunity that no other region has anywhere in the world, so if Oakland can’t do it, no one else can,” Selassie said. I don't see any reason to believe that. I mean if Oakland pulls it off -- diversifying tech and becoming an important hub in that regard -- awesome. But I see no reason to believe that it has to be something in the SF Bay Area. Part of what made Silicon Valley a growth opportunity is that that area was relatively undeveloped and it was, thus, cheap. Historically, a lot of our biggest companies were founded during a recession or depression and a lot of stuff was founded someplace cheap. In order to go live someplace expensive, you need to already be making good money. By definition, brand spanking new businesses and industries are not doing that. So I don't see any real reason to believe that any place in the SFBA is The Spot to bet on for becoming "the next Silicon Valley -- only for X thing or with X twist."
illicium 12y ago
It's only a "game changer" because SF is now too crowded and expensive, so startups are moving to Oakland because it's still close by and a little cheaper.
deleted 12y ago
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NDizzle 12y ago
My personal experience is trying to run a food related startup in Oakland. It didn't go so hot, but then again I think we tried to do too much. We tried to make the food, deliver the food, and provide the technology to order the food. (a menu that changes day to day - different menu items based on what was in season, etc) In 2010. It may seem that you can be the 'local boy makes good' when in Oakland, rather than SF. You can garner a lot of support from various groups by bringing business to Oakland as well. Just realize that as long as you are tech focused most of your customer base will be in SF.
- thrownaway2424 12y ago
  Maybe people in Oakland don't need food delivered because we don't have multi-hour lines out the door of every restaurant like SF has :)
pla3rhat3r 12y ago
It makes me happy to see other markets besides Silicon Valley and SF (yes I do not consider SF part of the Silicon Valley) get some attention about what they're doing. US News did a great piece about my hometown, Portland about how it's becoming a great place to start a company. http://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/2014/12/23/portland-oregon-is-a-hub-for-entrepreneurship-and-startups http://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/2014/12/... I can attest to this. SF is a great place to start a company, but Portland is a different world. People are much more collaborative. If you start a company here, you'll be able to find help. It's incredible. I'm Bay Area born and raised, but I'll never go back. The underserved markets are less toxic, more collaborative, and foster an ecosystem in which people can focus on their product or services without a lot of underlying tension.
hadley 12y ago
I found the title very hard to parse. It would be better as: "Why Oakland Is a Tech Start-up Game Changer"
LISPmasta 12y ago
45 comments? God you fucking sub-par coding python hipsters only care about things unrelated to actually doing work. Go make some commits on useful public libraries and stop circle jerking to your shitty cities.
millermp12 12y ago
Really only two takeaways from an overly long article: 1) the diversity thing has more than a whiff of wish fulfillment to it. Repetition in this regard just makes the dubious sound downright desperate. 2) if money is really flowing to the next Netflix for Latinos, what stronger "sell" signal do you need?

75 points by MilnerRoute 12y ago

Oakland is incredibly close to San Francisco. If you want all the benefits of being in Silicon Valley's startup network with only a fraction of the cost, then Oakland is your spot. The only downside is that many businesses already realize this and have begun driving up renting costs.

teej 12y ago
> have begun driving up renting costs The two bedroom I rented near the 19th St BART in Oakland was $1,700 in 2009 and is now on the market for over $4,000 a month.
- ryanSrich 12y ago
  In Oakland? That seems about right, considering it's a 2 bedroom, a comparable spot in SF would be closer to $6 or $7k. Out of curiosity do you know the folks living their now? I'm always curious to hear who these people that are making enough money to justify a $4k rent payment. The Bay Area never ceases to amaze me. The rent prices are so crazy yet the pay increase is negligible.
  - justizin 12y ago
    A couple both making six figures is basically what's happening there, or someone has decided it's OK to be 'rent poor'.
  - 2arrs2ells 12y ago
    16th St BART is in San Francisco (in the mission). As crazy as rents are, they're not yet $6-7k for a 2BR in the city (unless you're talking super luxury).
    - teej 12y ago
      Sorry, I meant 19th st in Oakland.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    19th St Bart is right by Pandora, which (per glassdoor) seems to have a number of jobs around $100k. Cutting the cost and time of a commute is worth paying for.
    - ryanSrich 12y ago
      That still seems way low to me. A qualified software engineer or designer can command a six figure salary remotely, thus eliminating a commute and the need to live in an expensive city. If Pandora is doing $150k for mid level developers then I'd say it's worth it, but not a penny less.
      - dllthomas 12y ago
        Not all those jobs were development roles. http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Pandora-Salaries-E262334.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Pandora-Salaries-E262334.htm
- deleted 12y ago
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- deleted 12y ago
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krakensden 12y ago
The real estate market in oakland is crazy- wild amounts of office space have changed hands over the past few years. That said, SF has approximately "a downtown oakland" in office space in the pipeline.

fyell 12y ago

Great article. The diversity in tech is definitely apparent in Oakland. Not just in employee demographics, but in how companies tend to think in a different manner. The article mentions that start-ups in Oakland are driven by a social mission, and it's very true. I work at VSCO and we're based in Oakland. VSCO is not about giving likes, being popular, or generating money through ads. We are simply about empowering the community with the art of photography. Without trying to sound too self-righteous, I like to think that the tech companies coming to Oakland also share a sentiment of contributing to social causes bigger than themselves.

krakensden 12y ago
> I like to think that the tech companies coming to Oakland also share a sentiment of contributing to social causes bigger than themselves. I'm pretty skeptical. It's telling, too, that there was no mention of the big companies with their names on towers.
- fyell 12y ago
  Your skepticism for the bigger companies is certainly just. My comments are more inclined to smaller start-ups like GoldieBlox and Qeyno.
  - krakensden 12y ago
    There's lots of little startups with lofty goals wherever you look. I don't think Watsi[1] means anything in particular for the character of San Francisco. [1]: or twitter for that matter, though I'm sure no one will agree with me
- justizin 12y ago
  I interviewed with one of them, and they picked a fight with me about advertising because I felt my previous employer had taken the absolute lowest possible road. I continually tried to acquiesce, even noting that they had a paid option, and they basically said that they hate their paid customers, who they lose money on (why not charge us more?!?), and that they only ever did a paid option because they were forced to. Pretty sure I had been using their fucking service longer than anyone I interviewed with there, but whatever. ;)

tzs 12y ago

According to Wikipedia, "Oakland has the fifth largest cluster of 'elite zip codes' ranked by the number of households with the highest combination of income and education". That's a good sign. On the other hand, Oakland is also persistently near the top of the list of most dangerous cities in the US. One recent report put it at #2 [1]. That's generally not a good sign. Is there much interaction between the high income/high education areas (presumably where you'd want to put your start up), and the high crime areas? BTW, in addition to having one of the highest crime cities in the nation with Oakland, the Silicon Valley area also has one of the lowest. That would be Sunnyvale, which was the 10th on this recent list of safest cities in the US [2]. [1] http://247wallst.com/special-report/2014/11/11/the-most-dangerous-cities-in-america-4/ http://247wallst.com/special-report/2014/11/11/the-most-dang... [2] http://247wallst.com/special-report/2014/11/12/the-safest-cities-in-america/ http://247wallst.com/special-report/2014/11/12/the-safest-ci...

hack_edu 12y ago
To answer part of your question, the high-income/education zip codes are residential neighborhoods in the hills and more northern neighborhoods. This has been the case for a century. The zips on the lower end are also residential neighborhoods, but in the flats of the East and West parts of town. This area has been in stagnation since the early post-war years. Neither interact with each other almost at all, rarely even sharing schools. Neither are areas where any business would establish itself, because most all of Oakland are old fashioned post-war neighborhoods. Downtown Oakland, and the meat of the city's desk & cubicle type of office spaces are in the center near the lake and the bridge. This is a very small area without a whole lot of commercial development starts, current or planned. A surprising amount of high density residential real estate priced for upper-middle class types are slowly appearing. These projects are eating away at the old retail/warehouse space that would typically be turned into new commercial development. There is an alternate universe where Twitter moved to Oakland/Emeryville and brought the mid-Market/Castro-East craziness with it... [Also, there is plenty of violent crime throughout the Valley. It doesn't show up very well in crime statistics and reports because how closely intertwined it is with the poor, semi-homeless and meth. Nobody likes to talk about it, and it is very good at hiding in the bushes (literally).]
12y ago

nailer 12y ago

I don't live in the US, but it's weird: downtown San Francisco people tend to look down on Oakland, but every time I've been, San Francisco is unique in having human feces on the streets. In Oakland: there's a bunch of parks, a hacker space called the sudo room, a bunch of JS related companies included npm Inc are headquartered there and the last JSFest was there.

justizin 12y ago
Please do not try to understand this through such a narrow lens. San Francisco has human feces because it is one of the only cities in the USA which has not completely criminalized homelesness, because there are a lot of services there, and because once people decide that San Francisco is home, they really, really, really do not want to leave. First of all, there are plenty of human feces in Oakland, but again, let's try and crawl away from that lens. If you become homeless in Oakland, the best advice I can give you is to spend your last $5 on a BART ticket to San Francisco. Oakland and a lot of Alameda County's solution to these sort of problems are a humongous jail called Santa Rita which is comparable to the size of the nearby San Quentin prison. Most of the people in there are there for minor crimes related to homelessness or poverty, and their situations escalate once they enter what is a major portal to our for-profit prison system, which per-capita is the most heavily populated in the world.
- nailer 12y ago
  I'm glad you acknowledge the problem, but I think you're understanding it through a narrow lens yourself: there are many cities worldwide with the the same levels of homeslessness as San Francisco (or higher), none are as filthy. Hell even in the US Portland has methheads everywhere: they don't shit on the street. SF has a unique problem. Your claims about for profit prisons may be true, but they don't change the fact that San Francisco is uniquely filthy.
  - RyJones 12y ago
    Agreed. San Francisco is the filthiest city I've ever worked in. That the residents appear A-OK with public activity that would at least warrant a visit by social services or the cops in other cities amuses and amazes.

Mz 12y ago

“Oakland has a unique opportunity. It has an opportunity that no other region has anywhere in the world, so if Oakland can’t do it, no one else can,” Selassie said. I don't see any reason to believe that. I mean if Oakland pulls it off -- diversifying tech and becoming an important hub in that regard -- awesome. But I see no reason to believe that it has to be something in the SF Bay Area. Part of what made Silicon Valley a growth opportunity is that that area was relatively undeveloped and it was, thus, cheap. Historically, a lot of our biggest companies were founded during a recession or depression and a lot of stuff was founded someplace cheap. In order to go live someplace expensive, you need to already be making good money. By definition, brand spanking new businesses and industries are not doing that. So I don't see any real reason to believe that any place in the SFBA is The Spot to bet on for becoming "the next Silicon Valley -- only for X thing or with X twist."

illicium 12y ago

It's only a "game changer" because SF is now too crowded and expensive, so startups are moving to Oakland because it's still close by and a little cheaper.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

NDizzle 12y ago

My personal experience is trying to run a food related startup in Oakland. It didn't go so hot, but then again I think we tried to do too much. We tried to make the food, deliver the food, and provide the technology to order the food. (a menu that changes day to day - different menu items based on what was in season, etc) In 2010. It may seem that you can be the 'local boy makes good' when in Oakland, rather than SF. You can garner a lot of support from various groups by bringing business to Oakland as well. Just realize that as long as you are tech focused most of your customer base will be in SF.

thrownaway2424 12y ago
Maybe people in Oakland don't need food delivered because we don't have multi-hour lines out the door of every restaurant like SF has :)

pla3rhat3r 12y ago

It makes me happy to see other markets besides Silicon Valley and SF (yes I do not consider SF part of the Silicon Valley) get some attention about what they're doing. US News did a great piece about my hometown, Portland about how it's becoming a great place to start a company. http://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/2014/12/23/portland-oregon-is-a-hub-for-entrepreneurship-and-startups http://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/2014/12/... I can attest to this. SF is a great place to start a company, but Portland is a different world. People are much more collaborative. If you start a company here, you'll be able to find help. It's incredible. I'm Bay Area born and raised, but I'll never go back. The underserved markets are less toxic, more collaborative, and foster an ecosystem in which people can focus on their product or services without a lot of underlying tension.

hadley 12y ago

I found the title very hard to parse. It would be better as: "Why Oakland Is a Tech Start-up Game Changer"

LISPmasta 12y ago

45 comments? God you fucking sub-par coding python hipsters only care about things unrelated to actually doing work. Go make some commits on useful public libraries and stop circle jerking to your shitty cities.

millermp12 12y ago

Really only two takeaways from an overly long article: 1) the diversity thing has more than a whiff of wish fulfillment to it. Repetition in this regard just makes the dubious sound downright desperate. 2) if money is really flowing to the next Netflix for Latinos, what stronger "sell" signal do you need?