Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Every time someone says "don't worry, the big companies won't leave" due to e.g. SF's increasingly insane regulatory structure, start-ups should be hearing the silent "...but they'd be crazy to *start* here" at the end

Shouldn't underestimate the ludicrous advantages bestowed on the extant Schelling point in an industry where you can scale almost arbitrarily with capital & are generally bottlenecked by the talent pool, but SF is determined to keep raising the pot for someone to dethrone it

From the perspective of human well-being, distributing what is currently very heavily concentrated in the bay area to the rest of the country is probably net good. But, SF probably wouldn't view it that way once the tax revenue begins shifting to "anywhere but here".

There are massive productivity/growth advantages to having concentrated specialized talent pools & to having competitive capital rather than dispersed benefactor-fiefdoms — this is both why SF is still winning & why *somebody* should win

Tougher to care if you think of "tech" as insta-twit-book + some VR stuff or whatever; it's easy to dismiss the value there... but, for example, if a really promising biotech firm is treating cancer, you want them to have unfettered access to capital & the best employable talent

I don't think that, but quite a bit of the valley tech startup infra does. Plenty of biotech (maybe most, though it isn't something I've looked at recently) happens elsewhere.

This is true. A lot of tech happens elsewhere. But insofar as its productivity/growth is bottlenecked by talent — which I would argue is often the case — it's happening slower than it would if talent were even more aggregated

That feels like starting from the conclusion (SF is the best place for all tech startups) and working backward. Many kinds of tech talent, biotech in particular, isn't concentrated primarily in the valley. Silicon Valley was a happy accident...and, maybe replicable?