Is San Francisco the right place to start and build a startup today?

Eiso Kant · Oct 7, 2024

A large share of the world's frontier-AI-capable talent sits outside the Bay Area, spread across Europe and Israel, and building teams there is an unfair advantage because those people want to stay put but have no massively ambitious young companies to join

Their list of ~3,300 candidate researchers/engineers showed the Bay Area as the top single geo but a huge remainder across the UK, Switzerland, Tel Aviv, Amsterdam and Paris; conversations revealed highly capable people who won't relocate and lack ambitious local companies

Scope: no single deep talent concentration outside the Bay Area, with the UK the largest; Poolside is still an American company with people from San Francisco to Israel

48:07 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside

Severin Hacker · May 19, 2025 · hedged

For an investor, staying in Europe is a defensible strategy because the market is much less crowded and you can become the top investor founders want to work with.

Europe is far less crowded with investors than Silicon Valley, so it's easier to reach the top of the market — the same thesis he used to start angel investing in Pittsburgh.

Scope: says the investor case is 'not clear', unlike the founder case; notes many of his Pittsburgh portfolio companies eventually moved to Silicon Valley

55:05 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker

Martin Mignot · Aug 11, 2025

Outlier companies can come from anywhere, not just Silicon Valley

Index's biggest return drivers came from five different locations including Amsterdam and London, which has always been a key focus of the firm

72:59 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures

Maor Shlomo · Nov 24, 2025

Being outside Silicon Valley no longer hurts a company like Base44

The world has changed — he used to fly out every two weeks with his previous company and won't again; the war on talent in Silicon Valley is brutal; Wix provides the deep-pocketed backing that Silicon Valley would otherwise supply; Lovable is proof you can build from Europe

Scope: Silicon Valley is still the right place if your game is raising as much as possible to conquer the market and exit for cash

57:11 20VC: Base44's Maor Shlomo on How Vibe Coding Will Kill SaaS and Salesforce | Why it is BS that Vibe Coding Platforms Do Not Have Defensibility and Bad Margins | Why He Worries About Google, Not Replit and Lovable | Why Long Anthropic, Not OpenAI?

Demis Hassabis · Apr 7, 2026

Basing DeepMind in London was a structural advantage because the UK had world-class talent that had not yet been galvanised into ambitious deep tech startups, and less competition for that talent

The UK has three or four of the world's top 10 universities, a rich scientific heritage, and great engineers, but no ambitious deep tech startup absorbing them, so DeepMind could also draw the best European talent

Scope: describes especially the early days of DeepMind

26:34 20VC: DeepMind's Demis Hassabis on Why AGI is Bigger than the Industrial Revolution | Why LLMs Will Not Commoditise & We Have Not Hit Scaling Laws | Bottlenecks in AI & The Energy Crisis Caused By AI | Whether AI Will Do More to Harm or Help Inequality

Josh Browder · May 18, 2026

Starting out in the UK is an advantage because it's a less competitive pond for talent and media attention

Anyone can get on the front page of the Daily Mail with the right story, whereas US media is jaded and noisy; building an iPhone app in the UK then was seen as whiz-kid genius while in the US people did it every day

Scope: advantage of being a big fish in a small pond

75:50 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder

Alex Bouaziz · Feb 1, 2023

Global HR/payroll will support many great companies but produce one clear winner that is significantly larger than the rest — a single trillion-dollar generational company

Scope: several $10B+ companies can also be built; only one generational winner

22:48 20VC: From $57M in ARR to $297M in Just 12 Months; Why Speed of Execution is the Most Important Factor to Success, Hiring 2,000 People in 3 Years Remotely & Secondaries; Why, When and How Much To Take Out with Alex Bouaziz, Co-Founder & CEO @ Deel

Aatish Nayak · Apr 11, 2025

San Francisco's talent churn and talent war are real, but the Bay Area remains unmatched for growth-stage companies because experienced executives are concentrated there

The best executives in the world live on a small peninsula, have families and want to stay; the mind-melding and experience available there is second to none

Scope: early-stage talent can be found in other places; churn is not unique to AI

59:53 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak

Victor Lazarte · Apr 14, 2025 · hedged

Starting a company on the US West Coast makes you roughly a thousand times more likely to build a tech giant, and the cause is concentrated knowledge of how companies are built rather than superior talent

Around 70% of the world's tech giants started in the Bay Area and Seattle while ~0.1% of people live there; people are just as smart in Europe or Brazil, but in Silicon Valley founders can access the accumulated knowledge of what has worked before

Scope: numbers presented as rough back-of-envelope math

23:14 20VC: Benchmark's Victor Lazarte on Why Portfolio Construction is BS| Why SaaS Spreadsheet Investing is Dead | Why China is a Stabilising Force for the US | Three Traits All the Best Founders Have & The Lie All Big Tech Companies Have Been Telling

Lucas Swisher · Feb 23, 2026

You don't have to be in San Francisco to build a great AI company, but it materially helps

Very few people in the world know how to work with these systems; many are locked inside two to four companies and most of the rest are concentrated in a small radius in the Bay Area, so being elsewhere makes life needlessly harder

Scope: not impossible to build elsewhere; talent-density advantage specifically

60:37 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher

Matt Murphy · Jul 27, 2026 · hedged

San Francisco has regained its centrality and the Bay Area's talent concentration gives investors and founders roughly 10-100x the context of being anywhere else

When technology waves come the Bay Area usually leads; constant conversation with entrepreneurs about what they're technically working on compounds context

Scope: the 10-100x figure is offered loosely ('probably like')

42:10 20VC: Leading Anthropic's First Ever Round | Will Open Source Threaten Anthropic's Business | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | Why Triple, Triple, Double, Double is Not Good Enough Today | Why Series A is Hard Today with Matt Murphy @ Menlo

Daniel Erickson · Jun 5, 2020

There is no longer any need for startup teams to be co-located, and the Silicon Valley ethos should become location-independent so the best ideas get funded regardless of where the team is based

COVID has shown that distributed teams can still achieve outstanding results

22:41 20VC: How To Scientifically Measure Product-Market Fit, How To Efficiently and Accurately Segment Users Into Cohorts, Why Investors Analysing CAC's at Pre-Seed Is Not Useful & How To Determine Between Customer Feedback to Accept vs Reject with Daniel Eric

Alex Bouaziz · Feb 1, 2023

Where you are born geographically materially determines the opportunities available to you, so companies should hire the best people wherever they are rather than within a 30-mile radius

He met exceptional people all over the world and saw that the same talent in the Bay Area would have had an easier path; his own early companies could only afford engineers outside Israel and most of those hires are still with him

4:41 20VC: From $57M in ARR to $297M in Just 12 Months; Why Speed of Execution is the Most Important Factor to Success, Hiring 2,000 People in 3 Years Remotely & Secondaries; Why, When and How Much To Take Out with Alex Bouaziz, Co-Founder & CEO @ Deel

David Tisch · Feb 27, 2023

Geography does not matter for startups and is overrated as a factor

BoxGroup is in New York only because its partners want to live there, and its San Francisco partner lives there by preference; the firm does not invest only in New York

Scope: framed as a view few around him hold

56:57 20VC: How Multi-Stage Funds Changed The Game For Seed Rounds, Why Signalling Risk is BS, The Three Most Important Variables for Founders When Raising Rounds & A Debate on Portfolio Construction: Does Ownership Matter with David Tisch

Anton Osika · Aug 18, 2025 · hedged

Lovable would have been very successful regardless of whether it was built in the Valley or Stockholm

48:32 20VC: Lovable CEO Anton Osika on $120M in ARR in 7 Months | The Honest Truth About Defensibility and Unit Economics for AI Startups | The State of Foundation Models: Long Grok, Short OpenAI, Why | Replit vs Lovable vs Bolt: What Happens

Raaz Herzberg · Dec 12, 2025

Starting Wiz at the onset of COVID was a net advantage rather than a handicap, and it neutralized the disadvantage of not being a Silicon Valley company

In lockdown the team had nothing to do but work for a year; remote selling let them compete with rivals who had salespeople in every US region without travel, and nobody knew they were in Tel Aviv, so location stopped mattering

Scope: specific to the first year of the company; they were scared at the time that there would be no money in the world

53:24 20Growth: How Wiz Built a $30BN Brand in Enterprise | What Worked vs What Was a Mega Failure: Lessons Learned | Why Marketers Make the Worst CMOs & What To Look for in Growth with Raaz Herzberg

Clem Delangue · May 12, 2023

AI founders do not need to relocate to Silicon Valley; they can build a great company from anywhere and should optimize for where they are happiest

Founders build great companies when they are happy, so location should follow happiness; occasional trips to Silicon Valley are enough

Scope: you do need to be in Silicon Valley sometimes

11:41 20VC: Why The Future of AI Is Open Not Closed, Why We Are Years Away From AI Being Autonomous, Why AI Founders Do Not Need to Move to the Valley & Why Founders Should Not Meet Investors in Between Rounds with Clem Delangue @ Hugging Face

Emad Mostaque · May 17, 2023

You do not need to be in Silicon Valley to build a leading AI company; a globally distributed, open approach can accumulate more talent, data and supercompute than any single-location company.

Bringing the technology to universities like the IITs, national broadcasters and family offices, and nation-built supercomputers yields talent, data and compute that centralized Valley companies can't match, and building in the open compounds it.

44:04 20VC: Why the AI Bubble Will Be Bigger Than The Dot Com Bubble, Why AI Will Have a Bigger Impact Than COVID, Why No Models Used Today Will Be Used in a Year, Why All Models are Biased and How AI Kills Traditional Media with Emad Mostaque, Founder & CEO @

Alex Lebrun · Jun 19, 2023

Being in Silicon Valley used to be necessary to build an AI company but is no longer; founders should instead locate close to their customers

Talent is now very distributed and getting more so, and everything is distributed; his own Valley advantage was access to people like Siri's creator who gave him the confidence to refuse early acquisition offers — an advantage he wouldn't have had in Paris

41:24 20VC: Why No Models Today Will Be Used in a Year, Why Open Will Always Beat Closed in AI, Why Proprietary Data is Less Important Than Ever And Why EU AI Regulation is a Disaster with Alex Lebrun, Founder & CEO @ Nabla

Cristóbal Valenzuela · Aug 28, 2023

AI founders do not need to be based in Silicon Valley.

He builds Runway from New York and has only been to the Valley a couple of times.

36:13 20VC: Why AI Models are not a Moat, Where Does the Value in AI Accrue; Startups or Incumbents, What the World Has Got Wrong About AI, Why AI Needs a New Story and Who is the Right People to Tell it with Cris Valenzuela, Co-Founder & CEO @ Runway

Christian Kleinerman · Sep 22, 2023

AI founders do not need to be in Silicon Valley

There is amazing talent throughout the world and a lot of innovation is clearly happening elsewhere, even though the Valley has a special community advantage

Scope: Valley still offers community and idea-bouncing benefits

38:25 20VC: Are Foundation Models Becoming Commoditised? Do OpenAI and Anthropic of the World Have a Sustaining Moat? Why Smaller Models May Work Better? Why Incumbents with Data Power Win the AI War with Christian Kleinerman, SVP Product @ Snowflake

Harry Stebbings · Apr 4, 2025

San Francisco's talent market is a serious drawback: acquisition is extremely hard, competition and salaries are very high, and employees churn between hot companies

US employees are promiscuous with jobs, leaving as soon as the work gets hard or a rival's up round looks bigger

59:59 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital

Harry Stebbings · May 16, 2026 · hedged

San Francisco is the worst place to start a company because a seed-funded startup cannot acquire and retain talent against well-funded AI companies.

A $3M seed startup is competing for the same people as Abridge, OpenAI and Anthropic with vastly larger war chests

Scope: asked as a position he invites Shiv to rebut

54:59 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge

Harry Stebbings · May 18, 2026 · hedged

San Francisco is the worst place to start a company today

Talent is extremely expensive and hard to acquire, the competing pool of companies like Anthropic is immense and brilliant, and talent tenure is so short that you can't build institutional memory

Scope: asks 'am I wrong?' and whether he's been infected by UK bias

79:14 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder

Anastasios Angelopoulos · Aug 3, 2026

The Valley talent market is so competitive that only companies paying absolute top dollar can retain top engineers and scientists, leaving seed-stage startups that raised around $10M effectively unable to hire

Compensation is where the competitiveness shows up

34:28 20VC: 70% of Neolabs Will Die | There Will be a $100BN US Open-Source Model | Data is a Trillion $ Market | Governments Cannot Regulate Models: It is Too Late | The Cyber Attacks to Come Will be Insane with Anastasios Angelopoulos @ Arena

Matt Clifford · Jul 1, 2024

It is more plausible to build and hold together a world-class AI research team in London than in the Bay Area

The hardest part of building an OpenAI or Anthropic-scale company in the Bay Area is retention — the moment you have a first demo, Sam Altman can offer your best researchers packages you can't match; London also has DeepMind, European offices of Anthropic and OpenAI, Wayve, and Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and UCL

31:07 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF

Eiso Kant · Oct 7, 2024

London, not Paris, is Europe's deepest AI talent pool, because DeepMind and Google made far larger investments in building that talent base there than Meta did across London and Paris

Historical pre-ChatGPT talent formation traces back to which companies built the talent base and at what scale; DeepMind out of London deserves the most credit and Google's investments dwarfed others by sheer headcount

50:17 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside

Harry Stebbings · Apr 11, 2025

It is easier to build an AI company in London than in San Francisco

London has AI talent supply from top institutions and universities but lacks San Francisco's employee churn

59:20 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak

Anish Acharya · Feb 9, 2026

Because cities are the original network effect, being in San Francisco confers an enormous benefit for technology builders at this moment, even though a company can be built anywhere

Cities are the original network effect, and in this moment of technology many of the key secrets circulate informally in person in SF; there is also a selection bias in founders willing to give everything up and move there

Scope: opportunity is not equally distributed even if talent is; you can make it happen anywhere, but it is harder

5:06 20VC: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI | Do Margins Matter Anymore | Is Triple, Triple, Double, Double Dead Today? | Who Wins the Dev Market: Cursor or Claude Code | Why We Are Not in an AI Bubble with Anish Acharya @ a16z

Josh Browder · May 18, 2026

San Francisco is far less socially stratified than London — if you are moderately interesting you can befriend anyone there

People in SF are bored, whereas in London the rich keep to themselves in fancy clubs

80:05 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder

Amjad Masad · Mar 10, 2023

Startups still do best in San Francisco, though the intangible community effect can be found elsewhere and New York has much more of it today

There is an intangible optimism and feeling in the air in SF, and community matters to startup success

Scope: the intangible driver can be found in other places; New York now has a lot more of it

38:56 20VC: Why AI Will Lead to Thousands of Billionaires and Elon Musk's, Will TikTok Be Banned and How Facebook Should Be Investing in AI & Why Startups Have Become Too Soft; We Need a Spiritual Reform with Amjad Masad, Founder & CEO @ Replit

George Sivulka · Jan 22, 2025

Silicon Valley is the place to build an AI company and Hebbia is the exception rather than the rule as a New York AI company

Hebbia works in a Silicon Valley style, pursues and invests in new technology the same way, started there, and has almost only Silicon Valley investors

58:02 20VC: Why All AI Companies Are Under-Valued | The Future of Foundation Models: Scaling Laws, Generalised vs Specialised, Commoditised? | From Unable to Afford Rent to Raising $130M From Index and Peter Thiel with George Sivulka @ Hebbia

Nabeel Hyatt · Apr 4, 2025

In the age of AI, a founder who is genuinely all-in should be in San Francisco rather than London or Berlin, and Europe's core problem is that the truly all-in founders will choose SF

A startup's default state is death and everything — recruiting, raising, all of it — is hard, so a founder trying to mitigate everything that could kill them wants to be where the AI dinners and the best people are, which is San Francisco right now

Scope: of course people can and do succeed in London or Berlin; there are exceptions to every rule

59:01 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital

Severin Hacker · May 19, 2025

As a founder, you would be more successful based in San Francisco than in London.

Scope: explicitly scoped to founders, not investors

54:38 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker

Severin Hacker · May 19, 2025

Silicon Valley VCs of that era were interested only on the condition that founders relocate to the Bay Area, and none wanted to be the first investor in a non-Silicon Valley company.

Every SV firm made relocation a requirement and lost interest immediately when Duolingo refused to leave Pittsburgh; several later invested once others had gone first.

Scope: Based on Duolingo's own Series A roadshow; Union Square was the exception

62:42 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker

Josh Browder · May 18, 2026

A California LLC is uninvestable and a startup must be a Delaware C Corp, be based in the Bay Area, and build a software-style product to be backable

He made these three changes conditions of his investment in Micro1 and they changed everything for the company

Scope: stated as his own investment conditions

41:40 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder

Josh Browder · May 18, 2026

The best structure is leadership based in San Francisco with talent hired globally, because SF's serendipity is irreplaceable even though its talent market is punishing

SF gives you serendipitous encounters — you bump into Sam Altman on the street — while global hiring arbitrages the cost problem, as Deel demonstrates

Scope: partially agrees with Harry's cost critique; New York may work similarly

79:43 20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder

Ryan Petersen · Jun 20, 2026

Flexport overcorrected on distribution and should pull more talent, especially leadership, back to San Francisco

The leadership team is too distributed; getting the CFO to move to San Francisco made the business much better

Scope: Flexport still needs to be everywhere, not just San Francisco; no large SF sales team needed since customers aren't there

36:15 20VC: Why Remote Work is White Collar Fraud | Why Revenge and Patriotism are the Best Founder Traits | Two Questions Every Founder Needs to Ask | The Wild Story of Raising $1BN from Masa Son in an Hour Long Meeting with Ryan Peterson, Founder @ Flexport

Cyan Banister · Oct 19, 2020

San Francisco and California's politics are the cause of startups and residents leaving — high taxes and a feeling of being unsafe are driving people to red states

People can only be taxed so much before they flee to states with better taxes, and they say they feel safer and have higher quality of life in those states — largely because of the conservative thinking there

37:38 20VC: Cyan Banister on Her Relationship To Money, Risk, Her Investment Decision-Making Process, Why We Will See A Reckoning in the Early Stage Market, Her Biggest Takeaways from HQ Trivia & The Future of Silicon Valley

Marc Andreessen · Mar 30, 2026

Silicon Valley and San Francisco have serious structural problems as a place to build — cost of living, housing, transportation, commutes, and politics — and San Francisco in particular is a city whose voters do not want it to grow or want business there.

He is a keen student of the region's issues and does not think everything should be concentrated there; practical quality-of-life and political conditions are genuinely bad.

Scope: stated while identifying as a committed Californian who has not left

40:22 20VC: Marc Andreessen on The Future of Venture Capital: Will a16z Go Public | Why Labour Displacement with AI is Wrong | Why Introspection is Dangerous | Why "Diamonds in the Rough" is BS in VC | Why a16z Invested $300M into Adam Neumann

Max Altman · Nov 21, 2025

Living in Austin doesn't hurt his ability to get deals and actually improves his decision quality

In New York or San Francisco he makes many hectic decisions but not great ones; he thinks most clearly with space to reflect before calling a founder

Scope: acknowledges Austin has far fewer strong companies than San Francisco

34:50 20VC: Max Altman on The New Seed War: Can Anyone Compete with Sequoia and a16z | Leaving $2BN on the Table with Reddit | Lessons from Backing Rippling at $25M Post | Why Climate Tech is a Mirage and Disaster

Harry Stebbings · Apr 7, 2026

Being far from Silicon Valley is core to innovative thinking

28:24 20VC: DeepMind's Demis Hassabis on Why AGI is Bigger than the Industrial Revolution | Why LLMs Will Not Commoditise & We Have Not Hit Scaling Laws | Bottlenecks in AI & The Energy Crisis Caused By AI | Whether AI Will Do More to Harm or Help Inequality

Kevin Systrom · Feb 22, 2023

San Francisco will rebound from this downturn and come back stronger than before

It has been through many downturns and always rebounds harder; extrapolating the current decline in a straight line is a mistake

48:29 Sf will rebound from downturn and return stronger as it always has

Kevin Systrom · Feb 22, 2023

The Detroit analogy doesn't apply to San Francisco — remote work and pandemic shifts aren't a fundamental change to the industry that sustains the city

Detroit declined because a fundamental change hit its industry; no comparable structural change has hit the nerd community that constitutes SF

49:09 Detroit style decline analogy misapplies to sf absent a fundamental industry change

Harry Stebbings · Feb 1, 2023

Concentrating a lot of smart people in one place with nothing to do but work is a great way to build great companies

22:14 Silicon valley is a mindset not a geography

Alex Bouaziz · Feb 1, 2023

Venture still carries a bias that Silicon Valley companies are the only ones that can succeed, and too few funds take the risk of backing hungry founders elsewhere

COVID shifted it somewhat and Deel is living proof the assumption is wrong, but the mindset persists

39:58 Venture industry bias still favors silicon valley founders over hungry founders elsewhere

Clem Delangue · May 12, 2023

AI talent — scientists and ML engineers — is heavily geographically distributed, even if early-stage startup energy concentrates in Silicon Valley

Looking at the full stack beyond early-stage startups, the talent is dispersed: 10 of the 13 authors of Meta's LLaMA, arguably the best open source model released, are based in Paris at Meta's AI lab there

10:30 Ai talent is already geographically distributed beyond silicon valley

Anton Osika · Aug 18, 2025

Distribution and centre-stage attention are easier to get in San Francisco or New York, but Lovable proved it can be achieved from Stockholm through storytelling, building in public and amplifying users' own stories

Sharing everything the company is doing and empowering Lovable users to tell their stories is how they broke through from outside the US hubs

46:37 Storytelling and public building overcomes non hub distribution disadvantage

Harry Stebbings · Aug 18, 2025

Silicon Valley teams have inherently higher churn, which prevents the compounding of knowledge within teams

On a bad day a competitor like OpenAI offers a bigger package and people leave, so knowledge never compounds inside the team

48:15 Sf high churn prevents knowledge compounding within teams

Jack Zhang · May 27, 2025

London is a better tech ecosystem than Melbourne and an exciting place to build, chiefly because of its global nature, though it is very expensive

He values the global mix and has enjoyed meeting many entrepreneurs there

81:55 London is an excellent global hub despite high cost

Christian Lanng · Sep 27, 2023

Silicon Valley's startup ecosystem recycles knowledge far faster than elsewhere because of the sheer density and rapid death rate of startups

Thousands of startups within a small radius, most die within months, and the people immediately recycle into new startups carrying the knowledge

42:44 Density and fast failure recycle knowledge

Daniel Khachab · Oct 28, 2024

Silicon Valley's extraordinary company-building has not improved average quality of life where it happens — and life there is getting worse

Every Caltrain stop has a $100B+ company yet the train is a garden shed on rails, the roads are bad, and homelessness is next level; the best foundation models and vertical winners all come from that small strip of land with none of it showing up in living standards

64:47 Extraordinary wealth creation coexists with declining local quality of life

Shiv Rao · May 16, 2026

San Francisco is the right place to build right now, and companies that inflect need to move there

The concentration of cracked early-stage teams, ideas, creativity and energy is unmatched; you osmotically absorb ideas and get access to talent and mentorship you can't get elsewhere

55:19 Sf concentration is worth it move at inflection

Sebastian Siemiatkowski · Feb 16, 2026

US VCs pushing already-grown European companies to move their engineering centre to Silicon Valley is bad advice that can destroy traction

Truecaller did it on VC advice, couldn't recruit because nobody in Silicon Valley knew the brand and they were too mature to attract talent as a startup, shut it down and lost a year

50:48 Relocating a mature company to sf destroys recruiting and traction

Severin Hacker · May 19, 2025

A company headquartered outside Silicon Valley should not open a Silicon Valley office.

It creates an internal funnel moving your best employees to Silicon Valley, where they then get recruited away by whatever the hot local company is, so you lose your talent.

53:18 Opening a satellite sf office creates a talent drain funnel

Jason Wilk · Apr 21, 2025

Being based in LA rather than a tech-heavy hub was a real advantage during the crisis because it let him escape constant exposure to the tech scene

His golf club and social circle contain no tech founders, so he wasn't surrounded by it at all times; being a virtual company helped too

21:38 Distance from tech hub eases psychological burden during public crisis

Victor Riparbelli · Jan 15, 2025

It is easier to move people from the Valley to London than from the Valley to New York

Americans want to experience European lifestyle, cultural heritage and London's melting-pot character

59:01 Moving talent from the valley to london is easier than to new york

Cyan Banister · Oct 19, 2020

With rents and property values falling, more conservatives should move to San Francisco, which could turn the city around

Lower cost of entry makes it feasible, and the city needs political diversity to fix itself

40:48 Lower cost of entry invites political diversity that could help fix san francisco

Jean-Denis Greze · Jul 21, 2023

The knowledge of how to build and scale a startup has internationalized — other regions have proven they can export Silicon Valley's company-building culture — though the Valley retains an edge in people who have done it multiple times

On a recent Europe trip he found that things which were specialist Valley knowledge ten years ago, like what a first PMM does or growth hacking and PLG, are now widely understood

20:50 Startup building knowledge has internationalized though the valley retains an edge in repeat operators

Nabeel Hyatt · Apr 4, 2025

High talent churn incentivizes companies to keep innovating and move fast — or to fake it with synthetic growth

The competitive labour market forces continuous innovation and speed, so the skill is separating real innovation from synthetic growth

60:23 High talent churn forces continuous innovation or synthetic growth fakery

Ryan Petersen · Jun 20, 2026

Flexport largely moved its team out of San Francisco because of cost and lack of employee loyalty

Job hopping is prevalent and SF is expensive; only ~4% of the company is now based in SF despite being founded there

35:40 Cost and job hopping push teams out of sf

Max Altman · Nov 21, 2025

The majority of the best companies will still be built out of San Francisco, but founders there must be outward-looking and target at least the entire United States to succeed

Rippling works because Parker targets a product a nice HR woman in Nebraska will love, rather than a coastal niche

21:20 Sf remains the best base only with a nationwide market focus