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Thread alert! Been thinking about folks leaving Silicon Valley and good commentaries from @btaylor & others on tone. Agree with all that – especially when it comes to the super successful who are now repackaging their success around a misguided libertarian ideology...
But I want to offer another perspective from a recent Bay Area Expat. First, for those that don’t know me, I'm a liberal & have no illusions RE challenges facing every city, suburb and rural area. My departure had nothing to do with taxes, or the politics of local government.
Second, while the SF Bay area was home for 24 years, I was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, so if I was to pull up tent pegs from the Bay, coming back to the greater Seattle area to be closer to family was always the natural fall out. But this wasn’t my final trigger.
Third, to understand my actual departure trigger, I’ll share my hypothesis that there are two underlying forces that power Silicon Valley. The first, and one I truly believe in, is a spirit of curiosity and innovation that permeates the place.
Very few of us in the tech world started out with goal of building companies, making lots of money, etc. Many people I know and love in the Valley were once just a bunch of nerdy kids who were curious about the world and enjoyed the challenge of building things.
But there’s a yin to that yang. High concentrations of brilliant people building practical things attracts high concentrations of money. I’d be a hypocrite to denounce money; like most humans, I enjoy comfort, security, and being able to provide opportunities for my children.
But I suspect that over the last couple decades, so much money has found its way into SV that it’s created an unsustainable environment – not a bubble necessarily – but a system of incentives that will start to break down at some point.
On one hand, you have folks struggling to make ends meet, and the impossibility of affording a studio apartment within a 50 mile commute. Solutions aside, it’s not a recipe for a healthy society, but supply and demand guarantee it given the amount of money sloshing about.
This reverberates up the income ladder, and for me, was starting to make me question why I was doing any of it. I got into this profession for love of curiosity and innovation – building software was fun! But over time the money machine will start to eat you...
A promotion to afford a better apartment; one IPO for a modest townhouse; two IPOs for what most of the country would consider a standard, middle-class dwelling; three IPOs (or a successful founder’s exit) to have that same place within Menlo Park or a tear-down in Palo Alto.
Somewhere along the line throw in the consideration of private school for the kids given the chronic underfunding of public education in California, and you are hooked!
The money machine of Silicon Valley eats the energies of innovative folks, and always has the next carrot to dangle given the incredible shortage of reasonably priced housing (and similar necessities) it has helped create.
So many of us continue to chase it, inadvertently driving up costs of things for folks around us. At some point, the economics of that pursuit break down for enough folks in the middle that they migrate in larger numbers to places like Seattle, Boulder, Austin, Boston, etc.
Eventually the investment money will follow them, and Silicon Valley can cool off just enough to make it more livable for everyone: innovation can continue with an easier economic hill for social justice, and progressive tax policy to climb.
My departure came at a point where I realized I had a choice in this matter. I still enjoyed building things, but I was questioning whether I was building for the sake of building, or because I was on the proverbial treadmill.
I knew I could stay in the Bay Area and be signed up to pursue the next carrot, or I could leave, not be bidding up the next house in Menlo, and have a little bit more freedom. Yes, I’m still in tech, and yes I’m still (happily) in the VC funded world...
But I feel far more like I’m doing it on my own terms, and while my personal decisions have the potential to create economic divides in the Pacific Northwest, we still have time up here to manage things before it gets super crazy. Thanks Seattle for taking me back!
As a country, we should be excited if talent starts to disperse from a few concentrated areas and with it pulls investment to more regions. Someday those places may become crazy too, and need to spread the talent and wealth farther afield once more – hooray!
My point is, while I’m happy that good people are staying in Silicon Valley and carrying on the dream (thanks @btaylor), some folks departing is also good thing – we might make life in the SF Bay Area better for all in the process.
Thank you Silicon Valley for making me what I am – in gratitude, I’ll get out of the way now.
