The techxodus is good for tech, America, and even SF

🌶 take: the techxodus is good for tech, good for America, and yes even good for SF (as tempting as the collapse narratives may be). 🧵

The first two are easy. It's been clear for some time that the Bay Area was becoming a bottleneck on innovation. I know it seems like a distant memory at this point, but this was a frequently discussed challenge before the pandemic.

The remote / distributed revolution was already under way to address this when the rest of us were very suddenly forced into it. It was clear even then that the Bay Area (and its housing policies not its taxes) were constraining growth in the tech ecosystem.

Throwing the seeds of innovation in the wind is a good thing. Freeing them from fighting over their small patch of 49 square miles means more opportunities for more people. Not everyone could uproot their lives to move to this city.

The people who stood to benefit the most were often the ones that were least able to. Not only did this limit who benefitted from this amazing wealth creation engine, it created an unfortunate myopia in our ecosystem.

Too many apps to replace mom, not nearly enough to address the needs of people who didn't look like your typical San Francisco resident. Too many of the recent startup waves reflect the specific desires, challenges, and cultural zeitgest of one peculiar city.

That's not to say these didn't offer broader benefits or other ideas and geographies didn't get funded. But it was undoubtedly harder. The one exception here is probably FinTech where chasing the $s meant people looked elsewhere and look how that's gone.

More ideas, more entrepreneurs, more cities getting funding means great things to come and I'm excited to see the wave of innovation this unlocks. But, how could this be good for San Francisco which is losing its stranglehold on the ecosystem?

The first reason is the simplest, SF as a city was struggling to keep up. The city at times felt like a startup going through hypergrowth, experiencing a lot of growing pains though in theory for good reason and with great reward on the other side.

Even the best run city would have struggled to keep up with the massive expansion pressure being placed on it and SF is decidedly not the best run city. Every facet of the city struggled to keep up, not just housing.

What's worse, in many cases the people who paid the steepest price were different from the people who benefitted. If you think the tech boom has been an unequivocal boon for every resident of SF then you haven't been paying attention.

Slower growth (and I do think it's slower not no growth) will be good for this city. But it will also be good for a deeper reason. Some downward pressure on the tax base will be good. It will stop the papering over problems by throwing more money at it.

The last time SF faced a real contraction it prompted the Ed Lee era and the government in SF actually got better for a brief time. It may feel like ancient history, but the shift from the peninsula to the city happened over the last 10 years and happened because of that.

Who knows if the city will rise to the occasion again, but I think it will. In the process we'll forge a stronger, better city than we would have otherwise. It may seem l gross mismanagement that things have gotten to the point they have and to a degree that's true.

But it's also true that this mismanagement is made worse by a city struggling to keep its head above water. I'm excited for this next era. I'm excited for what it means for our industry and I'm even excited about what it means for SF, pessimists be damned.