Why I No Longer Want to Move to the Bay Area In 1999, during the height of the dot com bubble, Garage Technology Ventures funded the short-lived Opnix, one of the first Stealthmode Partners companies. Ed and I went gleefully up to the Bay Area for the pitch meeting, and thats where we met Bill Reichert, who later became a good friend, and Bill Joy and Guy Kawasaki. Although Opnix fell victim to the inexperience of its 20-something founders, running through $8m in a single year trying to build a data center that later formed the crux of Limelight Networks (where I met Bill Rinehart), I was in love with the process of entrepreneurship and the venture capital mystique. Along the way, I also fell in love with Blogger, and later Typepad and Wordpress. I rediscovered myself as a writer, as well as a mentor and coach. Those were happy times in my relationship with the Valley. We all struggled through the bust, and I got involved in Web 2.0 at the very beginning, with Friendster, Ryze, and MySpace. I loved the social aspect of it, and by 2005 I owned a house in Half Moon Bay, as well as my home in Phoenix. I spent summers and vacations in HMB, and there I started a geek meetup group and made amazing friends. The startups of 2005-2010 we incredible: Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Foursquare. They all felt like they were helping the world and making it better. In 2010, after the real estate crisis, I sold the house in Half Moon Bay, but I maintained my strong relationship with the Bay Area -- so much so that I considered moving back up there this year. And then, during my due diligence, several things happened: 1)close friends of mine, like Marcus Nelson, had negative investor experiences and left the area, choosing family over entrepreneurship. 2)people I met when they were barely out of school, like Mark Zuckerberg, became billionaires and began to inhabit a separate space 3)new startups addressed smaller and smaller niches, suitable only for people with almost infinite disposable income 4)the sharing economy produced the rental economy 5)the new generation of tech companies created only 1099 jobs 6)long time inhabitants of San Francisco and New York were forced out by arrivistes and rising real estate prices, gentrification and greedy developers 7) founders got liquid before their exits, producing rich boys whose companies could still fail 8) the vibe changed from were all in this together to the 1% vs. the rest of us. 9) to live in this rarified atmosphere would drastically reduce my quality of life 10) Phoenix began to seem more like the real world, and San Francisco something of a fairy story or a movie plot. And then there are the themes we all know about: lack of diversity, misogny, greed, and envy. So Ive fallen out of love with the Bay Area, and my New Years Resolution? Choose love.
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 16:48:40 +0000
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