Garry's SF Guide to Where Your Startup Should Be

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by pitdesi • 14 years ago

88 42 14 years ago

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bentlegen• 14 years ago

This was written in 2010. How do these locations fare today?

ralphleon• 14 years ago

Pretty well! The mission still has great food but is very competitive for rental space and getting from berkeley to Silicon Valley still sucks ;)

vinayan32• 14 years ago

Some of the companies listed working in certain areas has changed. However, the comments on the commute and pricing is still about the same.

I would say he went over the top on describing SOMA. It is still dead.

potatolicious5• 14 years ago

I'm surprised he called out the Mission (east of Valencia, which is to say, 95% of the Mission) as being dangerous at night... and didn't do it for "Affordable SOMA". That part of town is infinitely more dangerous at night than even 16/Mission, which is about as bad as that neighborhood gets.

I'd consider anything west of 6th in SOMA to be considerably sketchier than any part of the Mission.

Not sure if this list is supposed to be a guide on where to put your office in SF, or where to live. He calls out west SOMA as "most soulless area to live in SF" - well yeah, it's the financial district, you put your office there, you don't live there.

Besides, that title more rightfully belongs to the Marina district.

timr2• 14 years ago

I live west of 6th in SOMA. It gets sketchy around 7th and 8th, and near the hall of justice, but otherwise it's fine.

Meanwhile, in the last year there have been multiple assaults, robberies and a few rapes in the part of Mission that you've called safe. YMMV.

shali2• 14 years ago

I've helped two companies search for space in San Francisco in the last couple months and the market is TOUGH right now. If you find a good spot, grab it QUICK! It will be gone before you know it. Prices are quickly on the rise ($30-40 per square foot per year, $40+ if you want something prime in downtown or by ferry building).

Palo Alto prices per square foot have gone up ridiculously in the last year as well. Seems to average around $60-80+ per square foot per year. There's hardly any space in downtown PA left unless you're willing to include your arms and legs, too...

New listings show up on Craigslist everyday. Seems you get the best deals there if you can grab a sublease which is what my current company was able to do. Alternatively, another great resource for commercial space searching is: http://www.loopnet.com/

Good luck!

harlowja• 14 years ago

Just stay away from milpitas ;)

seltzered_• 14 years ago

May I ask why? Just curious, my totally-non-startup employer is based out there and I've thought about pitching to work remotely / office there. I'm tired of texas.

elangoc• 14 years ago

this is very cool! I came to the area recently and settled in Berkeley based on a PG essay, and I think it deserves the good review that it gets on the map. I thought being in the Gourmet Ghetto area would be too far away from the bustling student-y area with cheap food, but it's nice to see it got mentioned.

Travel to SV via public transit is a 2-2.5 hr trip door-to-door (maybe a little more, depending where, and if you need to walk). If commuting is only a once in a while thing, it's not too painful with a Clipper Card but maybe expensive.

5vforest2• 14 years ago

Yeah, best part about commuting to SV by transit is that you can pretty much work the entire way -- driving might be quicker, but if I work on the train it's like I'm not even losing any time.

reneherse• 14 years ago

Totally agree with the vibe of Berkeley that PG talks about in "Cities and Ambition"; it's all about quality of life. I lived there for a couple years and loved it (though I wasn't in tech at the time), and now I'm considering relocating there again.

For me the greatest advantage of Berkeley is the opportunity for amazing outdoor recreation, which is a boon if you enjoy nature and want to keep in shape while avoiding the gym. You can live literally minutes away from trail heads into the hills for hiking or biking. Lunchtime trail running? Not a problem. Also at Berkeley Marina you have one of the best locations for sailing in the Bay Area.

Access to healthy food is also a huge plus. I've never seen a wider selection of reasonably priced vegetables than at the produce section of the Berkeley Bowl.

And, there's far more sunshine than anywhere else on the Peninsula north of Millbrae.

Lastly, I agree with your comments and disagree with the author's regarding the commute to SV. An occasional commute to SV is very doable by BART and Caltrain, but a ridiculously stressful waste by car. Just bring your earplugs for those acoustically torturous minutes in the Transbay Tunnel.

5vforest2• 14 years ago

+1 for Berkeley, my rent is less than half of what I would be paying on the other side of the bay, not to mention it's just great out here.

potatolicious5• 14 years ago

I've been looking around the Bay for way-cheap alternatives to the city, and nothing I've seen in Berkeley is that cheap. It seems anything close to transit is comparable to SF (at most a 10% discount).

It would seem that "far from SF" is countered by "population of monied students".

rms• 14 years ago

I pay $4700/month for an architecturally magnificent 5BR 2200 square foot house on the block east of the Berkeley Bowl. I suppose it's not cheap on an absolute scale, but a comparable house in SF would be $8000/month at the very minimum and in Pacific Heights or the Marina or a neighborhood I don't want to live in. I think you're underestimating the cost of San Francisco right now.

Berkeley is more expensive than Silicon Valley, but it has all of the amenities of a major metropolis (except late night anything) while being quite small in the scheme of things. It's still absolutely not a place to go for a way cheap alternative to a city, as it's still one of the most expensive areas in the USA.

rabidsnail5• 14 years ago

Re: Dogpatch / Potrero Hill

The area around 3rd and 20th is actually pretty well connected transit-wise (near 22nd st caltrain, the T line, and three or four bus lines), is a 30 minute walk from soma, and is still pretty cheap. And although the real estate prices are going up (along with the rest of the city) there's still a lot of underutilized land to expand into that should act as a buffer on rent prices. If I were looking for a place to start an office I would look there first.

google maps: http://g.co/maps/dqmrn

walkscore: http://www.walkscore.com/score/3rd-and-20th-st-san-francisco...

callmeed• 14 years ago

Uh, I just looked at rentals on CL/Trulia in Potrero/Dogpatch. $4-7K a month for a 3 bedroom? That seems crazy to me, even for SF.

rabidsnail5• 14 years ago

I live a block away from there and pay closer to $3k for a 3 bedroom.

And soma looks like $6-10k for the equivalent thing (although soma tends to be 1-2 bedroom places).

impendia• 14 years ago

I lived a block from 3rd and 20th. It's a reasonable place to live, I liked it, and it is indeed next to Caltrain, the T, and the 22 and 48 buses.

But there isn't a lot right there, it always takes at least fifteen minutes go get where the action is (i.e. the Mission). I recommend it for anyone who commutes to Stanford, Palo Alto, Mountain View, etc. but wants to live in the city... but if I didn't have my commute I probably would have lived in the Mission/Castro/Hayes Valley/etc.

rabidsnail5• 14 years ago

There's a lot more there now than there was a year or two ago. Most of the places in the immediate vicinity were started in the past year and a half.

jackowayed• 14 years ago

It's interesting that he didn't include the Financial District. I know of a number of startups there, including some YC startups. He did make this a couple years ago though, and it may be that that's a more recent expansion as it's gotten harder to find reasonable options in SOMA.

I worked at Cloudera's office in FiDi over the summer and liked the area a lot. Super-convenient via BART (less convenient than SOMA via Caltrain, but one could always transfer to BART at Millbrae). Right in the middle of everything. Good food options. Felt pretty safe walking to BART after dark because there's enough people around.

jamesjyu• 14 years ago

+1 for FiDi -- we at Parse are right on California and Market, as are a lot of other new startups. Being right off of BART and having awesome access to the ferry building and downtown is very convenient. Also, lots of lunch options.

vinayan32• 14 years ago

FiDi does have the best lunch options in the city M-F.

arohner• 14 years ago

Yes, and the worst lunch options Sat & Sun.

rabidsnail5• 14 years ago

It seems like startups tend to move north once they get to the stage where they're not quite really startups anymore. Dropbox is a classic example. I don't know how easy it is to find space up there if you're not using a whole floor of an office building, though.

jaredsohn• 14 years ago

north? That doesn't sound like a general trend (I'd expect south), and doesn't match my understanding of Dropbox's moving pattern (153 Kerney to Market St. to near AT&T park.)

shali2• 14 years ago

N, K, T Muni Metro line makes going from Caltrain to anywhere along Market easy. Also plenty of buses along Sansome/Battery (10 line in particular)! FiDi/Downtown and Jackson Square are the way to go these days it seems since SOMA is pretty much not available. Also Potrero Hill for lower costing nice spaces but you're kind of stuck away from everything it seems like.

goodweeds• 14 years ago

Downtown Oakland was sadly ignored. The nice side of Lake Merritt, as well as downtown and Jack London Square are generally overlooked. Maybe that's a good thing for my rent. I pay $1900 for an 1100 ft^2 2br/2bath right next to jack london square, with a pool, a hot tub, and soon with a 100mbps synchronous connection that will cost $45/month. BART is 4 blocks away and door to door I'm downtown in 30 minutes. I'm looking at downtown office space now and it's incredibly cheap, plus the business taxes are a lot cheaper.

The food scene isn't as great as Berkeley, but rent is 30% cheaper, and there are far fewer yuppy moms walking around with kids in strollers, which makes me happy. There has been a pretty solid core of hackers moving here in the past two years, generally people like me in our early '30s who have been in SF for a decade+ and have finally stopped drinking the "San Francisco is worth $4k for a 750 ft^2 apartment" koolaid.

_delirium• 14 years ago

Santa Cruz can be a good option for some kinds of things.

Pros: Lower housing/office rental costs than most of SF/SV, nice ocean, less crowded coffee shops, lots of UCSC students willing to work as cheap summer interns in return for not having to commute across the hill, lower salaries for senior engineers for the same reason if you find one[1], substantial local indie-gaming startup scene (Team Meat, Chronic Logic, Gaijin Games, Graeme Devine), laid-back lifestyle.

Cons: Further from the VC and most of the tech/meetup action, SF/SV people consider it infinitely far away, harder to find senior engineers, few local peers if you aren't in the indie-game space, laid-back lifestyle.

[1] There are a lot of engineers who live in SC, either because they prefer it to living in the Valley, or because they already established families there back when there were more tech jobs (SCO, etc.). Most now commute to Mountain View, San Jose, or Cupertino, but many would take a substantial paycut to not have to make that commute every day, which seems like a potential arbitraging opportunity for the right startup.

rll• 14 years ago

I'd look at downtown Sunnyvale as well. Nokia moved in a while ago, and Apple will be moving in later this year. Murphy street has a little bit of life, although not as much as University in PA or Castro in MV. But the rents are lower than PA/MV and Sunnyvale is a Caltrain bullet stop. Lots of startups in Sunnyvale too, although many of them are over in the Plug and Play Techcenter place which is far from everything except the skate park.

aiurtourist• 14 years ago

"The Mission: Recommended for awesome people."

Guess I'm not awesome. I'll just continue to live in the south bay under a rock.

neilk2• 14 years ago

I'm not much of a businessperson, but I wonder why startups cluster in expensive places like South Park. You could move to a loft in the East Bay, not too far from BART, and save enough to pay a whole other salary, maybe two.

pg's thesis about Silicon Valley is that it's mostly the about the investors. I assume that the talent pool is willing to do a BART ride to the East Bay for the right startup. So is being smack dab in the middle of the cluster that vital to success? How does the math work out?

lawrence2• 14 years ago

The area to watch right now if you want central location, access to Bart, and an up coming startup scene is around Civic Center, between 6th and 10th and market / mission. It's still VERY sketchy there, but not for long - Twitter is coming soon, and this should start to gentrify / startupify things. Lots of classic, old SF office buildings there too.

potatolicious5• 14 years ago

How do you think it will gentrify?

There is already plenty of "legitimate" foot traffic there in the daytime from all the government and government-affiliated offices. That doesn't seem to have helped.

The homeless and addicts congregate there because of a combination of housing policy and placement of social services. As long as those remain, I'm not sure if all the startups of the Bay could displace them.

Note: I'm not advocating removing housing/services for the homeless, but rather that forcibly moving a bunch of startups there will just mean you'll add a lot of startups into the mix of sketchiness. It won't get rid of the sketchiness.

lawrence2• 14 years ago

You might be right. But dropping one giant startup in there will almost certainly mean new coffee shops, restaurants, and more courage for other startups to move in.

eli_gottlieb• 14 years ago

So whatever happened to "not in San Francisco"?

kkt262• 14 years ago

This is an excellent guide, especially since me and my co-founder are moving to SF soon.

Any price range info by chance?

Garry's SF Guide to Where Your Startup Should Be

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