By Sahin Boydas – Founder and CEO, RemoteTeam.com
From the Austin Business Journal
The dream of Silicon Valley is dead — at least for the vast majority of its residents.
The 1% of those founders, executives and well-paid employees that have made it to the top — those who go work every day for a company like Facebook or Amazon or Google or Netflix — probably aren’t going anywhere. But for the rest of us, the city has little left to offer.
When I first arrived in Silicon Valley over a decade ago, it was still a magnet for the world’s best and brightest. At the time it was just affordable enough that the average resident could enjoy a stable quality of life from their day job while building the next great startup in their garage during their spare time. Those smart, energetic people had ample opportunity to meet, to share ideas, to try to build something unique and afford to fail a few times before finding success.
Silicon Valley was less of a place and more of a culture.
Today, I don’t see that same spirit and energy in the Bay Area. Once the epicenter of disrupting the status quo, it’s evolved over the years to become the status quo itself. Thanks to the pandemic and the rapid transition to remote work, the Valley is now itself ripe for disruption.
For decades, startup culture fueled innovation in the San Francisco Bay Area. But California has less of a monopoly on that culture these days, with many entrepreneurs deciding to relocate to Texas.
That startup culture, which was once unique to a particular area of California, has since been exported all over the world. Few of the new Silicon-Somethings, however, enjoy the advantages that put the Bay Area on the map decades prior. Austin might be the only exception.
While the Valley’s spirit and energy has been taxed and mismanaged and discouraged through overcrowding and unaffordability, it appears to be alive and well about 1,700 miles east. The city of Austin has the culture, it has the lifestyle, it has the venture capital, it has the infrastructure, it has the top-tier educational institutions, it has the natural beauty, and pretty soon I believe it will have the best and brightest talent as well.
I’m far from alone in thinking this way, and a number of influential voices are using their platforms to facilitate an even greater push eastward. Elon Musk recently referred to his West Coast headquarters as “Sanctimonious Valley” in a tweet from April that was liked nearly 100,000 times, before announcing that Tesla’s next Gigafactory will be built in Austin. Just last month, Joe Rogan announced that his $100 million podcasting empire would also move from its current headquarters in L.A. to Austin.
“You need someone who can poke fun at the status quo and challenge deeply assumed beliefs, and that is increasingly difficult to do in the Bay Area,” writer and philosopher Ryan Holiday said during an episode of one of the most popular podcasts in the world, The Tim Ferris Show. “We’re in Austin, which is jokingly referred to as the blueberry in the Tomato Soup … you have a commingling of political, artistic and financial interests that I deeply enjoy.”
When some of the most popular voices of a generation tell their millions of fans and followers that the Silicon Valley dream has picked up and moved to Austin, it has a real, tangible impact.
As entrepreneur Patrick Bet-David explained in a recent YouTube post that was viewed more than 350,000 times, influential people have the power to move populations. “When the first influential Armenian moved to Glendale, everybody else said, ‘Armen moved to Glendale, we’re all moving to Glendale’… because an influential Italian moved to New York, we’re going too … there’s a massive Puerto Rican community in Orlando. Why Orlando? Because an influential one went first.”
Bet-David goes on to explain that unless California “gets its act together,” the tech community too will begin to follow in the footsteps of some of its most influential members.
More than half of San Francisco’s residents would leave if their work from home policies became permanent, according to a recent survey. Another study found that Austin ranks among the top five alternatives for those vacating the Bay Area, and data from Apartments.com shows a clear increase in searches for homes in Austin by San Francisco-based residents since February.
The point that Musk, Holiday, Rogan and others are trying to make is that Silicon Valley evolved into the powerhouse of innovation it once was because it attracted a wide array of opinions and expertise, many of which went against the grain. Today, however, the region’s best and brightest work for a handful of companies, often out of financial necessity — and those who are looking to build something truly disruptive feel increasingly unwelcome.
That is why I firmly believe the next generation of disruptive technologies will be built in Austin, an aesthetically beautiful place that offers flexibility, welcomes diversity of thought and experimentation, and provides ample room for failure.
What the silicon microchip did for the Bay Area, I believe the next generation of innovation will do for Austin. Whether that is quantum computing or commercial space exploration or some other fringe science, Silicon Valley as it exists today is too close-minded to discover it.
Taking that next technological leap will require an ecosystem that embraces unique, bold and frankly crazy-sounding ideas. That is what Silicon Valley represented to the previous generation of technologists.
The Austin skyline seen from the Pennybacker Bridge over Lake Austin. Home searches in Austin have increased among San Francisco residents since February, according to data from Apartments.com.
As money and power and influence became concentrated into fewer and fewer hands — and as the region gradually became unaffordable and unliveable — the fringe thinkers who didn’t want to work at Facebook or Amazon or Google had to take their crazy ideas elsewhere. All signs suggest they’ve found a new home in Austin, a place that has long prided itself on being weird and quirky and different. Over time their migration will bring investment capital as success stories seek to fund other future successes; the same cycle that powered Silicon Valley’s growth decades earlier.
That is why, after more than 10 years working in the technology industry in Silicon Valley, I plan to move to Austin myself. I’ve always considered myself to be a unique, bold, and frankly, “crazy” kind of person — and my way of thinking once felt very at home in the Bay Area, but not anymore. Fortunately, Silicon Valley was never really a place so much as it was a culture, and while that dream may have died in the Bay Area, it is alive and well in Austin.
Sahin Boydas is a serial entrepreneur whose latest company is RemoteTeam.com, where he is founder and CEO.
