That was a good insight on Uber. Some huge fund is looking to invest, and they like you. But if you say no, they give that massive cash to your competitor. They still get into the market, your competitor zooms past flying to new heights and you are choking on their dust.
Helps explain some of the zany fundraising I saw over the past decade. It’s like a mini series of Ponzi schemes. All that matters is growth, because it’s easy to sell equity when something is rapidly growing. So seed sells to A, A sells to B, B sells to huge fund, and huge fund sells to public markets. The hype lasts just long enough to IPO (as the retail public finally can get a piece of this super hyped company) and…it all falls down because now profitability matters.
Like this article said - it didn’t matter if your product ended up dying. It just mattered that you made a lot of money for early investors, so they’ll want to back you again.
Really like this article. I'm hoping more people write about what's different about SV now, than in the past. I assume it has a lot to do with the 2008 wall street crash, and a lot of the people who'd normally have gone to wall street, suddenly were interested in "tech", regardless of their background.
> a lot of the people who'd normally have gone to wall street, suddenly were interested in "tech"
Is there more to it than that? I think you summed it up well. I'll add that other "fancy" professions have structural limitations that seem to cause a glut of money-seeking software engineers (beyond the hyped up non-tech founder). Once upon a time, if you were smart and technical you became a doctor, but med schools haven't expanded capacity and its a long tough process compared to an undergrad CS degree. Lawyers experienced a massive growth a generation ago, and they haven't retired yet, depressing salaries and causing lawyers to work longer. SDEs are still a great career though, considering its still growing in salary and accessibility.
Nothing is wrong with it. Follow the money. I personally like making more of it. That said, some people enjoy technology for the sake of technology, and they likely lament the changing demographics of their colleagues. Personally, I noticed that at my highest paying job(at the time), most of my colleagues didn’t care about learning anything technological if it didn’t relate to their job growth. Eg. A real conversation i had:
UDP vs TCP what’s tht?
Networking stuff.
Everything here is wrapped in an internal library, why do I need need to know those acronyms?
PS: I suspect this is how companies brazenly violate GPL and other licenses. Not by manager mandate but engineers who don’t know anything about OSS and just git-clone a random GitHub repo.
>In a 2001 interview about his case study of the grocery-delivery site Webvan, Harvard Business School professor John Deighton said that direct-to-consumer internet advertising was here to stay, but “home-delivered groceries? Never.” There was no way to compete with supermarket efficiencies. Deighton’s prediction was — not to belabor the point — wrong.
I'd argue that grocery delivery never really became a mainstream business outside of certain bubbles and urban circumstances.
In the UK it's pretty mainstream (depending how you define that, but more than 12% of grocery sales are online) -- and it's done by the existing supermarket chains, mostly.
Everyone is missing the actual point of the quote. The UK is at the top end in terms of online penetration in grocery and even there it's true that there's "no way to compete with supermarket efficiencies". Grocery retail stores are really efficient logistically. No one in the industry has truly cracked the problem of selling profitably online because of that. It's the same players doing physical stores and online because they're cross-subsidizing.
I assume the US is a lot less. (Which makes sense because the US is a lot more spread out and, I assume, more people own cars.) Around where I live there is one service owned by a local supermarket chain plus, mostly, Instacart. I have heard it's bigger in the UK in general.
It actually feels like one of those activities were doing more of during the pandemic but pretty much reset on.
It picked up during the pandemic, and a lot of people decided to keep doing it afterwards. My BIL hasn't been to a store in ages. For the few things they can't get delivered, they just ask us to pick it up for them.
No. A lot of things are clearly mainstream. Some things are barely used outside of some specific single digit ingroup.
I'd bet if I polled my friends I doubt if I'd find a single person who used grocery delivery regularly outside of specific examples--e.g. post-surgery or new kid.
I'm in Australia and we used to do it but it wasn't cheap so we stopped (and in the city a supermarket is never too far away, plus shopping on a weeknight evening is much easier than say a Saturday morning).
The big supermarkets in Australia periodically push it with free introductory periods though, and I sometimes see the delivery trucks in the neighbourhood so some people must be using it.
Back in the 200x's Sydney had a pretty amazing centrally fulfilled online grocery delivery service called Shopfast that offered next day delivery for orders before 5pm.
The Coles-Woolworths supermarket duopoly saw it as an existential threat to their business, so Coles purchased it and shut it down. Coles and Woolworths then simultaneously killed their own online offerings. Shopfast was cashflow positive at the time it was acquired and murdered.
It also turned out that the extra "cost" in going shopping yourself is not the travel, it's walking around the shelves. So they now offer picking and "direct to boot" pickup at very low fees, good luck competing with that.
Only way it even comes close to making sense is if cars and scooters run on an abundant totally clean energy source, and then the next problem is traffic.
Money is being thrown at Silicon Valley by clueless pension and sovereign wealth funds and the Softbank guy. This irrational exuberance started around the Windows 95 launch when bankers finally realized that computers and the internet weren't going to disappear in a few years as some sort of a fad and that they had no "tech" in their portfolio, hence the mad rush to buy any business with a website. The mad scramble to jump on these next big thing hasn't gotten less ridiculous since the dotcom era, but quantitative easing since the 2000 crash has increased the size of the speculative investments made available by an order of magnitude.
The "textbook" example of Silicon Valley hubris favored by so called "journalists", Theranos, was laughed out of Sand Hill Road and had to go to Washington and the Walmart Brats for capital. In fact, most companies with negative return business plans (Ride sharing, food delivery, commercial realestate subletting, etc) weren't funded by Silly Valley investors at all beyond angel, seed, and A rounds.
It’s one thing to fall for Bankman-Fried’s magic money box; it’s another thing to do so by the flickering light of tell-all TV shows about Uber, Theranos, and WeWork. Even during this latest downward readjustment, there’s no good reason to believe there will be structural changes or even a lot of individual consequences in Silicon Valley.
Hmmm..last time I checked uber is still around and worth a whopping $70 billion still, which is quite remarkable given how much money it lost and continues to lose. It should not be lumped in with the others.
I think the main thing is Uber has never presented a viable business plan. It's always been showing numbers based on subsidized rides, and is almost a house of cards.
If they had started small, grew organically and had always maintained a healthy profit margin, it'd be a very different story
I think the biggest problem is that people don't properly account for how much tech has to spend to fend off competitors. these are often ignored with statements like 'well they are losing money to grow their market share, but look at the growth!' I even seen people say the same things I heard during the dotcom.
dotcom : "it doesn't matter how much money they are losing, what counts is users"
dotcom2: "it doesn't matter how much money they are losing, what counts is TAM (total addressable market)
The 'dot-com bubble' sounds like the name of a great cautionary tale, but any capitalist who kept taking their investment cues from the collapse of Pets.com missed out on a lot of money
This is why your genuinely good startup will never attract money in that environment.
VCs roll the dice on garbage from fear of missing out and they get rewarded due to greater fools taking the fall. Anything good getting funded will be purely accidental at this point.
I think if they fixed the homeless problem and converted some of the now unused office buildings to apartments it would go a long way. Think there's a real chance that could happen?
Lots of money is invested into homelessness, but the problem of homelessness in America isn't money, it's incentives.
Home equity represents a large chunk of retirement savings for boomers and is largely an investment vehicle for many funds. This means two things:
1. The prices of homes are designed to go up every year; money "invested" into your home must grow.
2. Any action (new homes, legislation, etc) designed to decrease the cost of homes will be actively fought.
As the cost of homes continues to balloon, more and more people will be priced out of home. As landlords need to cover larger and larger mortgages rents will also increase. The trend is already starting; the people you see on the street are those that would have been living in cheap neighborhoods that you would avoid driving in at night (those neighborhoods were gentrified and the people who were priced out and didn't have any family were put on a greyhound to SF/LA).
My theory is that we will get AGI before we blow up the real estate investment market.
> I think if they fixed the homeless problem and converted some of the now unused office buildings to apartments it would go a long way.
There is no “homeless” problem. There’s a drug epidemic problem. Giving homeless people free housing just moves the problem from the sidewalk to a building. A building that will quickly become a slum. The drug problem is what needs to be fixed.
The data doesn't really back this claim up. There are parts of the country where drug use is very high, and yet they don't have as many homeless people per capita as SF. There is a very clear correlation between homelessness and house prices, and not a clear correlation between drug use and house prices. Additionally, the mere fact of being homeless often results in increases in mental illness symptoms and drug use, so trying to get people to not be drug addicts while not giving them a home means you aren't taking away what is often one of the biggest causes of their drug use.
Being marginally employed at a restaurant, supporting a drug habit, can get you an apartment in many locales. Being gainfully employed at multiple restaurants means you still can't afford housing within a 70mi radius of SF.
I’d expect places with generally pleasant weather to attract more interest than places without. It wouldn’t surprise me if that drove both higher home prices and more homelessness.
(I don’t live in CA, but I have somewhat frequently sat on an airplane de-icing pad waiting to travel to CA.)
> There are parts of the country where drug use is very high, and yet they don't have as many homeless people per capita as SF.
That’s because drugs are still illegal in those areas. California and Oregon have essentially legalized every drug. If you’re caught on the street smoking meth or fentanyl, it’s more than likely that a police officer walks right past you.
People are downvoting this, but it’s true. There’s a little more nuance here as well. In addition to fully tolerated public drug possession and consumption, there is also the tolerance of street camping, and the extremely low prices of meth and fentanyl on the West Coast at play here. However a person enters the drug addiction spiral, once they’re in it, it’s easier by far to stay in active addiction here. In Oregon, where I live, people can either scrounge enough cans to take to the recycling center - about 20 will do - or use their EBT card to buy bottles of water, empty them and then recycle the bottles to get the cash deposit. Either way, less than $10 will buy enough meth to stay high for days here. I assume it’s similar for fentanyl. No one will stop you from setting up your tent or RV on street, and at least in Portland you can steal bikes or cars to earn extra money. There’s a chop shop within sight of my house doing exactly that, all day every day out in the open. You can get enough food from the many homeless services organizations and tents are given out by the city. Essentially everything a person needs to completely destroy themselves with drugs is available for free or nearly free, and law enforcement stopped bothering to try to keep things under control. These conditions are fairly unique to Oregon, Washington and California, so I think the high housing price correlation is true, but also incomplete.
People downvote it because the base premise is not true.
The claim isn’t “there aren’t large drug problems I. California/Oregon” which is what you are correctly stating is true, the claim is “drug problems are not the primary driver of homelessness, housing costs are”.
Saying “California and Oregon have effectively legalized drugs so that’s why there is homelessness” just isn’t an accurate statement. As noted in other parts of the thread, people who use drugs will happily rent a place of it is cheap.
Now is it a contributing factor? Probably a minor one, yes. But the primary driver of the size of the homeless population is housing costs, and for the unsheltered population it’s definitely weather. New York actually has a very sizeable homeless population, the difference with California is that people are much more likely to be living in shelters there.
> But the primary driver of the size of the homeless population is housing costs
You're flat out wrong here. It's drug addiction, alcoholism, mental illness and in some cases a complete lack of a social safety net. There is free housing, subsidized housing, shared housing, and more available to low/no income people all over California, Oregon and Washington. The majority of the homeless population does not take advantage of these programs because they require addiction therapy. They stay on the streets because drugs can be legally consumed and purchased without consequence. The sooner we listen to the police, fire fighters, and first responders who are on the ground dealing with these issues every single day, the better. Doing yet another study to prove it's housing costs and not the rampant out of control drug problem is worthless.
> The sooner we listen to the police, fire fighters, and first responders who are on the ground dealing with these issues every single day, the better.
Listening to the police on this is why there are federal drug, alcohol, and criminal restrictions on federally funded public housing programs, and why most public housing authorities impose even stricter rules than the federal requirements, which serve as a bar for many of the people who need help.
But, sure, lie and claim its that homeless people with current or past drug problems choose not to avail themselves of programs they are banned by official policy from.
The West Coast has temperate weather which makes them a desirable destination for the houseless, as well as other jurisdictions to send their populations over. You don’t see that level of homelessness in fairly liberal drug policy states of Illinois or New York, and I’m sure there are even more examples.
Also, the previous rebuttal makes no sense. If an area has a high amount of drug use, what does it matter whether if the law there are legal or illegal, with respect to how that affects homelessness? Was the GP claiming only the well-to-do housed are using drugs there?
Why is the drug overdose rate so much lower on the West Coast than the East? It sure looks like drug usage is at least as bad in other states, so it doesn't really make sense that the unique West Coast housing issues are due to drugs alone.
People are at an elevated risk of overdose after getting out of prison, they are forced to stop cold turkey and when they get out they don’t have the same tolerance as they used to so they end up misjudging the dose.
The west coast is more lenient on drug use, im guessing that leads to fewer overdoses as a result.
At least where I live (Portland) it's the availability of narcan. Ask any first responder. They show up, administer narcan, and before they can even get the person's name the person is gone.
I don't have the numbers for SF specifically, but I doubt they differ that much from LA. The numbers in LA are that 27% of homeless people have a substance abuse issue and 25% have a severe mental illness[1]. Those are not mutually exclusive, so there is some overlap in those groups. It means that roughly 50% of homeless people are mentally well when they become homeless and potentially much more than 50% as these numbers don't represent any causal information. Many people might become homeless for other reasons and the difficulty of homelessness triggers a mental health crisis or pushes them towards drugs as a coping mechanism.
This idea that drugs cause most homeless is largely just confirmation bias. You likely cross paths with many homeless people that you don't realize are homeless. It is the drug addicts and the mentally ill that stand out as obviously homeless. The person who is out on the street because they couldn't make rent, probably isn't noticeably homeless if they spend their nights in a shelter or sleep in a car before showering at a local gym.
I think an important distinction is that not all homeless are problematic, but the homeless you see are almost always problematic - in the sense of having an untreated severe mental health issues including drug addiction.
You never notice the single mom living in a shelter, who takes her kids to work at a laundromat, or the guy who sleeps in his car and does landscaping jobs during the day.
The obvious follow-up then is do you care about homelessness or do you just care about problematic homelessness? Because most people here using "homeless" as a shorthand for "problematic homelessness". This just goes to support majormajor's comment that people are not upset by homelessness in general. They are upset they have to see and interact with problematic homeless people.
A substantial portion of people think the "homeless problem" is visibility and having to interact with homeless people more than the existence of homelessness.
(Setting aside for now the amount of heavy lifting "if they fixed the homeless problem" is doing there... gee, why did nobody try to fix it ever before, anywhere?)
In the US, the political will for "eliminate homelessness by giving them homes" is a political non-starter in a lot of places. In the left-liberal places, you've got entrenched interests fighting tooth and nail to prevent any housing at all from being built, and in right wing areas you've got a "being poor is God's punishment" attitude pushing back against any positive change at all. To make matters worse, any effort to solve the issue results in a large influx of homeless people, because when the standard across the country is one step above "hunt them for sport", you come across as a haven.
In the places it has been tried, housing-first solutions have been wildly successful. It turns out getting your shit together is a lot easier when you don't have the constant stressors of living on the street.
It's hard to disentangle cause and effect. It's true that many homeless people are addicts. Some lost their housing because their addiction caused them to get fired from their job or alienate their family. Others became homeless first and turned to drugs later as a way to temporarily escape a bleak reality. Many homeless people use illegal drugs as a way of self medicating psychiatric disorders because they lack access to mental health care. Giving them stable housing first is often an effective initial step in treating their addiction (and other medical conditions).
In any case, the War on (Some) Drugs has clearly been lost and the drugs aren't going away. What is your solution?
Having a stable, safe place to live is a crucial and necessary step (among many other basic steps) to being in a place to be able to tackle more complex life problems, such as solving a chronic drug use problem.
It's not terribly likely at all that anyone will ever get any traction on solving a chemical addition problem when they have dramatically more important and basic near term problems such as finding food and shelter.
I agree, but you can’t just let a drug addicted person have tax-payer subsidized housing without also requiring that addicted person to attend drug addiction therapy.
I live in Portland, where the overwhelming majority of homeless people deny housing because of this fact. Because they are required to get help.
I absolutely do not think providing more “free” housing is the answer.
If they don't follow these rules they are on their own? So you end up with homeless people who go to central high traffic areas to remain visible and ask for charity. That's what you have now.
Putting them in housing solves a few problems. You know where they are and have a contact and can offer lifelines. Requiring people to get help and removing more control over their lives reduces trust, likely hood of success and they end up hiding the fact. You need to constantly watch them now or drug test them. Easier to live on the street than in your world
People deny shelters because you have to live under ridiculous rules that have very little to do with drugs in addition to the rules around drugs.
What kind of an offer is “come in here, sleep in a crowded room filled with a bunch of other people you may have conflict with, with no place to store your stuff, oh and you’ll be kicked out during the day and have to take all your shit with you”.
And housing doesn’t need to be free, it just needs to be relatively cheap. It wasn’t that long ago that you could afford a basic apartment on a part time job.
It’s not that it’s gross. It’s legitimately a threat to the city. Not just rats and other diseases. But large scale fires are a very real problem when people are cooking meth inside of high rise buildings. I have several fire fighter friends that have had multiple calls in a single evening from some of these places that provide free homeless housing. It’s a very real drain and safety threat to the city.
Watch an episode or two of Hoarders and tell me it seems delightful to just let people live that way. If we're giving people housing because it's not okay for them to live that way, then I can't accept that also it's okay for people to live in such squalor simply because they have a roof over their head. That's just a personal opinion though.
Any one of these makes the other two impossible to fix:
- homelessness
- drugs
- mental illness
In the US, we've done a spectacular job of pricong working people out of housing, creating a ridiculously incompetent drug policy (simultaneously too lax and too punitive), and closing down all reasonable avenues to mental health care. This dates back to Reagan or before but both left and right-wing parties have considerable blame to carry. You dont have to believe that they were malicious, but the results have been disastrous.
Also employment. If you implement a federal job guarantee[0], it means that people can move more readily to regions that currently suffer low employment opportunities which places downwards pressure on housing, but it also raises the question: if the government is obliged to employ everyone, can people go to work without a house? If not, then it's probably a good idea for the government to supply a basic level of housing as well.
Do San Franciscans want their city to be the AI capitol of the world?
Ask long time Mountain View residents what it's like to live in the online advertising capitol of the world. Their property values are way up but quality of life is worse. Attracting tech giants to your city is in certain ways a Faustian bargain. Be careful what you wish for.
Care to elaborate on this a bit? I imagine things like bad traffic are due to poor urban planning and lack of transit-oriented or walkable/bikeable design.
I imagine a lot of misdirected blame towards the economic boom instead of NIMBYism.
Anytime a bunch of people move in with way more money than you (or existing neighbors suddenly have way more money than you, and than they used to), you are going to have quality of life problems. They can outbid you on anything you both want that has any sort of scarcity. We haven't eliminated scarcity.
Housing's been shit since before the first dot com crash and has always been unaffordable, but other than the freeway being a parking lot at Shoreline Amphitheater at rush hour, and Safeway on Rengstorff being a shit show, can you be specific in what ways having both Google and Facebook (technically Menlo Park) has affected you?
Not the OP, but Fishscapes, Bierhaus, Milk Pail, Sprouts, LazerQuest all gone, couldn't afford the rent. And that's just Mountain View. Retail that residents loved has been replaced by establishments exclusively for tech bros.
Edit: Forgot about Game Kastle and Lee's Comics. Really I could go on all day. These community establishments are gone and never coming back ever, as long as Google lives.
We know that decentralization and redundancy have massive advantages in systems. Yet we (or at least - rich investors and CEOs and similar) also want to get rid of it in favor of centralized riches.
The financialization of everything, with the drive to concentrate profits into fewer and fewer extremely-big winners, instead of having an organic ecosystem of research, production, and development, is very fragile, all for the benefit of a fairly small few at the very top.
Completely agree, before Twitter opened up in SF, SF had a homelessness problem and a petty crime problem. That didn't stop an influx of tech moving into SF, except now professional workers were now shocked to find that the homelessness and petty crime didn't make way for their gentrification.
The future is almost certainly going to be remote, there are far too many economic, environmental and social benefits to being remote. The days of cities being a forced hub for hundreds of thousands of career seekers is over.
OpenAI itself has only ~300 employees. This is not going to be like the FAANG era at all, much more competition, much higher automation, fewer people required. And the real estate ship has already sailed in the Bay Area... that's a problem they should have been aggressively addressing 10 years ago, but they didn't.
Don't think the VC types understand how much cost of living is an enormous turnoff to the average worker. The majority of tech employees, including myself, lived there for the career opportunities. Now it's no longer required. Why would I ever give up 60% of my take-home pay to state taxes to also pay a much higher CoL?
I do expect RE costs to decline considerably there in real terms though, so perhaps in 5-10 years SF will have another shot
Typo, should be 50%. Federal, state, local (SF City tax) puts you over 50% at the top bracket.
The point is you can cut taxes significantly while also reducing CoL… the economic benefit is far too high to justify people crowding back into SF again
California income tax tops out at 12.3% which is, um, nowhere near 60. That's higher than, say, Nevada, which has no income tax, but they make up their revenue in other ways, so unless you take a look at the bigger picture you'll be making decisions based on incomplete data.
Helps explain some of the zany fundraising I saw over the past decade. It’s like a mini series of Ponzi schemes. All that matters is growth, because it’s easy to sell equity when something is rapidly growing. So seed sells to A, A sells to B, B sells to huge fund, and huge fund sells to public markets. The hype lasts just long enough to IPO (as the retail public finally can get a piece of this super hyped company) and…it all falls down because now profitability matters.
Like this article said - it didn’t matter if your product ended up dying. It just mattered that you made a lot of money for early investors, so they’ll want to back you again.