Urban Area Cost-Of-Living as Big Tech Moats and Employee Golden Handcuffs (opens in new tab)

> As absurdly high as their salaries become, the cost of living drains it away,

This is how it works. The more money people have the more business will charge you. Real state is the one getting the biggest part as you cannot get more land that the one that already is.

Now stop a moment and think about all that people that is NOT part of Tech. That people that has normal salaries but live, or used to live, in that area.

Social democracy, where the well-being of citizens is as important as the business needs is the way forward. Better public transportation allows people to live farther away but do not wast more time on commuting. Social housing helps the people that cannot afford to pay the rent but is needed to run services, local business, etc.

Citizens should be plan for the citizens not just for Big Tech or the next Big Whatever.

This narrative resonates personally with me. We bootstrapped Anvil in Cambridge (UK), and one of the most common reactions to a demo is "wow, this is actually a real platform, deep enough to have answers to my follow-on questions". (Which is...kinda important for a programming tool.) Ironically, this response often comes from Bay Area-based startups with incredibly limited time/resources to produce a prototype, despite objectively huge amounts of "seed" or "pre-seed" funding - because prevailing salaries and cost of living make staying alive long enough to build it, let alone recruiting another engineer, a real stretch.

No way would we have been able to build anything nearly so complete if we'd had an SFBA cost-of-living clock ticking behind us.

It use to be what about Microsoft. Now people ask what about Google/Facebook/Apple etc... Same story. If you get big enough and have traction there's enough VC money to float you. The larger structural question is that companies don't IPO for like 10+ years... now that's a real problem.