

West Oakland Is For Startups - rekoros
https://medium.com/i-love-you-san-francisco/5142e32747e8

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malandrew
I used to bike from SF to Berkeley when our office was there and I would
always start my East Bay leg of the trip from the West Oakland Bart station.
It really is a huge shame that that area is such a dump. It's so incredibly
conveniently located and there is plenty of land and I expect rent to be very
cheap relatively speaking. I imagine that it would be a great place to do
hardware startups, especially around American Steel, where a lot of people
into art welding work out of.

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ccmoberg
Having just placed a startup in SoMa, I'll say that the inconvenient CalTrain
<-> BART transition is an issue. If you are looking to draw employees, mentors
or investors from the peninsula, that one BART station makes a big difference.
I expect this will change significantly once the new SoMa transportation hub
opens and you have CalTrain lines that dead-end at a BART station.

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rekoros
Yeah, the W. Oakland to South Bay connection is hard, both via SF and 880.

However, it's about as hard as it is for the SF Downtown <-> South Bay
connection, since to get to Downtown from CalTrain, you have to pass by a BART
station :-)

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hackula1
Not from SF here, but I study maps of it frequently for analysis work. Is
there really not a single startup there??? I find this a bit hard to believe
considering its proximity to downtown.

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rekoros
I don't know of a single one.

There's lots of art stuff happening, but no tech/internet (which isn't that
surprising).

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malandrew
AFAIK the American Steel warehouse there is the center of a lot of the big
metal art stuff in the Bay Area.

