

Ask YC: Best areas for startups to relocate to Silicon Valley? - terrysilver

PG, I'm convinced. I'm putting to put my house up for sale and moving to Silicon Valley. I have only visited SF/Bay Area a few times but spent most of my time near Berkeley. What are the best areas to move to for startups? 
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vishaldpatel
Berkeley Pluses: \- Everything is in walking distance if you live around
downtown - from the grocery shops, to the many many good, cheap (compared to
East Coast) restaurants, and the BART (subway) that takes you to San Francisco
in 20 - 25 minutes.

\- Office space, the last time I checked was about $2 per square foot. Check:
[http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/off/eby?query=&minAsk...](http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/off/eby?query=&minAsk=min&maxAsk=max&minSqft=min&maxSqft=max&neighborhood=48)

\- University town - the campus libraries are among the best places are
awesome. The Berkely gym and the downtown YMCA here are also really excellent.

\- The weather is really nice - not as cold and windy as SF, and not as hot as
San Jose. It warms up and cools down very gradually here - and usually stays
between 15 and 25 degrees Celsius. \- The parks and the marina are great.
There is pretty good hiking, and the sailing club here will get you sailing
(or wind-surfing)! For cheap! (www.cal-sailing.org).

Cons: \- It is dirty in places - it doesn't smell though. \- There are lots of
homeless people here - quite harmless. \- Everything shuts down early.
Berkeley is a town more than a city. There are two 'night-clubs' - only one is
worth any time - the other is a dirty (in a bad way) hole in the ground. Only
a couple of bars and restaurants are open late - thankfully they're quite
good. Lucky for you, San Francisco is less than half an hour away by public
transit. There's a bus that drives back every half an hour all night long.

Non-issues: \- "Activism". big deal - some people like to protest - they don't
come in your way or bother you. You are invited to participate and the locals
can be engaging and opinionated if you talk to them. This is one of the most
educated places I've ever lived in - that is a good thing.

Conclusion: \- Berkeley is great! You can raise your kids here. You can live
in a relatively quite place but live very close to two main cities - Oakland
and San Fran - so you can go crazy and then return to relax and work in a
quieter place.

~~~
ardit33
I agree. Berkeley beats hands down all other clown towns in the Peninsula. It
actually feels like a real town (more similiar to Cambridge, MA, or
Someriville than anything else). It has great food (i mean really good,
cheap), and it is walkable to a certain extent. There is mass transportation
to SF. SF would be my first choice, then Berkeley second. The rest of the Bay
area is a big soul drenching Strip Mall Wasteland.

Palo Alto is not that bad, except the smug attitude of the people there, and
it is so expensive. It doesn't really feel like a town. More like a suburb,
with one main avenue (university ave.). Nothing too exiting.

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SwellJoe
I settled on Mountain View, and have been happy with the choice. The downtown,
despite aspersions on its character by alaskamiller, is actually quite nice.
More Asian food than you can shake a stick at (some of it very good), a couple
of great little Asian markets (I just got back from one of them, where I
bought everything I needed for a good vegetable soup, some Jasmine green tea,
and some nice looking apples for cheap). Having shopping, and especially
restaurants, within easy walking distance is now my primary concern in
choosing where to live.

I'm renting a house a few blocks from Castro St., and I like the whole town
quite a lot. It's not San Francisco, and right now, that's probably good--I
would go to rock shows three or four times a week if I could walk to the club.
I've got work to do right now, and don't need the distraction. Presumably, if
you're starting up, you also have work to do.

That said, being around other startups has value, too. The YC guys often get
together in the city, and I'd love to go, but I rarely have a car handy (and I
hate driving/parking in the city, anyway). If I lived nearby, I'd walk, or
catch a bus. But taking the train (which stops running at a ridiculously early
hour) from here to there isn't an option. Once things are spinning nicely,
I'll probably move to the city, or possibly back to Austin.

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alaskamiller
Berkeley is dirty, expensive, and everything closes at 9pm sharp.
Anticorporatism is strong so most shops are coops or expensive food stores.
The college environment and the college kids somewhat make up for it, the
atmosphere is hard to beat.

San Francisco is crowded, expensive, and it's a second-rate NYC. But the
proximity to everything and everyone again makes up for a lot, especially for
cuisine and nightlife. Driving is pain, housing is a pain.

Milpitas is cheap, full of housing, but next to the city dump. It smells in
the summer and since there's so much suburban sprawl, you'll drive for half an
hour before reaching the highway. Everything closes early too, there's no
downtown or nightlife.

Mountain View: tract homes suburban sprawl. Mountain View has one long strip
called Castro street that masquerades as a downtown on certain days. Other
than that it's just old 60's tract housing style (you'll find this to be the
case for almost all of Silicon Valley).

Sunnyvale is like a pseudo commercial zone where all the warehouses and tiny
offices are. Imagine playing SimCity and watching your purple zone
languishing. That's Sunnyvale. It's definitely cheaper though to live because
of this effect. There's a Fry's and Costco here, meaning you don't need to go
anywhere else.

Cupertino/Saratoga has one big hit: Apple. There's no downtown, everything
closes at 9pm sharp. Cupertino is essentially where everyone commutes back to
after working in SF or Sunnyvale. There are an abundance of police officers
because of the odd arrangement the city has with the county to generate
revenue. Saratoga is up in the hills which is pretty but basically excludes
anyone without a seven digit network.

Palo Alto is schizophrenic in that it doesn't know whether it's a farm town,
college town, ritzy retreat, or corporate shill. Stanford is here and the
surrounding area outside of Stanford is great. Sand Hill Road is right
outside, there's a strip that act as the downtown, significantly longer than
Castro. But because of Stanford it attracts quite a lot of companies to move
here which in turn forces house pricing through the roof. Facebook is based
here and they pay their employees an extra $600 to live within a 1 mile
radius, meaning your chances are next to nothing to get a nice place. Watch
out for East Palo Alto, that's not a place you want to be.

Santa Clara is like the ice cream center of a cake. It slowly melts into
either layer but in the mean time it acts as the barrier between the sponge up
top and the ghetto area on the bottom. This is where most people go because of
the lower housing pricing due to market pressures. It's not a bad area, but
then again it's not the sunny disposition you would expect California to be
known for. This is also where my stolen car ended up at. Twice.

East San Jose. This isn't meant to be racist: east San Jose is where most of
the poor live, there's a huge Mexican and Vietnamese community here. This is
also where the low-rent and section-8 apartments are and where most of the
illegal immigrants will bus from to find work at Home Depot in other areas.
This isn't in any way to degenerate them, but this is just how the city is
broken up into. Go more east and near the mountains and you end up at this
ritzy and rich community called Silver Creek where they built thousands of big
houses. You can drive for an hour here and still not see the main highway.

San Jose itself is huge. In fact, it's bigger than San Francisco, ranking
itself as the 3rd biggest city in California. There's a downtown, but it's not
as glamorous as say New York nor LA. Plenty of clubs to go to but it's almost
always full of cop cars, low riders, scrapers with big wheels, and sound
system that's enough to shatter glass. Quite a lot of companies are here
though, Adobe for one, and the recent clamor for city living has caused quite
a few skyscrapers to go up for loft living and the like. Prepare to pluck down
more than $750k for a 900sq ft loft with sky high windows that look directly
into a depressing airport. Oh, at least they have the courtesy to shut off the
airport after 9pm (apparently everyone sleeps at 9 in Silicon Valley). There's
multiple museums though, but they have enough content to last you through
maybe 3 weekends.

This turned out more pessimistic than I had originally intended it to be. It's
not to say I hate Silicon Valley, but the wide-eyed optimism has worn off.
Don't think it's a dreamland, it's just an certain area where lots of people
have moved into. The new trend now is to tear down unoccupied commercial zones
(caused by the first dot-com boom) and remaking them as condos. Expensive
condos. It's only getting more and more people to come in. Traffic is
annoying. Stuff is expensive. There's houses everywhere. And most areas lack
charm.

So in summation, where would I go?

With a bit more money saved up, I would much prefer Palo Alto, it's by far the
best area, a 30 minute drive to the City (that's what we call San Francisco)
and close proximity to Mountain View. If I just need a cheap place to stay?
Santa Clara. If I want to live the California life? San Francisco. If I have a
family? Cupertino. If I really really really want to have a house? Milpitas.

Don't take this post as gospel though. I've only been living here for 15 years
and can't say I have truly captured ever nuance of Silicon Valley.

Addendum: Oakland. It's in a renovation stage. What used to be a horrifying
place to live at is now being revitalized for business and as a contra to SF.
The popular trend amongst my friends and smaller startups is live in SF or
Fremont/Union City and rent an office in Oakland. You can find a huge 1500 sq
ft open loft/warehouse type office for less than $1.50/sqft. I still wouldn't
live in Oakland though.

~~~
waleedka
You didn't mention Redwood City. This is where I moved to four months ago, and
I love it. The downtown is small, but beautiful with many restaurants most of
them have outside seating because the weather is so nice. Actually, Redwood
City uses the slogan "Climate best by government test". And I would agree; we
got only 3 cloudy days in the last 4 months. It's not too hot and not too
cold. And, it's not as expensive as other places. As for location, it's close
to the 101, and it's half-way between San Francisco and Sunnyvale, so you're
not too far for any event in the city or the valley.

~~~
alaskamiller
In my mind I kind of lumped Redwood City, and that whole Atherton area, in
with Palo Alto. Redwood City indeed is a very nice place, there's decent
housing, a friend of mine whose parents are pastors were able to buy a house
with a pool, and there's this atmosphere around that particular area that's
just unique. I think it's a combination of expensive cars, luxury housing, and
smart people that makes me want to do better.

East Menlo Park is kind of ghetto though.

------
staunch
It'd be awesome if YC owned some apartment buildings in Palo Alto and rented
the rooms to YC founders for (mostly) cash + equity. Seems totally logical
given that most YC investment goes into overpriced rent already and renting is
such a big distraction. YCScaper seems exactly like the kind of "proxy for
demand" good startups take their cues from ;-)

~~~
falsestprophet
Paul Graham has a garage

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pg
Imagine a bullseye with Palo Alto at the center.

Palo Alto's very expensive, unfortunately. Mountain View might be a good bet.
Not crushingly expensive, and has something of a downtown.

~~~
breck
Where would you put the bullseye in Cambridge? I only ask because we just
opened up shop in Kendall Square because that's where I put it, but you might
have a better idea.

~~~
nostrademons
MIT, but it's not really a fair question because the Boston startup scene
isn't shaped like a bullseye. It's really two lines, following major traffic
arteries. The city corridor is along the Red Line, from Davis to South
Station. The suburb corridor is Route 128, from Rt. 3 in Burlington to
Needham.

Both of them don't really drop off with distance - Davis (near the end of the
red line) is as much of a startup center than Central, and Burlington (the
northern end of the 128 corridor) is more of one than Weston (though this
isn't really fair: Weston is a bedroom community for all the venture
capitalists that fund them). They do, however, drop off dramatically if you
move laterally: Billerica and Carlisle are rural bedroom communities,
dramatically different from the high-tech industries in neighboring Bedford
and Burlington.

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DaniFong
We like Berkeley for what we're doing. The area is very nice, there's activism
in the air, there's a lot of good, cheap food, rent is comparatively
inexpensive and we can walk right into the libraries that we need to.

The library thing is really key for me, though we're not sure what the
situation is elsewhere (Like Stanford, say).

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ksjhalla
Don't discount Fremont/Union City (Maybe even Hayward) - its central; crime is
low @ least in Fremont; and Hayward is making a great effort to revamp their
downtown. UC is bland - but convinient.

~~~
davidw
The last time I was in that area, we lived in Hayward, because my wife was
doing an internship at a biotech company, and we only had one car, so she rode
her bike. One thing that always made us laugh was the bank downtown with the
cornerstone that had a date on it like 1978. Coming from Italy, where you
regularly walk by buildings that are 100-200-500... a few nearly a thousand
years old, it's kind of silly.

We were bored to tears in Hayward in terms of having a social life, and
usually drove up to Berkeley.

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aaroneous
I'd recommend Emeryville or (parts of) Oakland. It's well-priced, right across
the Bay from SF (<10min BART ride and you're downtown), easy access to the
major freeways.

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immad
More than half the YC startups in the Bay Area are in SF I think. and about
half of them in the yscraper :).

There are quite a few startups in SF and quite a lot tech stuff happens here.
Some benefits to moving to Palo Alto, since it can be cheaper their and less
distractions.

~~~
terrysilver
I've heard of the famed 'Y-Scraper', where in SF is it?

~~~
aaroneous
It's the Crystal Tower Apartments - Lombard and Taylor I think.

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Prrometheus
This is a great thread. I would love to hear some more personal experiences
with various areas. I am looking to live somewhere on the cheap, self-funding
and learning for a few months before meeting a couple of co-founders and
trying to build something.

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thingsilearned
DONOT MOVE TO COLMA! That place is 50% cemetery and where I spent my summer
:). Maybe if you were right by the BART or something, but either go further
north to San Fran or South to the Valley.

I'd recommend San Fran as its a lot more exciting than Palo Alto. Living in an
exciting area is extremely motivating.

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cstejerean
i hope someone answers this as i plan to move there soon myself

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sabat
The pensinula is probably best. It's the area that extends south from SF to
San Jose. Home of Palo Alto, San Mateo, Mountain View, Los Altos, other towns
you've heard of. Nothing in the SF area is cheap, but if you're renting, you
can find things you can probably afford.

