Tech moguls ‘optimistic’ about San Francisco despite urban decay

News

By Katherine Donlevy

Forget the rampant crime, boarded-up retailers and homeless encampments plaguing San Francisco — tech moguls are optimistic that the city is about to hit its stride.

The Golden Gate City experiences cyclical booms and busts of prosperity and has spent the past several years stuck in the latter, meaning a boom is just on the horizon, several Silicon Valley leaders told the Los Angeles Times.

“It does feel like this really optimistic and exciting moment in time,” said Angela Hoover, who recently relocated her AI search chatbot company, Andi, from Miami to San Francisco.

“People are wanting to be in San Francisco, and the folks that are on my team who live here are falling in love with the city.”

While Hoover, who described the move to the Bay Area as “rocket fuel,” is a newcomer to the area, plenty of longtime San Francisco tech moguls were eager to agree despite the Bay Area’s newfound reputation of disrepair.

Frisco has made national headlines for its surging crime, drug use and homelessness — which even prompted one man to notoriously start a “Doom Loop Walking Tour” highlighting its urban decay.

Many business leaders tried to fight the bad image San Francisco had earned, while others demanded the government step up to clean up the streets — last week JPMorgan’s Chief Executive Jamie Dimon declared that “San Francisco is in far worse shape than New York.”

Many tech leaders, however, said the city continued to stand above others across the nation even with its plethora of social issues.

“There’s no better place to do it than S.F.,” said Catalin Voss, a German native and co-founder of Ello, a company that uses speech recognition technology, powered by artificial intelligence, to help struggling students develop their reading skills.

“If you want to be the world’s best at finance, you move to New York. If you want to be the world’s best at acting, you move to LA. If you want to be the world’s best at tech, you move to San Francisco.”

While crime and homelessness data lean toward the negative, other numbers point to a more prosperous future.

The Bay Area maintained its No. 1 national ranking last year for venture capital investment, according to an October report by Ernst and Young.

San Francisco and other Bay Area counties recorded a net gain of thousands of residents and are enjoying a drop in housing prices that is expected to continue in 2024, according to the LA Times.

“San Francisco is vibrant. It’s a magnificent city,” Russell Hancock, president and chief executive of the think tank Joint Venture Silicon Valley, told the paper.

“There’s a reason it has appeal. And part of the appeal, let’s never forget, is it’s kind of quirky and kooky and progressive.”

“These things come in waves. And this appears to be the next wave. And it appears to be real,” Hancock continued.