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My two-person education startup is looking to move to San Francisco for personal and business reasons. What are the possibilities and tradeoffs of where to live/work? Our general (somewhat conflicting) considerations are:

  • Cheap as possible (less than $850/person)
  • Access to weekly tech and social events
  • Don't want to have to have a car
  • Will likely be aggressively pursuing angel funding
  • Don't care much about housing quality or "safety"

For locations outside of San Francisco e.g. Oakland, Daly City, South SF, and Richmond, is it easy enough to regularly get into the city? Would a startup feel isolated there? How about in the outer parts of SF like Sunset or Lower Mission? Am I overstating the importance of being connected to downtown?

If anyone got a temporary place for a month first to feel it out, how did you go about finding a place and where did you live?

This is an open-ended question, and I'm most interested in hearing about your experiences: what was frustrating, what worked well.

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Could I please get an explanation on why my question was downvoted? I'm looking for specific advice on where are the locations in SF that offer the best combination of cost vs access to startup resources. Seems like a practical, answerable question in accordance with the FAQ. – Derek Dahmer Feb 6 '11 at 23:33
I'm guessing the downvoter didn't notice your question was specifically about startups. – Joel Spolsky♦ Feb 7 '11 at 0:15
1  
Yes, Joel guessed correctly. I really don't see how this has to do with startups. I'll remove the downvote since the question changed but I stand by my vote to close. It would be similar to people who want to be actors asking where in Hollywood/LA they should live so that they can be actors. It has such marginal relevance as to be off-topic. I see that you are in Boston - another "hot-spot" for startups. Not sure why you feel it is important to move - I think more focus on the business and less on location is key, but that's just my opinion. – TimJ♦ Feb 7 '11 at 14:29
Boston also seems to be a more "education oriented" town relative to SF/Bay area - I'd choose it over SF for that domain. – TimJ♦ Feb 7 '11 at 14:33

4 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

From the East Bay, SF is very BART-accessible, but the hotbed of angel-investor and VC activity (Mountain View and Palo Alto) is NOT. It's actually a real pain to come down from Berkeley / Richmond / Oakland to Palo Alto. So count out East Bay.

On the peninsula side, San Mateo or Redwood City are actually great options. In-between SF and Palo Alto, cal-train accessible, and not very expensive.

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up vote 3 down vote

A number of companies are looking at San Mateo now. You'd be in good company there and it's a decent compromise between SF and all the action in Palo Alto and southward. This is important if you plan not to have a car. Traveling between SF and San Jose takes about an hour by Caltrain, so settling in between gives you a convenient position to meet with investors, go to startup mixers, and recruit university talent.

Daly City & South SF are pretty good and not very far away from downtown. I'd opt for those over Oakland (which may be significantly cheaper) because crime there is higher than average.

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up vote 2 down vote

Would it not be smarter as a mini-micro-pre-seeded startup to AVOID the big boys playground?

How do you want to attract talented staff if you compete with the biggest tech companies on this planet?

Why waste extra rent for office space where the market is poisoned by the biggies?

There is a reason why the big ones even outsource their stuff to take leverage on the benefits of lower cost of living in rural areas. Why are you heading for straight the opposite?

If you want to eat a pizza at a cool place why don't do that on your holidays?

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up vote 1 down vote

Another -1 for the East Bay: if you use public transit, the BART's last train (to most area destinations in the East Bay) is freakishly early—7 pm! Forget about staying out late for coding sessions (or even drinks).

Living south of San Francisco also has it's problems. See Caltrain's new, startup-unfriendly schedule (last train at ~8 pm): http://bit.ly/e8WE4r (Feb 2011).

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The PDF you linked for South of San Francisco is a draft and says it doesn't start until July (see top). The schedule on their homepage has the last train outbound at midnight, and the last inbound train arriving at midnight. For the BART, trains also run until around midnight. – Derek Dahmer Feb 10 '11 at 2:42

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