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In addition to the SFBA getting less attractive, I think that some products (ironically many coming out of there) have helped geographically distribute access to the advantages people used to move to get.
Video conferencing which works 90% of the time every time isn’t quite good enough to replace office presence, but it is getting Good Enough, *and* folks not attending the meetings daily trust their productivity enough to write checks to fund them.
The last generation or two of the SFBA investor class live on the same Internet that their investors live on, and in comparison to previous generations, they’re quite willing to send a check farther than they could bicycle it.
(Startup generation not human generation.)
(Startup generation not human generation.)
AngelList, HN, ProductHunt, Twitter, shares Slack groups, WhatsApp, and just the general hyperdensity of the social graph have largely eroded the barrier that was the flip side of “proprietary dealflow.” It’s no longer difficult for arbitrarily located team to meet capital.
There has always been an “information flows at the speed of beer” factor which encourages deal makers to be in close proximity to other deal makers, but some patterns of the deals which make the ecosystem go round are now streamlined and possible to conduct over the Internet.
I know this does not sound like a real thing but I promise you this was a real thing: you used to have to talk to an actual person, frequently in the flesh, to get servers.
Ditto payment processing, rack space, startup-compatible professional services, placement agreements for ads, etc.
Some of the expertise requirements for operating things are now encoded in the services you will naturally use for them. Some are widely distributed in on the Internet. Some are in the same brains they have always been in, but those brains left the SFBA.
