So I firmly believe you can build an incredible SaaS startup from anywhere now, or at least, any major-ish tech center. See, e.g., Atlassian, Canva, Cloudflare (CEO now in Park City), Adyen, etc. Heck, Oracle apparently is moving to Nashville!
And yet … gravity is coming back to the SF Bay Area.
So many CEOs have come back, even if their teams haven’t. The CEOs of Brex, DropBox, and more have come back. And many senior executives of those leaders are often in the Bay Area now / again. Many French AI startups still try to spend at least a month in the Bay Area now, for example.
And if nothing else, VC funding has come back to the SF Bay.
What do I mean? VCs really don’t want to invest 100% on Zoom anymore.
So what I now is so many emails like this: “Jason, I’ll in the Bay Area in a few weeks meeting with investors …”
You can see it also with EF, which originally came out of London to incubate and accelerate the best pre-idea founders. It’s been wildly successful, and now … it’s requiring its founders to come to SF to learn and fundraise:
How @join_ef now works:
1. We find you in Europe, India or the US.
2. We select you based on your founder potential.
3. You join one of our programmes in London, Paris, Bangalore or SF.
4. If not already in SF, we help you re-locate to San Francisco to raise your seed round— Alice Bentinck (@Alicebentinck) April 8, 2024
So this latest data from Carta is interesting. 38.4% of pre-seed and seed funding rounds are happening in California, mainly the SF Bay:
Again, build where you need to build.
Just realize the power laws of being in the SF Bay Area at least part-time in many cases. And especially, for fundraising. It gets even more pronounced post-seed, per Carta:
We’re back to the days where it’s simply far easier to fundraise if you can just drop by their office in person.
If nothing else, come to SaaStr Annual in the SF Bay on Sep 10-12. It’s a concentrated shot at meeting 1000s of SaaS founders, execs and VCs.
