Silicon Valley tech legend Keith Rabois is leaving San Francisco and “moving immediately” to Florida, adding to the list of tech heavyweights who have left the Bay Area.
“I think San Francisco is just so massively improperly run and managed that it’s impossible to stay here,” said Rabois, an early executive at PayPal, Square, Linkedin, Yelp who has been a Bay Area resident of two decades, telling Forbes that many in his social circles are leaving as well.
“COVID sort of masks this stuff. It’s not quite as obvious where people are moving to and if they’ve actually moved since everybody’s working remotely.”
Rabois is one of many Bay Area forsakers. His planned departure follows the flight of Peter Thiel, Rabois’s old Stanford buddy and PayPal partner, to Los Angeles in 2018. (Rabois joined Thiel’s venture capital firm Founder’s Fund last year.) In a much-read IPO prospectus this year, Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, a PayPal spinout and Rabois investment, also said he was relocating the company to Colorado after laying into the Valley’s tech firms, calling them unpatriotic for pooh-poohing military contracts. And Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, where Rabois worked as chief operating officer for three years, planned to move to Africa before the pandemic struck. –Forbes
An August “Suburban Market Report” by Zillow revealed that home prices in San Francisco had fallen 4.9% year-over-year, while inventory had jumped 96% during the same period as a flood of new listings hit the market. Zillow noted that they aren’t seeing the same trend in cities such as Miami, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. or Seattle.
“It may be tempting to credit the city of San Francisco’s inventory boom to the advent of remote work that came with the pandemic, but one only has to look at to San Jose to question that narrative,” Zillow economist Josh Clark told SFGATE, adding “The San Jose metro, which like the city of S.F. is dominated by tech workers, has not seen a similar rise. Two things that could drive the difference are San Francisco’s density and its smaller share of family households.”
