I&#x27;ve been wanting to leave the Bay Area for at least 3 years -- Seattle, Austin, or Berlin.  I don&#x27;t love California, but really dislike virtually everything about San Francisco.  Of course, I&#x27;ve been working in San Francisco for 21 months now, but that&#x27;s because of a specific company -- otherwise I&#x27;d be gone, at least to the South Bay.<p>SFBA is not a good place to hire engineers, unless you&#x27;re heavily funded AND a clear winner and need to hire a bunch of diverse types.  For anything else, I could find other places which are far superior.<p>It&#x27;s a great place to hire professional services to support startups, and the best place in the world, hands down, to raise money.  YC being here makes it great early on, too.  I think investors become less location-sensitive as you get to later stages, if you&#x27;re winning.<p>The biggest problem is if you&#x27;re selling b2b to tech companies at all, you can literally bump into your customers here.<p>With my next startup, I plan to do Seattle (probably) or Austin for a US office, with a small SFBA presence, and then Berlin, and run EU and US companies as separate entities with separate officers, so people can choose if they want to be customers of a US or EU company.  Maybe add other location in the future.<p>(I&#x27;d obviously be doing something in the infosec space, which is becoming increasingly jurisdiction sensitive.)<p>I absolutely encourage people to work in SFBA for a while to build a network, but after that, GTFO unless you really want to be here.