Firehose #168: 🏙 Urban flight. 🏙

Today’s major tech companies are signaling that people don’t need offices to maintain operational effectiveness. If this sentiment maintains, these tech companies may no longer need Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, or Boston as talent-generating headquarters. Instead, they can move to cheaper suburban or rural areas of the same city or another... See more

My humbler assertion is that 2020 has punctured my confidence that the internet cannot encroach on the benefits of urban density and proximity. Going forward, many fledgling companies may agree, as they find that the city in the cloud essentially acts as a more accessible version of the city on the Earth, eerily reproducing its forces of agglomerat... See more

We accept today that the days of startup cities, at least in the West, are over, but I don't think we should. And the societal changes that a post-COVID world makes possible could restart this cycle. For thousands of years, ambitious young people have had to move to big cities run by the kind of people who run big cities to maximize opportunity in ... See more

What we have learned — what we were forced to learn — during the COVID lockdowns has permanently shattered these assumptions. It turns out many of the best jobs really can be performed from anywhere, through screens and the internet. It turns out people really can live in a smaller city or a small town or in rural nowhere and still be just as produ... See more

A building’s location is becoming less important and insufficient to define and defend its value. Humans can work remotely and many choose to do so, at least some of the time.

What's interesting in the current moment, with the internet truly giving talent a CHOICE, is that cities will become more important because — working from home makes it even more necessary and fun to live in a relatively dense area.

And what about cities? Will New York really be a ghost town? Is this the end? I don’t think so. I think that remote will make room for a new wave of young, hungry, social creatives who bring fresh energy to the city. As in nature, monocultures like San Francisco, which has mainly served to house people who work in tech, will struggle, while permacu... See more