Firehose #168: 🏙 Urban flight. 🏙

These tools make it possible, for the first time, to effectively get work done without physical co-location — at scale. The last truly significant fixed cost for many startups today is an office lease. Multiple scaled startups (Automattic, Zapier, Invision, Gitlab) have demonstrated the fully remote model, negating the need for an expensive office ... See more

These two factors together make it possible, for the first time, to agglomerate economic activity virtually. Could the next big tech region be built on the internet? All it needs is one big push.

Lastly, I realize that not every company is a technology company. Centralization is necessary for some hardline and service industries, and that won’t change because of better remote work tooling. However, the technology industry is subsuming many legacy industries (e.g. big box retail, movie theaters, financial services).

Two factors may be responsible for breaking the linkage between physical proximity and economic agglomeration. The first is the shift from fixed cost to variable cost development.