Tech exec blasts San Francisco: ‘Worst run city in the United States’ – New York Post
A top tech executive who uprooted his company from the Bay Area blasted San Francisco as “probably the worst run city in the United States” during a conference of Silicon Valley bigwigs.
Drew Oetting, the president of 8VC, a venture capital firm that was once headquartered in San Francisco but has since pulled up stakes and relocated to Austin, Tex., said that rampant homelessness, rising crime, COVID lockdown measures and high taxes led him to say good riddance.
“San Francisco is probably the worst run city in the United States,” Oetting told fellow participants at Fortune Brainstorm Tech in Aspen, Colo., this week.
Oetting said that he and his company opted for Austin due to its “energy” and its significantly lower cost of living.
But Oetting got pushback from another fellow tech executive, Bloomberg Beta head Roy Bahat.
Bahat, a San Francisco resident, said the Bay Area will remain a hub for tech firms due to its plethora of top-flight colleges and universities.
“A lot of people made a lot of money in California, only to leave for tax reasons,” Bahat said. “I actually think that’s despicable.”
Bahat also added that the recent Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, strict anti-abortion statutes in Texas and the newly passed “Don’t Say Gay” law in Florida will deter predominantly liberal tech workers from living there.
“I’ve heard from a lot of women who are not very happy about Texas’s stance on everything related to women,” he said.
Oetting, however, said that cost of living outweighed concerns over social issues.
“I don’t owe the government my taxes, the government owes me services,” he said.
Last year, more than two dozen California-based companies, chief among them Tesla and Oracle, moved their headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin.
Another tech executive on the panel, Moment CEO Lucy Guo, said her current hometown of Miami has been welcoming to the LGBTQ community.
Guo, who identifies as bisexual, said Miami is “the happiest place I’ve ever been.”
“It’s one of the best places you can build a company,” she said.
Aside from Tesla and Oracle, Infrastructure engineering giant AECOM, telecom firm DZS, financial services provider Charles Schwab and real estate investment firm CBRE Group all relocated from the Golden State to the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.
Since the start of 2018, some 300 companies have relocated their home base from California to places like Texas, Arizona, Nevada and Tennessee, according to the Hoover Institution.