Business
Column: They say San Francisco is coming back as a tech hub, but it never really left
Michael Suswal’s first eye-opening encounter with the vibrancy of San Francisco came in 2017.
That’s when he and his fellow co-founders of Standard AI, an artificial intelligence startup funded by the incubator Y Combinator, moved from New York to San Francisco for the summer.
“Initially we planned on going back to New York,” says Suswal, 44. “But after living in the Bay Area for two or three months, between us we had way more network contacts than we had had in our combined 50 years living in New York.”
Where else would you go that would have more support, more connections, the right type of environment and the right investors?
— Michael Suswal, Generation Lab
When COVID hit, Suswal told me, he moved to Seattle and worked from home. Last year, when he and a partner opted to co-found a new company, they pondered the best place to start.
“We thought, where else would you go that would have more support, more connections, the right type of environment and the right investors? Building a company is hard. It takes everything you’ve got, and even then there’s an 80% chance of failure. So why would you stack the deck against yourself? It was a no-brainer to come back here.”
Generation Lab, which Suswal co-founded with longevity expert Alina Su and UC Berkeley bioengineering professor Irina Conboy, aims to market a technology that can help customers identify and manage long-term medical conditions.
Suswal’s take is different from what you might have heard from the news media and red-state politicians over the last few years. They spin a narrative of a region — indeed, the entire state of California — in secular decline. Of a Silicon Valley whose best days are behind it. Of wholesale flight of money and talent to new, welcoming places such as Miami and Austin.
But there has never been much truth to that narrative generally, and it’s more dubious than ever today, when the Bay Area has emerged as a center of artificial intelligence investing.
There is no shortage of newsy nuggets to illustrate the “doom loop” narrative about San Francisco.
On Tuesday, for instance, Macy’s announced that it would close its gigantic store overlooking Union Square sometime in the next three years. But the closure is part of a major corporate retrenchment involving the closings of 150 stores nationwide, 30% of the total.
Nor is there anything historically new about San Francisco-bashing. The practice dates back to the Gold Rush, when the city’s powerful attraction as a jumping-off place for Forty-Niners seeking their fortunes in the nearby hills generated an equally potent counter-narrative.
Hinton R. Helper, a visitor from North Carolina who would eventually gain notoriety as a white supremacist, reported in 1855 on the city’s “rottenness and its corruption, its squalor and its misery, its crime and its shame, its gold and its dross…. Degradation, profligacy and vice confront us at every step.”
It’s a short distance from Helper’s screed to the map that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis displayed during a televised debate with Gov. Gavin Newsom in November, purportedly showing deposits of human waste around San Francisco. (That didn’t help DeSantis’ presidential campaign avert an early demise, any more than Helper’s critique stemmed the flow of fortune-seekers into California.)
It’s true that the frenzy in artificial intelligence investing has brought a jolt of capital to the entrepreneurial economy of the Bay Area, but that’s merely the latest iteration of a story that dates back to the emergence of Silicon Valley in the late 1960s — or even to the founding of Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto in 1939.
The region has undergone a long sequence of technology booms and busts over the decades, but each bust has set the stage for the next boom. In the 1980s, the valley’s chipmakers lost their dominance in semiconductor memory to Japanese competitors.
But within a few years, as UC Berkeley economist and political scientist AnnaLee Saxenian observed in her definitive study of the region, “Regional Advantage,” in 1994, new semiconductor and computer startups such as Sun Microsystems had emerged and Silicon Valley had “regained its former vitality.” By 1990, Silicon Valley was home to “one-third of the 100 largest technology companies created in the United States since 1965,” Saxenian wrote.
The key to its enduring stature atop the innovation economy has been the Bay Area’s infrastructure of institutions (Stanford and UC Berkeley) and legal, technical and financial professionals, and its population of technology workers — all having created “dense social networks and open labor markets.”
By contrast, the Silicon wannabes tend to put all their eggs in one basket, and when that basket’s contents spill out, there’s little to fill it up again.
Miami is a telling example. Its mayor, Francis X. Suarez, tried to establish the city as the center of cryptocurrency financing and innovation. The FTX crypto exchange bought naming rights to the arena where the NBA’s Miami Heat play. International conferences for bitcoin and crypto adherents filled the conference center in 2022.
Miami associated itself with the first “city coin,” a crypto token that Suarez claimed would help boost the municipal budget.
The effort hasn’t panned out. FTX collapsed as its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was indicted and subsequently convicted of fraud; the Heat’s arena now carries the name of Kaseya, a Miami software firm.
Attendance at crypto conferences has dwindled. MiamiCoin, which was valued at 5 cents when it came on the market in August 2021, now trades for about 16-thousandths of a cent, if anyone cares — there doesn’t seem to have been a trade in eight months. The city is searching for relevance in the modern technology landscape.
The same sources that talked up the flight of entrepreneurs from the Bay Area to Miami, Austin and other Silicon wannabes are now running articles about startup founders moving back; often the return is accompanied by complaints about the lack of a true innovation culture in their new homes, as well as traffic congestion and housing prices soaring out of reach — much the same as one would find in any large city.
As my colleague Hannah Wiley reported recently, San Francisco’s adherents are trying to seize the narrative reins by reminding people that the city and region offer unique advantages to entrepreneurs, especially in technology-related fields.
One is Angela Hoover, 25, who launched her consumer-oriented AI search firm, Andi, in Miami with backing from Y Combinator. At first, Miami seemed inviting because it seemed to be host to a healthy startup community.
Attending AI events in San Francisco, however, made it “abundantly clear that the AI community was in San Francisco. It almost feels like you have a front-row seat to a play, and at the same time you’re in the play,” Hoover said.
“Despite what all the doom-and-gloom critics say, [the Bay Area] is still a hotbed of innovation,” Ali Diab, chief executive of Collective Health, told me. That’s what prompted the firm, which manages employer health plans, to return its headquarters to downtown San Francisco after allowing its workforce to disperse to a work-from-home system during the pandemic.
“Obviously, you have the AI revolution being driven from here,” Diab says, “but you also have powerhouse enterprise software companies like Salesforce and Slack.”
Collective Health also discovered that the cost of office space in San Francisco was lower than elsewhere in the Bay Area, including Silicon Valley proper. About 120 of Collective Health’s 783 employees work in San Francisco, with the others distributed among offices in Chicago, Texas and Utah, or working remotely.
Diab was an early critic of the “doom loop” argument against San Francisco, observing in a mid-October op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle that “as a Bay Area native, I’ve had to listen to people predict the demise of my city for my entire life.” In truth, he wrote, “the oft-cited challenges San Francisco faces are no different from those experienced by any other major city in the United States.”
Housing is “prohibitively expensive in almost every major American city,” he added. “New York, Chicago and Los Angeles haven’t solved their homelessness problems and neither have many other large cities.”
The story of a Bay Area exodus always was overstated. The image of Texas’ attraction for entrepreneurs has never moved much beyond three major tech companies that moved their headquarters there from California — Hewlett Packard Enterprise in Houston and Oracle and Tesla in Austin.
And the significance of these moves may be more imagined than real. In 2020, when Oracle announced its move to Austin from Redwood City, south of San Francisco, it said it was building a campus for 10,000 employees; the company has 164,000 workers worldwide.
When Elon Musk sought a location for Tesla’s “global engineering headquarters,” the seat of the company’s innovative brainpower, he found it in Hewlett Packard’s former corporate headquarters — not in Austin, but Palo Alto. He announced his decision to move into that space in February 2023 at a joint event with Gov. Newsom.
Other states have never come close to California in the volume of their venture investments. In 2022, according to the National Venture Capital Assn., California firms raised $78.3 billion in venture funding, more than 40% higher than second-ranked New York. Florida ranked fifth with only $2.6 billion, followed by Texas with $2.4 billion (and Texas’ total fell by about half from the previous year).
San Francisco companies attracted nearly $31 billion in venture funding in 2022, according to CBRE. The Bay Area all told attracted $61 billion, accounting for 35% of all venture funding in the U.S.
Venture investing fell appreciably in 2023, and venture-backed companies experienced a spike in “down rounds” — in which their valuations are lower than they were in the previous round of venture infusions — starting in late 2022. But those trends appeared across the entire venture funding universe, and were more likely related to the run-up in interest rates and fears of a recession than to any California-centric phenomena.
In any case, AI was a distinct bright spot, accounting for about 1 in 5 of all venture deals in 2023 and one-third of all venture dollars invested, according to the accounting firm EisnerAmper.
No one doubts that San Francisco and the Bay Area present challenges. Suswal says he was concerned that recruiting staffers to come to the area would be difficult. When he himself was considering moving back to San Francisco from Seattle last October, he “bought into a lot of the negative aspects of the city that were being published at the time,” he says. “But the city is in better shape than it gets credit for. … All the best people come here, because it’s well worth it.”
The highest gas prices in the country are making it tougher for some gig drivers to make a living.
Gas prices have shot up amid the war in the Middle East. On average, California gas prices are the most expensive in the United States, according to data from the American Automobile Assn. The average price of regular gas in California is almost $6. The national average is a little above $4.
While Uber and Lyft drivers have concocted clever ways to cut gas consumption, they say that without some relief they will be forced to leave the ride-hailing business.
John Mejia was already struggling to make money as a part-time Lyft driver when soaring gas prices made his side hustle even harder.
“Unfortunately, it’s the economics of paying less to drivers and gas prices,” he said. “It actually is pulling people out of the business.”
Guests at The Westin St. Francis hotel get into an Uber.
(Jess Lynn Goss / For The Times)
Gig work offers drivers the freedom to work for themselves and more flexibility, but being independent contractors also means they must shoulder unexpected costs.
Ride-sharing companies say they’re trying to help, but drivers say the gas relief comes with caveats. For now, drivers say they’re being pickier about what rides they accept, cutting hours and are looking at other ways to make money.
Mejia, who started driving for Lyft more than a decade ago, said in his early days, he would sometimes make $400 in three hours. Now it takes 12 hours to rake in $200.
The San Francisco Bay Area consultant is an active member of the California Gig Workers Union, so he knows he isn’t alone. California has more than 800,000 gig rideshare drivers, according to the group, which is affiliated with the Service Employees International Union.
On social media sites such as Reddit and Facebook, gig workers have posted about how the higher gas prices are eating into their earnings. Among the tricks they are suggesting: reducing the number of times the ignition is turned on or off, avoiding traffic, working in specific neighborhoods and at times with high demand and switching to electric vehicles.
Gig drivers usually have only seconds to decide whether to accept a ride on the app, but they have become more strategic about which rides and deliveries they accept.
That means they are more likely to sit back in their cars and wait for higher fares for quick pick-up and drop-off.
“I highly recommend the ‘decline and recline’ strategy, rejecting unprofitable rides until a better one appears,” wrote Sergio Avedian, a driver, in the popular blog the Rideshare Guy.
Pedestrians cross the street in front of a Lyft and Uber driver on Wednesday. High gas prices have made it hard for gig drivers to make a living, cutting into their profits.
(Jess Lynn Goss / For The Times)
Uber, Lyft and other companies have unveiled several ways to help drivers save on gas.
Uber said drivers can get up to 15% cash back through May 26 with the Uber Pro card, a business debit Mastercard for drivers and couriers. Based on a worker’s tier, they can get up to $1 off per gallon of gas through Upside — an app that offers cash rewards — and up to 21 cents off per gallon of gas with Shell Fuel Rewards. The company also offers incentives for drivers who want to switch to electric vehicles.
“We know the price of gas is top of mind for many rideshare and delivery drivers across the country right now,” Uber said in a blog post about its gas savings efforts.
Lyft also said it’s expanding gas relief through May 26 because the company knows that the extra cost “hits hardest for drivers who depend on driving for their income.”
The company is offering more cash back, depending on the driver’s tier, for drivers who use a Lyft Direct business debit card to pay for gas at eligible gas stations. They can get an additional 14 cents per gallon off through Upside.
Drivers say the fine print on the offers dictates which card they use and where they fill up gas, making it difficult for them to save money.
“If I do the math, it’s ridiculous,” Mejia said. “They’re offering us nothing.”
Uber declined to comment, but pointed to its blog post about the gas relief efforts. Lyft also referenced the blog post and said “the gas savings were structured through rewards to maximize stackable opportunities.”
Guests at The Westin St. Francis hotel get into an Uber.
(Jess Lynn Goss / For The Times)
Gig workers have struggled with rising gas prices in the past.
In 2022, Lyft and Uber temporarily added a surcharge to their fares amid record-high gas prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This year, Uber is adding a fuel charge to its fares in Australia for roughly two months to offset the high cost of gas for drivers. Lyft said it hasn’t added a fuel charge in the U.S. or elsewhere.
Margarita Penalosa, who drives full time for Uber and Lyft in Los Angeles, started as a rideshare driver in 2017. Back then, gas was cheaper. She would easily hit her goal of making $300 in eight hours. Now she’s making just $250 after working as much as 14 hours.
Gas prices, she said, used to be less than $3 per gallon. Now some gas stations are charging more than $8 per gallon.
“Take out the gas. Take out the mileage from my car and maintenance. How much [do] I really make? Probably I get $11 for an hour,” she said.
Jonathan Tipton Meyers wants to spend fewer hours as a rideshare driver.
He already juggles multiple gigs even while driving for Uber and Lyft in Los Angeles. He’s a mobile notary and loan signing agent, a writer and performer.
Driving is “a very challenging, full-time job,” he said. “It’s very taxing and, of course, wages were just continually decreasing.”
John Mejia, a longtime Lyft and Uber driver, poses for a portrait before attending a meeting about unionizing gig drivers.
(Jess Lynn Goss / For The Times)
Even if oil continues to flow through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran reopened Friday, it could take a while for gas prices to come down to earth, said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.
“There’s an old adage that prices rise like a rocket and fall like a feather,” he said. “I think that’ll apply.”
In the meantime, it will be survival of the fittest drivers. If enough of them decide to leave the apps, the ride-hailing companies could be forced to raise fares further to attract some back.
“Those who approach rideshare driving strategically, tracking expenses, choosing trips carefully, and optimizing efficiency are far more likely to weather periods of high gas prices,” wrote Avedian in the Rideshare Guy blog. “For everyone else, a spike at the pump can quickly turn rideshare driving from a side hustle into a money-losing venture.”
The proprietor of Los Angeles’ legendary Clifton’s has given up on reopening the shuttered venue.
It’s just too difficult to do business in downtown’s historic core, he says.
Andrew Meieran bought Clifton’s on Broadway in 2010 and poured more than $14 million into repairs, renovations and upgrades, adding additional bar and restaurant spaces in the four-story building. In 2018, he found that demand for cafeteria food was too low to be profitable, and he pivoted to a nightclub and lounge concept called Clifton’s Republic, featuring multiple dining and drinking venues. Meieran has tried elaborate themed environments, such as a tiki bar and forest playgrounds, and renting out the location for big events to spark more interest.
It was never easy, but during and since the pandemic, the neighborhood has grown increasingly unsafe as downtown has emptied of office workers and visitors.
Storefronts are gated up due to vandalism in the historic district in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
The alley behind Clifton’s Cafeteria in the downtown historic district Tuesday.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
Vandalism has been rampant, with graffiti appearing on the historic structure almost daily. Vandals would use acid or diamond glass cutters to deface the windows, often cracking the glass. It would cost Meieran more than $30,000 each time to replace the windows. Insurance companies either stopped offering policies that covered vandalism or raised premiums by as much as 600%, he said.
There has been continuous crime in the area, he said, including multiple assaults on people in front of his building. He last shut the venue last year, hoping things would improve and he could come back with a business that could work. Now he has given up. Someone else may take over the space or even the name of the historic spot, but he is done trying.
“We’ve lost our way,” Meieran said. “I want to get up on the tops of the skyscrapers and yell that people need to pay attention to this.”
The disenchantment of a business leader who used to be one of downtown L.A.’s biggest backers shines a spotlight on the stubborn safety concerns, rising costs and thinner foot traffic that have made it increasingly difficult for even iconic businesses to survive.
The once-popular institution dates back to 1935, when it was a Depression-era cafeteria and kitschy oasis that sold as many as 15,000 meals a day when Broadway was the city’s entertainment hub.
It served traditional cafeteria food such as pot roast, mashed potatoes and Jell-O in a woodsy grotto among fake redwood trees and a stone-wrapped waterfall reminiscent of Brookdale Lodge in Northern California.
It’s not the only once-prominent destination that has failed to find a way to flourish in today’s market. Cole’s, one of L.A.’s most famous restaurants and often credited with inventing the French dip sandwich, closed last month after a 118-year run.
“The bigger problem for us and the rest of the industry is the high cost of doing business,” said Cedd Moses, who used to operate Cole’s and has backed many other bars and restaurants in historic buildings downtown for decades. “That’s what is killing independent restaurants in this city.”
Outside of Clifton’s Cafeteria.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
Clifton’s Republic owner Andrew Meieran stands next to a boat on the top floor of the historic restaurant in 2024.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
Clifton’s opened and closed repeatedly during the pandemic and, more recently, after a burst pipe caused extensive damage. Meieran opened it for special events such as last Halloween, but it has otherwise been closed.
Police are woefully understaffed and hampered by public policy, said Blair Besten, president of downtown’s Historic Core Business Improvement District, a nonprofit that arranges graffiti removal, trash pickup and safety patrols in the area.
Businesses and residents in the area would like to see a bigger police presence, but there have been protests against that by people who are not from downtown, she said.
“People are starting to see the fruits of the defunding movement,” she said. “It has not led us to a better place as a city.”
The Los Angeles Police Department is making progress downtown, Captain Kelly Muniz said, with violent crime down more than 10% from last year.
“While we’re working very hard to solve crime, to prevent crime, there are still elements such as trash, open-air drug use, homelessness and graffiti,” she said. “We’re swinging in the right direction.”
Retailers have been opting out of downtown L.A., said real estate broker Derrick Moore of CBRE, who helps arrange commercial property leases. Brands have headed to more vibrant nearby neighborhoods such as Echo Park and Silver Lake.
“A lot of operators are just electing to skip over downtown,” he said. “They’re leasing spaces elsewhere, where they feel they have a greater chance at higher sales.”
A man walks past a pile of trash left on the street in the historic district.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
While some businesses are struggling, many downtown residents say their perceptions of safety are improving and that the area is regaining some vibrancy.
“A lot of people live here. I think people forget that,” Besten said. “We’re all surviving. It’s just hard for all the businesses to survive.”
A green shoot for the Historic Core is Art Night on the first Thursday of every month, when 50 or 60 locations, including permanent art galleries and pop-up galleries in unused storefronts, display art to map-toting visitors who come for the occasion.
They often end up in Spring Street bars, which more typically thrive on weekend nights but are still a draw to downtown.
“I think nightlife will thrive downtown, since bars attract people that don’t mind a little grittier atmosphere,” said Moses. “Our sales are hitting new records at our bars downtown, fortunately, but our costs have risen dramatically.”
A closed sign for Clifton’s Cafeteria.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
Clifton’s former backer, Meieran, says he doesn’t think things are going to bounce back enough to warrant more massive investment. He has sold the building, and the owner is looking for a new tenant to occupy Clifton’s space. He still controls the Clifton’s name.
While there is still a chance he could let someone else use the name Clifton’s, Meieran is done for now — too many bad memories.
“There was a guy who was terrorizing the front of Clifton’s because he decided he wanted to live in the vestibule in front, and he didn’t want us to operate there,” Meieran said. “He would threaten to kill anybody who came through.”
He doesn’t believe official statistics that show crime and homelessness are way down in the area, and he doesn’t want to restart a business when criminals can so easily erase his hard work.
“What business that’s already on thin margins can survive that?” he said.
Trader Joe’s customers might soon get a payout from the popular grocery chain.
The Monrovia-based company agreed to a $7.4-million settlement in a class action lawsuit that claimed customers were left vulnerable to identity theft.
Customers who purchased items with a credit or debit card from March to July in 2019 might be eligible for a payment as part of the settlement.
The plaintiff alleged that some receipts printed in 2019 included 10-digit credit or debit card numbers —double what’s allowed under the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act.
Trader Joe’s “vigorously denies any and all liability or wrongdoing whatsoever,” the grocery chain said in the settlement website. The grocery chain decided to settle to avoid a long and costly litigation process.
The payout will go toward paying impacted customers as well as attorney fees and other expenses.
About $2.6 million will go toward attorney fees, and the plaintiff will receive a $10,000 incentive payment, according to the settlement. The remaining funds will be distributed evenly among customers who submit valid claims.
It’s unclear how much money each customer would get, but the payout could be about $102, according to the settlement notice.
To receive the payout, customers must have received a receipt displaying the first six and last four digits of the card number.
Some customers identified as part of the settlement class have been notified and received a class ID number to file a claim.
Customers have from now until June 6 to file a claim online or by phone.
A customer not identified in the settlement can still submit a claim by entering the first six and last four digits of the card used, along with the date it was used at Trader Joe’s.
Brian Keim, the plaintiff who brought the case, used his debit card at stores in Florida in 2019. He said some stores printed transaction receipts that included the first six and last four digits of customers’ card numbers.
The receipts did not include other personal information, such as the middle digits of the users’ cards, the cards’ expiration dates, or the users’ addresses. No customer has reported identity theft as a result of the receipts since the lawsuit was filed, the grocer said.
However, identity theft doesn’t require submitting a claim for payment.
The settlement was agreed upon by both the grocer and the plaintiff, but still has to be approved by a court. A hearing is set in August.
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