- General
- November 23, 2020
- 5 minutes read
More Tech CEOs Decamp From SF
The CEOs of technology companies Splunk, Brex, and Dropbox are set to leave the city of San Francisco for other cities…
The CEOs of technology companies Splunk, Brex, and Dropbox are set to leave the city of San Francisco for other cities including Austin and Los Angeles, The Information reports. According to the technology news site, the CEOs of Dropbox and Splunk both recently purchased homes in the city of Austin, Texas and plan to make there their permanent residence.
Likewise, Brex’s 20-something co-founders Pedro Franceschi and Henrique Dubugras have decamped to Los Angeles and don’t plan to renew their fintech company’s San Francisco office lease next year, The Information reports.
The reported decampments from San Francisco point to a broader trend whereby a significant number of companies and entrepreneurs have left San Francisco, which is famous for housing numerous technology companies, to other cities. For such people, the city of Austin in Texas seems to be a major attraction and just recently took in a newcomer who is the Palantir co-founder and the founder of venture capital firm 8VC, Joe Lonsdale.
Lonsdale’s move came on the heels of the company he co-founded, Palantir, decamping from the city of Palo Alto to Denver in Colorado. Even before that, Palantir’s co-founder and Executive Chairman Peter Thiel had decamped from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
Additionally, Keith Rabois, an investor who works for the Thiel-founded firm Founders Fund, recently decamped from Silicon Valley to Miami, Florida.
The newly reported decampments of the CEOs of Dropbox, Splunk, and Brex are notable given that the three companies were born and bred in San Francisco. It seems that other cities are increasingly becoming attractive to other tech personalities and companies, Austin being a major one.
Over the years, more well-known tech startups have emerged outside Silicon Valley, which has long enjoyed the status of being a hotbed for successful technology companies. Now, with a coronavirus pandemic that has widely encouraged and propped up remote work, it seems that even more companies will follow suit as the talent that’s usually concentrated in the Silicon Valley region spread out to other places.
Photo: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston|by @cpe is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
