We’ve all seen a lot of press lately about people pulling up stakes from San Francisco and the Bay Area to move to places like Austin and Miami.

How much of that is true, I really don’t know.

At the same time, the defenders of the Bay Area argue that “well, Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley and there’s only 1.”

When you think about SF and the booming economy, at least this go round, I think about the dot com era. I don’t know what SF was like before that, but the histories I’ve read of the Bay Area and the Valley more so seem to imply that it wasn’t the bubbling tech enclave that it has become today.

The dot com era made SF the tech capital of the world. That success, however, led to the super high rents, long commutes, and high costs associated with the area today…not to mention the wealth inequality.

It became a victim of its own success, but until Covid, there was nothing to stop the inertia.

Now, of course, everyone realizes that location and tech-based value creation are no longer synonymous.

Meanwhile. the crypto tech boom, which we can point to the 2017 ICO craze as the seminal moment, has already been living that model. Most of the top projects are not located in SF and many of them are not US based.

This revolution is global and decentralized.

And it was 3 years ahead of the rest of the world.

It makes me wonder if we are watching the paradigm fully shift as decentralized networks and decentralized work both come to maturity in the same decade.

The Roaring Decentralized 20s?

I had originally wanted to tie the idea of “victim of its own success” to the possibility that Ethereum may suffer the same fate, but the post went in a different direction.

Such is the process.

Have a great day.