[logfromblammo]

Why are sales and rental prices so high? Because demand is rising faster than available stock is increasing.

Why is demand rising so fast? Because people are moving there.

Why are people moving there? Because that's where their employers want them to work.

Why are employers locating there? For some, prestige address. For others, proximity to investment capital.

What does proximity have to do with investment? Couldn't a VC gain competitive advantage by locating in some other city that doesn't have such vicious competition for unicorns?

I don't have an answer to that. It doesn't make sense to me as a strategy, because I have incomplete information.

[Nasrudith]

It isn't for a lack of trying. Attempts to go too cheap have ended in failure typically - people don't want to move to the middle of nowhere for a one company job when they have a nice well of employment already. The network effect is very real in a that critical mass of workforce talent can provide concrete advantages. That said moving to the fringe of the network seems to be a good move to get the best of both worlds if possible - Palo Alto was once the cheap option.

It probably is inflated due to ego - Juicero certainly didn't need significant talent (or have it for that matter) but if you are developing something that needs complexity like say self driving cars or their parts it could pay off.

[jamie_ca]

> Why are employers locating there?

Also, proximity to talent. If all the other game developers are in the same area, it's easier to recruit employees with "come work for us, we're 2 blocks east" than it is with "come work for us, we'll pay relocation expenses".

For developers in general, remote work is an option, but specifically for the highly-collaborative creative work that goes on in game dev (and especially the genre Telltale was running) a remote culture is a _lot_ harder to get right.

[logfromblammo]

Workers follow the jobs. Where do you think all the L1s, H1Bs, O1s, TNs, and the people from other US cities come from?

About 50% of the people I meet moved here from somewhere else. It's easy to recruit people with "Come work for us. We can't give you more money, but we can offer more purchasing power, which is better. The homes within a 15 minute drive of the office--even at rush hour--are less than $1500/month."

For their story-heavy games, it seems like Telltale might have done okay with a location near the Georgia film industry, especially with the Walking Dead television show operating out of Riverwood Studios in Senoia, south of Atlanta.