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It was largely driven by Millenials, who wanted to work in cities whether they're founding or working for a startup. YCombinator (itself based in Mountain View) found that most of their startups preferred to locate in SF, oftentimes many of them in one building. At one point there was the "YScraper", the Crystal Tower building in North Beach that was home to Justin.TV (parent of Twitch/SocialCam/Cruise), Xobni, Weebly, and Scribd. Also your list of South Bay startups is pretty incomplete - there's also WhatsApp (Mountain View), Box (Redwood City), Coursera (Mountain View), Khan Academy (Mountain View), Tesla (Palo Alto, with manufacturing in Fremont), the Signal Foundation (Mountain View), RobinHood (headquarters is Menlo Park, not SF), Zoom (San Jose), GoFundMe (Redwood City), Carbon3D (Redwood City), WealthFront (Palo Alto), Impossible Foods (Redwood City), Roblox (San Mateo), and GoPro (San Mateo). I do agree that the center of gravity of the valley moved northwards in the 2010s though. Prior to then, it was debatable whether SF was even really part of the valley, while since then it's been a major tech hotspot. |