We bought a home 11 miles from the Googleplex in 2009 and paid it off in 15 years and did it on a single salary working in non-profit tech. Your assumptions here are deeply flawed or your reasoning is broken.
So, two years after the nearly existential crash of 2007 and only one year after Sequoia's famous "RIP Good Times" memo, when housing prices were at their absolute lowest and investment in the Bay Area was at its lowest ebb since at least the dot-com crash.
He was responding to the absurd assertion that nobody has bought a house in California in two decades. It’s not cheap but that’s pure hyperbole, and Asa was reminding him of that.
Just not sure how relevant that anecdote is.