Techcrunch - Silicon Valley's Real Estate Crunch Is A Golden Opportunity For Other American Cities lyrics

When Curse CEO Hubert Thieblot told his employees last year that he was moving the company's San Francisco headquarters to Huntsville, Alabama last year, they thought he was crazy. About 20 of his employees quit because they didn't want to relocate. “It was very controversial,” said Thieblot, who had lived and run the company out of San Francisco for at least five years. “A lot of people did not like me for that decision.” But today, the profitable, 110-person person company operates out of an Alabama city with a population of just under 200,000 people and the highest number of Ph.Ds per square mile given Huntsville's history with NASA as the nation's “Rocket City.” Curse just closed $16 million in funding earlier this week too from the China-centric venture firm GGV Capital. “If you want to build a long-term company, you might have a better chance of keeping people outside of San Francisco,” Thieblot said. “The job market is too crazy here.” Indeed, the cost of living and commercial real estate is also pricing smaller startups out of San Francisco. I'm seeing bootstrapped founders, who have yet to a take full round of funding, trickle into surrounding cities like Oakland, Daly City and the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco, if they're not considering urban hubs in other parts of the country altogether. Jon Wheatley, a British entrepreneur who co-founded DailyBooth, wrote a good post about this when he decamped for St. Louis, Missouri to dream up new projects.