Originally posted as a Twitter thread on December 25, 2020
Real Estate: location location location
Startups: timing timing timing
Obviously none of this is to discount the teams that make real estate projects or startups successful 🙂 But right team + wrong timing or right team + wrong location != success
Originally posted as a Twitter thread on December 02, 2020
Are high salaries the *cause* or *effect* of expensive housing? In NIMBY-prone areas (hello SF!) where supply is artificially constrained, companies anchored to the geography need to pay a high enough wage to attract talent, which then anchors rent/mortgage payments
Prediction: the current remote-work salary adjustment concept, the Marxian “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his location,” will not last. Why pay people more simply because they choose to live in a more expensive area? Pay them more if they are good!
So looking at lower-cost areas, and paying a discount to prevailing SF wages to get to “parity,” is a crutch of sorts to get to a more sensible end-state: pay a prevailing wage to get the talent. And then let’s see what happens to housing prices…
Home prices will always be based on supply and demand, of course – WFH doesn’t change economics. But “desired location to live” is going to drive that more than “high wage employers” — where those wages could conceptually plummet given increase in supply (global worker pool)