Building this in Los Angeles

I've been told to move the company to San Francisco roughly once a quarter for two years. The argument is always some combination of capital, engineering talent, and being where the conversation is.

All three of those are real. I've stayed in Los Angeles anyway, and I want to write down the reasoning while I still believe it, because if this company doesn't work someone will tell me the geography was why.

The supply side lives here#

Exposely sells access to people with audiences. Those people are disproportionately in Los Angeles, and it isn't close. Not because of some abstract creative-industry gravity — because this is where the entertainment business is, and the people building audiences on social platforms are either adjacent to that business, trying to enter it, or actively being recruited by it.

That means my supply side is reachable by driving. I can have coffee with someone who has 300,000 followers and find out in forty minutes whether they're serious, whether their audience is real, and what they actually want. I've done that a few hundred times now. That is my entire competitive advantage and it is not available remotely, at least not to me, at least not yet.

A version of this company in San Francisco would have better engineering and would be guessing about the thing I can just go look at.

The demand side doesn't care where I am#

Brands are everywhere. The marketing director buying this is in New York or Ohio or a suburb of Dallas, and they're buying over email and a call regardless. There is no version of this business where being in SF makes a brand more likely to sign.

The one thing SF would buy me is the funding conversation, and I've written elsewhere about why that ship has partly sailed for us. Proximity to capital matters enormously if you're going to raise. It's a rounding error if you aren't.

What it costs#

I'm not going to pretend this is free.

Hiring engineers is genuinely harder. Not impossible — LA has plenty of good people — but the density is lower and the good ones have more offers from companies with more money. Every technical hire has taken me longer than it should.

I'm outside the information flow. There's a version of industry knowledge that travels through in-person conversation months before it's written down anywhere, and I'm mostly not in those rooms. I find things out late. Sometimes that's fine. Occasionally it's expensive and I only notice in hindsight.

Nobody assumes you're serious. There's a status discount on companies outside the usual few zip codes, and it's applied by exactly the people who'd be useful — investors, press, potential senior hires. It's unfair and it's also just a fact you have to price in rather than complain about.

The general version#

I think the mistake isn't picking the wrong city. It's picking a city as an abstract question about startups rather than a concrete question about your company.

The right question is: what's the scarce input for this specific business, and where is it? If your scarce input is engineering talent or capital, the answer is obvious and you should go. If your scarce input is a supply side that physically clusters somewhere else, going to SF is optimizing the part you could have solved with money for the part you couldn't.

For Exposely the scarce input is people with real audiences who'll take a meeting. They're here. So I'm here.

If I ever build something where that isn't true, I'd move without much sentiment about it. Cities aren't a value system. They're where the thing you need happens to be.