We all know tech and the SF Bay Area have both been hit hard. How relevant is our region now? It’s still leading in tech innovation and the tech talent pool!

Investment in tech is still coming in. The Bay Area received more investor funding than other cities. Last year “more venture capital funding went to Bay Area companies from July to September than to those based in New York, LA, Boston and Austin combined” (per SFGate, citing PitchBook). According to Carta’s Head of Insights, San Francisco leads in funding in 6 (out of 10) industries: SaaS, Biotech, Healthcare, Hardware, Consumer, and Med Devices. It was #2 in the other 4: Energy (Boston was #1), Fintech (NYC was #1), Edtech (NYC again), and Gaming (LA #1). And “if AI was an industry, the Bay Area would take the crown in a landslide.”

The Harvard Business Review puts San Francisco at the center of “the world’s leading high-tech hub and the anchor of its global innovation ecosystem.” While some workers have physically left SF, remote work enables it to still be “the center of a high-tech galaxy” with links to other cities. Its biggest (bidirectional) talent flows are with “superstar cities” LA and NYC (which have experienced “the most significant growth as startup hubs”). SF also has “significant talent flows with the smaller tech hubs of Seattle; Austin; Boston; Brooklyn, New York; and Portland, Oregon” and is globally connected with “international tech hubs like Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Tel Aviv, London, and Singapore.”

Glad I can say the VC community and Harvard Business Review vouch for SF’s continuing relevance.