from Hacker News

Stripe to move to South San Francisco

by Croaky on 10/24/19, 4:16 AM with 419 comments

by dawg- on 10/24/19, 12:57 PM
I am not in the bay area, in fact I've never even been to the West Coast. So I am going to ask what may seem like a stupid question to some of you.
I mean this in as polite a way as possible, but why wouldn't established companies like Stripe just fuck off to another city entirely? It's a successful company with a great product - that I'm sure many people would like to work for. They could surely lure talent from the bay area by moving to a lower cost of living area where mid-level employees can afford to buy an actual house relatively close to work? And they could pull a mini-Amazon and get some sweet tax breaks to boot. Is there some hidden reason that companies like this insist on staying in the same area despite the many potential advantages of looking elsewhere?
by Decade on 10/24/19, 6:10 AM
What a completely unexpected consequence of the restrictions on office space, spearheaded by John Elberling of TODCO. /s
He is now trying to make office space even more restricted, and his allies are working to reduce office space alternatively by raising the fees on office construction. https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/SF-Mayor-SoMa-n... https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/10/22/sf-... (More about John Elberling: http://sfbamo.com/news/tenants-in-todco-property-allege-abus...)
San Francisco prevents office space from being abundant and cheap, and therefore the office jobs are being moved to counties with even worse jobs-housing balance, turning San Francisco into a bedroom community for (the richer individuals working in) the peninsula.
by pc on 10/24/19, 4:59 PM
Stripe cofounder here. Quick comment to say that we're excited about the move. South San Francisco is a cooperative and open-minded city. In being an infrastructure company, we have to take a long-term view, and we think this can be a good for many years. And while the Bay is tricky from a commuting standpoint no matter what the location, the the presence of a marina right beside this site opens up a lot of interesting new transportation options for us throughout the Bay.
by cjlars on 10/24/19, 4:46 AM
Articles misses that this is in response to SF's gross receipts tax. Payment processing is an ultra low margin business, no way they can compete while paying ~1% of revenues to the city.
by PopeDotNinja on 10/24/19, 5:16 AM
I can tell you recruiting for South San Francisco was way harder than recruiting for SF. If I lived in SF without a car, that'd be a deal breaker for me. They're going to start losing people, or see a huge spike in chronic working from home. I guess they have to move somewhere at some point, and no move is without trade-offs.
Regarding the gross receipts tax, couldn't they just move their HQ-on-paper to any place that doesn't have a gross receipts tax?
by dmode on 10/24/19, 6:05 AM
As someone who has worked in South SF for years, it is pretty bad for employees. It is a cultural wasteland with few restaurants or interesting things to do. Transit is also poor as both BART and Caltrain are in awkward locations. And the fog is worse. This will be like Uber’s move to Oakland, which got rolled back pretty quickly
by fierarul on 10/24/19, 6:58 AM
> Though Stripe also strongly opposed last November’s Proposition C, which raised business taxes to fund more homelessness services, the company said that wasn’t a major factor for the move.
It would be PR suicide for a company to admit that the increased tax to fund homlessness was a major factor for the move. To accounting though a tax is a tax.
by heymijo on 10/24/19, 6:34 AM
I find myself confused about the new tax and unwilling to invoke Cunningham’s Law to get clarity.
So I went to the source (I think) and it appears Stripe would have been taxed at 0.560% on its gross receipts. [0,1]
Assumptions: 1) Stripe would be classed as a “financial services” company per the law and subject to section 953.6 of the law 2) Stripe has gross receipts over $25 million
My confusion is the discussion of a 1% tax rate on gross receipts. I don’t see any business taxed at that rate and on this case neither Stripe nor Square would be.
[0] https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/gross-receipts-t... [1] http://library.amlegal.com/nxt/gateway.dll?f=templates&fn=de...
by brunoTbear on 10/24/19, 5:38 AM
I'm surprised to not see any current Stripe employees in here commenting on the move. Usually you'd see one of The Brothers Collison in a HN Stripe thread.
As a former Stripe (ex-Stripe?), I do buy the story of running out of room. That office is lovely, but they keep growing on a pretty steep curve, and the floors weren't as dense in there as you might imagine. Decidedly cool interior design tho!
by baby on 10/24/19, 6:44 AM
These days I was thinking about San Francisco and wondering how it had come to that. There’s so much demand, so many people want to move to SF, yet its population has barely moved in the last decade. Why is that?
If anything had gone right, SF should be a HK-like dystopian city filled with electronics and high-tech.
But instead we have a horizontally limited place, that is filled with homeless and restricts new advances like shared kick scooters.
It’s sad.
by forthwall on 10/24/19, 5:07 AM
Kilroy Oyster Point is a pretty inaccessible area from San Francisco, you would need to take a limited train via Caltrain that's around 40 minutes to get there. I'm pretty sure this is definitely a blowback from the gross receipts tax and nothing more, even for commuters from the Peninsula would still have to get to the really strange south SF station which is also only accessible via limited express...or commute into one the worst traffic corridors in the Bay Area.
by paxys on 10/24/19, 5:38 AM
The gross receipts tax was ridiculously misguided and is going to cause irreparable harm to the city's economy if not fixed. Square and other FinTech companies are most definitely next.
by the_watcher on 10/24/19, 4:48 PM
> “Taxes don’t have a lot of impact on business decisions. It’s something that has been exaggerated for years”
What a laughable comment, as anyone can just look at the overseas behavior of large companies to see how this is false.
by samcheng on 10/24/19, 5:15 AM
They spent a couple of years building a shiny new building, only to move out of it after a year?! What a waste...
by skybrian on 10/24/19, 5:09 PM
This is described as somehow bad news for San Francisco, but I don't see it. Load balancing can be good news both for the old location (less crowded, less competition for housing) and the new one.
Maybe it's counterintuitive for some, but San Francisco is nothing like a old Midwest factory town where reduced jobs and economic activity would be a serious issue. It would be even better if they had moved somewhere further away that needed the jobs and economic growth more, but this isn't a bad result.
by bernierocks on 10/24/19, 4:53 PM
“Taxes don’t have a lot of impact on business decisions. It’s something that has been exaggerated for years”
If I'm paying 50% in taxes as opposed to 10%, I will be making different business decisions.
Most SF startups incorporate in Delaware because of the low corporate taxes.
by carpol on 10/24/19, 6:52 PM
I find it disappointing that Stripe is moving to a development that is a housing wasteland.
Oyster Point was slated for 1,200 housing units, but biotech opposed them.
> The residential development proposal was met by resistance from representatives of the life sciences industry though, with claims residents living in the area could make it less attractive to businesses.
https://www.smdailyjournal.com/news/local/new-builder-buys-o...
by tlavoie on 10/25/19, 6:14 AM
You know, the more I read about this sort of thing, the more I appreciate working for a company with a strong remote-friendly culture.
It's not universal within the organization, but _very_ common in the tech groups I interact with. All this talk about whether one can have pleasing weather vs cost of living highlights that for some, having both is quite possible.
I'm on Canada's west coast, so Vancouver (with crowding, culture and cost) is my nearest approximation to the Bay area. Being at or near HQ is irrelevant when remote work is common-place, and very occasional travel ceases to be a big deal.
by laurencerowe on 10/24/19, 6:59 PM
Expect this to add at least an hour a day to the commutes of those employees living in East Bay. Oyster Point is a long way from the Bart station. The fastest option will be to change to the shuttle at Glen Park. The ferry is nice for those who live near the terminal, but slower than Bart and shuttle for everyone else.
On a more positive note the Caltrain station is closer, so the East Bay commute could improve significantly in 20-30 years if the Caltrain to Oakland tunnel is ever built.
by hellllllllooo on 10/24/19, 5:02 PM
Stripe CEO was actively against paying taxes to support SF homeless through Prop C. This isn't suprising.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Tech-moguls-wor...
by abalone on 10/24/19, 8:50 AM
This blows, not so much because Stripe is leaving SF, but because it's going just over the border for tax purposes so 100% of employees who live in SF will stay in SF. The company just won't pay their fair share to the city to offset their impact.
The line about this being about space and not taxes is hard to believe.[1] And for good reason. Last year Stripe funded an anti-homeless campaign just $1 shy of the reporting threshold, initially, until they were exposed.[2] That's not something you do if you're proud of sharing your true motivations.
[1] https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/affordable-housing-fee-hike-...
[2] https://missionlocal.org/2018/10/orgy-of-big-money-donations...
by Tempest1981 on 10/24/19, 7:25 AM
Can't wait until we learn how to work remotely. Would save a ton of resources.
by isuckatcoding on 10/24/19, 5:44 AM
Or you know they could move to a much more accessible and cheaper city like Oakland
by sneeze-slayer on 10/24/19, 10:29 AM
Are there good bike paths in San Franciso? It seems like the weather is good enough for year-round biking, which would be a big plus.
by paggle on 10/24/19, 5:20 AM
SF won't care as it is the only major American city that seems to want fewer high paying jobs.
by olingern on 10/24/19, 4:39 AM
> The company will move more than 1,000 employees just 10 miles south of its current South of Market headquarters, which it plans to vacate.
Click bait. They're moving ten miles south of their current office ...
by eternalny1 on 10/24/19, 12:23 PM
Why are all these companies in San Francisco?
Because that's where it was the place to be for cool tech companies, start-ups, and venture capitalism.
Now that companies realize they can just move to Witchita, Kansas or wherever else they want, they will.
by joshe on 10/24/19, 11:58 AM
It's a disappointingly boring corporate campus (the second photo in the article) for a well run company with lots of smart people.
The rendering shows a sad 1990's office park, complete with a path winding artificially along the water, office windows overlooking parking lots, and useless lawn accents that no one will ever play on. Imagine the desolate dystopian feeling when you came in to do a few hours work on a Saturday.
We should have the will, talent, and state capacity to build more San Francisco style urban landscape. High prices cause San Francisco's worst problems. More high quality urban areas would make these areas cheaper and more people could enjoy them.