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Patrick Collison tells people in their 20s to not move to San Francisco.
William largely agrees with him. He thinks SF has a consensus problem and has removed the risk from becoming a founder:
"I'm a product of Silicon Valley. I started Plaid back in 2012. I've been there since I was 21, and it's very easy to stay in Silicon Valley.
But you can start to get isolated and get very consensus focused. San Francisco is probably the most consensus place I've ever been to. That is both a huge crutch for us, but it's also probably the most valuable asset.
As a founder, if you're building in something that SF believes is very consensus, but the world does not believe yet, that's actually a great operating environment. That's why Silicon Valley and SF are so dynamic and we're so in front of the curve. But we also have completely lost touch with how the rest of the world operates. Even how the everyday American operates.
So I think it's very important to go to places that don't have that same bias. If you think about emerging markets specifically – the founders who build there, they're the everyday people, they live in this constrained society.
They're constrained in a way that San Francisco and New York isn't. And that breeds a different type of creativity, it breeds a different type of innovation that you really can't get anywhere else. If you go to talk to people in London or Vienna or San Francisco, people are living in a world of abundance. And that causes a very specific creation cycle.
SF and Silicon Valley are probably more akin to Wall Street in the 1990s than they are like a research lab in Cambridge in like the 1950s. Maybe that was Silicon Valley in the 90s, but it's not anymore.
You talk to a 23-year-old and assuming you're like moderately competent and went to the right high school and college, you're going to get a $3 million seed round. And worst case scenario, you can go work at like a great company as an engineer and you'll have "founder" on your resume. There is no risk in that proposition.
If you go back to pre-2008, you're on the edge of the knife, and I think that creates just so much intensity in creativity and fear that is such a critical part of the founder journey.
Starting companies is just too f**king safe, and it's caused a lot of companies to be super safe companies -- like we're going to pivot to AI and wrap OpenAI/Anthropic. That's not bold, that's not ambitious.
And it's because we are attracting founders that actually want to be employees. They don't think and say "if I don't pull this off, I'm going to become bankrupt. My life is over." I think that's pretty healthy. That's when you bring out the rawness of humanity. And I don't see that very much anymore."
