Silicon Valley loses another tech icon

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Silicon Valley is losing another tech heavyweight: Keith Rabois, prolific startup investor, early exec at powerhouses such as Square, LinkedIn, Yelp, and PayPal, and longtime Bay Area resident. He tells me he is “moving imminently.”

Rabois revealed his decision to decamp during our conversation at the Meridian conference, an event hosted by the cryptocurrency-focused group Stellar Development Foundation. (Rabois, an investor in Stripe, joined Stellar’s board after Stripe made an investment in Stellar six years ago.)

“I think San Francisco is just so massively improperly run and managed that it’s impossible to stay here,” Rabois said. He believes he is not alone in giving up on the Bay Area, a place he has called home for two decades. He cited anecdotal evidence about many people in his social circles leaving, and noted, “COVID sort of masks this stuff. It’s not quite as obvious where people are moving to and if they’ve actually moved since everybody’s working remotely.”

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Data from Opendoor (which Rabois cofounded) and rival firms like Zillow reveal a trend. “Bay Area searches for rent are in free-fall, they’re down like 30%,” Rabois said. In big cities like New York and Los Angeles, rental searches are also dropping like crazy, as people acknowledge “all of the downsides” of urban life—higher costs of living and closer quarters—with few of the mostly social upsides, he said.

“It’s very clear right now, people are shifting their preferences pretty massively,” Rabois said. He added, though, that it remains to be seen whether the trend will continue once a vaccine becomes widely distributed and cities are able to open back up.

So where is Rabois moving? Just in time to avoid a west coast winter, he’s buying a home in the sunshine state. “Miami is an incredibly beautiful city, cosmopolitan, has an interesting mix of New Yorkers, Latin Americans, and Europeans,” Rabois said of his soon-to-be-home. Oh, and, “There’s no state income tax.”

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