Report: 96.9% of Bay Area tech startups remained in the region in 2020; of those that moved, 21% moved to New York, 21% to other parts of CA, and 12% to TX
Annabelle Williams / Insider : Tweets: @lenny_mendonca , @jaycuthrell , @producercities , and @abrams Tweets: Lenny Mendonca / @lenny_mendonca : “A new survey throws cold water on a popular storyline about a mass exodus from Silicon Valley. While much has been made of the reported exodus of technology firms from SF ... 96.9% of startups stayed in the Bay Area during 2020.” Pesky facts #exodushype https://www.businessinsider.com/ ... Jay Cuthrell / @jaycuthrell : Patiently awaiting the survey that digs into the truly burning question we're all asking: What percentage of Bay Area startups moved from studio and one bedroom offices into arguably more affordable two bedroom offices with more natural light on the other side of the building? https://twitter.com/... Jim Russell / @producercities : Pittsburgh shows up in two top-10 tables for VC investment growth: “Tech's Great Migration: Insights to Emerging Tech Hubs Across the US” https://telstraventures.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Jonathan Abrams / @abrams : Reports of tech companies leaving Silicon Valley ‘greatly exaggerated’ https://www.businessinsider.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
The exodus storyline built through 2020: after tech giants introduced work-from-home guidelines and floated salary adjustments, coverage assumed startups would follow their workers out of the Bay Area. This survey is the first hard check on that assumption — 96.9% of Bay Area tech startups stayed put in 2020, and among the tiny share that moved, no single destination dominates (21% New York, 21% elsewhere in California, 12% Texas).
The finding matters because it separates two things the exodus narrative conflated: individual workers relocating and companies relocating. Subsequent reporting bore this out — workers who quit the Bay Area began trickling back as Twitter reopened its SF HQ and Google planned expansion, and by 2024 investors and founders were flocking back to San Francisco amid the AI boom.
First-order effects
- Founders and investors treating relocation to Austin or Miami as a live strategic option get a data-backed counterweight: at the startup level, moving was a rounding error, so location decisions driven by exodus headlines were solving a problem only 3.1% of companies had.
Second-order effects
- Emerging hubs' growth math gets exposed as base-effect dependent — PitchBook's later tally showed Miami's 278% jump landing on just $5.39B against Silicon Valley's $74.9B, meaning destination cities were winning share of a small flow, not draining the core.
- Salary-decompression pressure from remote-work policies lands differently on startups than giants: with headquarters staying put, the compensation arbitrage argument for leaving weakens, pushing the real battleground to where talent chooses to live rather than where firms incorporate.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — startups sticky, workers mobile but reversible — regional concentration proves more durable than the pandemic-era dispersion thesis suggested, with the Bay Area's later AI-boom rebound confirming that proximity to capital and talent networks outlasts temporary worker exits.
The trend: Tech geography is proving stickier than the remote-work era predicted: workers move and return while startup hubs retain gravity, making headline-driven relocation waves a minority phenomenon.