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How to Find a Bay Area Start-up Location

Do you want to play with the big guns on the peninsula, go with the flow in SoMa, or carve out a different niche in the East Bay?

After a decade working in the technology field in San Francisco, and five subsequent years selling commercial real estate there, Alan Bernier decided mesh his skills by starting a website to match small business owners with Bay Area office space.

"What I found in real estate was that it was not only difficult for a business that needed a smaller space, but more difficult for a broker or landlord to market a smaller space as well," he says.

Soon enough, Bernier also had to practice what he preached.

After starting Rofo.com out of a space he and his co-workers shared with eight other start-ups, Bernier decided Rofo needed a bigger, more official, home. Three months ago, the 10 staffers relocated from outlying San Francisco neighnorhood of Potrero Hill to the pricier – and more business-dense – Financial District.

"Yes, we are eating our own dog food," he says. "We made the site, but we are also using our site. We found a great space for 10 people super cheap in an area that might have been too expensive for us otherwise."

But Bernier will be the first to admit that the Financial District is hardly a good fit for most start-ups. Finding a first home in the promised land for start-ups, the Bay Area, can be daunting – and, experts say, should have as much to do with the nature and personality of your organization as pricing and space availability.

Locating a Bay Area Start-up: Know Thyself

Like the proverbial faith, hope, and charity, let's be real: most start-ups begin at home. Where that home is located might not seem to make a big difference, but proximity to the right influences – whether it's business incubators, inspiring peers, or great burritos and French cinema – can matter. A lot.

Garry Tan, a founder of blogging site Posterous (and a 2010 class member of the Inc. 30 Under 30) has worked from an array of San Francisco homes, shared working spaces, and currently, a formal office. Considering himself an expert on the subject, Tan posted a Google map rich with descriptions of start-up friendly neighborhoods around the Bay Area.

He admits he's posting to advise any "team of two or three startup founders looking for a nice two- or three-bedroom place to live and start the company of your dreams." The qualities he recommends one should look for in a neighborhood are: proximity to the start-up community, ease of access to food, and ease of transit. He also advocates avoiding distractions such as nightlife, friends, or, well, anything that might prevent you from coding all day and night.

"That's one of the reasons I really recommended the Mountain View area, is that you don't have any distractions," he says. "There are great grocery stores, great produce, but it's moreover a great place to shut the world out. And that's the most important thing when you're just two or three guys who just quit their jobs and need to focus."

And some business incubators and funders seem to agree. Tan suggests that Y Combinator has cautioned some start-ups it works with to stay away from San Francisco in favor of less urban – and less potentially distracting – pastures.

If peers who will motivate you to work harder, or stimulate your hacking creativity, are your need, think toward Stanford. Palo Alto is rich with start-ups ("literally buzzing," Tan writes), and creativity. It's also a place dense with street life, but tamed by academia. It's also home to lots of angel investors and venture capitalists.

There are exceptions. Tan's Posterous – after working out of an apartment building's conference room for months, and then a shared work space in the currently swanky former favorite neighborhood of San Francisco Beat culture, North Beach – in mid-2010 relocated to a 3,500 sq. ft. office in the hipper, more central, Mission District. So much for no distractions: their neighborhood is lined with bars, cafes, and late-night taquerias.

"For us, it's not that important for us to be right where other start-ups are. We are pretty freestanding," Tan says. The perks? "Most of us live less than a quarter mile from here. We all like the food and the neighborhood."

Posterous is also consciously bucking a start-up supposition by rooting in the Mission. Much of the social-media crowd is centered around the more industrial, less foot-traffic-friendly South of Market (SoMa) district. Tan figures, hey, if we're making social software, we should be at home in a social neighborhood.

Dig Deeper: How to Pick a Site for Your Business

Locating a Bay Area Start-up: Know The Neighborhoods

If you're not fresh to the start-up ground zero that is the Bay Area, you have the luxury of getting to know the neighborhoods of San Francisco and its surrounding areas. Just walking around as much ground as you can cover can acquaint you to the territory better than just online searching, Bernier recommends. But the actual property hunt isn't based on For Rent signs, it's very much on Craigslist and other property rental sites.

The start-up landscape, though carved out during the 90s dot-com boom, has vastly changed over the past decade. While San Francisco's Potrero Hill was a hub of start-up activity, its only now regaining strength as a tech center. Today, among warehouses, cafes, and artists' studios, Zynga is based in Potrero Hill. So is Tripit.

Read more:

San Francisco's Best Hotels for Business Travel

Surviving Amidst the Seattle's Top Dogs

How to Start a Business in Los Angeles

Christine Lagorio

Christine Lagorio is a writer and reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Village Voice, and The Believer, among other publications. She is executive editor of Inc.com.

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