Guide to where your cofounders should live in the SF Bay

+1 for the mission. moved to a studio here 2 months ago (from Atlanta) and love the area. Amazing restaurants everywhere. tons of great coffee shops to work out of. Mission Beach Cafe, Four Barrel Coffee, Ritual Coffee Roasters. Bi-Rite market has amazing sandwiches (and the creamery has great ice cream). Delfina Pizzeria is fantastic. Frjtz has great fries (get the thai chili ketchup!). Limon has some nice bbq chicken appetizers and they know how to make a capirinha. Luna Park has holy-shit-amazing warm goat cheese fondue (and some great smores). Random mediterranean place on 16th &#38; mission does great shwarma for a few bucks. A short walk up to hayes valley has Patxi's pizza, La Boulange and Samovar Tea Lounge, where you'll often find Kevin Rose.<p>However -<p>I'm in a good part of the mission (near dolores) and every other day there is new graffiti on my building, trash everywhere on the streets and broken glass here and there.<p>related: my moving to SF post <a href="http://paulstamatiou.com/atlanta-to-san-francisco-moving-cross-country" rel="nofollow">http://paulstamatiou.com/atlanta-to-san-francisco-moving-cro...</a>

Palo Alto, if you can pick the right property, also has the benefit of metro fiber. If you can find a house or office on the right street (Waverly, a few others; ask at City Hall, the fiber utility guy is awesome), you can pay about $2-3k to get linked in, and then have your own fiber for $600/mo from home/office to PAIX. From there, it's pretty easy to get a wave crossconnect to one of the big datacenters in SF or the Peninsula.<p>For me, I'm willing to pay the extra $1k/mo to rent a house in Palo Alto vs. Mountain View or Menlo Park specifically so I can do this. Having fiber directly to your colo, when you're working on big data, moving virtual machines, etc., is amazing. If you live with cofounders and use it as an office, or live with 3-4 other people and split the cost, it really isn't that bad.<p>Otherwise, I look for Web Pass connected buildings up in SF, or buildings that have IP Networks fiber over PG&#38;E. Those are mainly in SoMA, although some in the east bay around Emeryville/Berkeley/Oakland.

The funny thing here is that I'm Garry's cofounder, and I don't live in any of the neighborhoods he recommends. Maybe he's trying to tell me to move :)<p>When Garry and I moved to SF to start Posterous, we moved to SOMA since apartments are abundant and it's startup central. But I found little value in being near other companies. What I did find was a lack of food and culture.<p>Posterous first got offices in North Beach. I really LOVE North Beach. There's amazing food and it's a beautiful part of town. Plus Jam Legend is there.<p>+1 for the Mission. We love our new offices. Much cheaper than anywhere else in the city, most people can walk to bike to work, tons of great food, near Bart. We couldn't ask for much more.<p>However, one point of disagreement with Garry's map: you can't simply write off everything north of Market. Sometimes it seems like people south of market (SOMA and Mission) don't cross north as much as they should. There's a lot of city up there!<p>San Francisco is one of the greatest cities in the world. If you decide to base your company here, don't optimize to be close to Twitter. Optimize to be in a vibrant neighborhood with great food and great culture.<p>Believe me, even north of market, you will have no problem immersing yourself in startup culture and surrounding yourself with more tech entrepreneurs than you can handle.

Don't forget Berkeley: affordable, interesting, and very easy to get to SF. (Only a 25 min BART ride.)<p>I would never again live in Mountain View because it's too damn boring. Palo Alto might be tolerable.

I moved to the Inner Richmond (sort of by accident, long story) and I'm surprised at how great the neighborhood is. It may be better just for living, but I think it could be practical for a penny-pinching startup too.<p>- Much cheaper rents<p>- Services: lots of restaurants, especially Asian, many open very late (you have lots of options even from midnight to 3AM), bookstores, bars.<p>- If you pick your location properly (close to California or Geary, and near certain stops) you can catch express buses to and from downtown at peak hours. 20-25 min to a BART station or SOMA. Off-peak it's more like 30-40 min.<p>- Unlike SOMA, my cell phone works here ;)<p>- Downsides: no techie neighbors, except Archive.org who recently took over the old Christian Science building on Park Presidio &#38; Clement.<p>Just generally, the place feels like a real neighborhood rather than some sort of Potemkin village constructed for yuppies or hipsters. That's important to me, anyway.

Pretty cool map.<p>One note: I discourage Millbrae. I grew up there and it was on the boring side of things, while still being a tad pricey. My life is (somewhat) more exciting living in northeastern Sunnyvale (near Hacker Dojo), and rent is dirt cheap (as low as $450/person). Also, for the carless, biking is much better in Sunnyvale/Mountain View than Millbrae.

What is the most ghetto part of SF? Like if you had absolutely no fear of getting stabbed by a crackhead girlfriend and your kidneys being harvested if you roll down your windows, where would you live?<p>Also, does one need to show some type of credit report or can one just come in with a bunch of cash and wave it around and get a place?

"amazing startup vibe (literally buzzing)"<p>Either they have an electrical problem or you misused the word "literally".

As a current Berkeley student / start-up intern, I would definitely recommend looking into living on the north side of Berkeley. The neighborhood is quiet and the city is only a short (25 min) BART ride away.

Not even a mention of where YouTube grew up? Downtown San Mateo is pretty nice. Thread is there as are a bunch of other smallish startups.<p>Foodwise, there are plenty of options though in my estimation there is one great hot pot place "Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot", a shabu-shabu place, what seem to be three(?) izakaya places and several ramen shops, too.

I like how it's broken out and a nice basic list of what is good and bad for a startup / hacker, but for most people won't it come down to cost? What they can comfortably and reasonably afford?<p>I have never been to California, but I want to check it out someday, possibly give a try as a place to live for a while. I quick googled apartments in Palo Alto because it sounded like the ideal location for me. The cheapest one I saw looked exactly like the place I have now but was &#62; $1000 / month (counter tops, layout, size, etc). I'm currently paying $475 for one of the better 1 br here (Oklahoma). The most expensive I have seen is &#60; $900 here for a 1 br in the newest upscale places with every little bill paid included.<p>So, unless the pay is significantly higher for the same work that I'm making here, I want to know how people deal with the cost of living in the areas provided in this link? Do you live paycheck to paycheck? Do you save much (I'm saving about 2/3 of my paycheck each month)? I wouldn't want to live in a rundown area with holes in the wall (I have lived in such a place) eating only ramen or the cheapest ground beef on discount from the local grocer. Maybe I just should not be looking at Palo Alto.<p>I will check these areas when I take some time off to travel out there and I will be doing that someday, hopefully not too far in the future.<p>I'm grateful to the OP for providing this link. Living out here in OK, having never visited CA/SanFran this provides a better overview of the different parts of the area you often read about on here from people.

Soma is "Most yuppie / soulless area to live in SF" ?<p>When I was there, that was the Marina / Cow Hollow. Funny how quickly things change. When I moved down there in 1999, a friend of a friend told me to avoid SOMA if I "didn't like getting stabbed", but I guess that's mostly been gentrified at this point. It was already starting to improve back then.

This maps excludes lots of livable areas in SF like Hayes Valley, Lower Haight, and the Duboce Triangle (where Justin.tv was, many moons ago).<p>If you don't care about access to public transit then I think its totally reasonable to expand that to places like Nob Hill or North Beach.<p>It also excludes all of College Terrace in Palo Alto.

I came close to signing a lease for a place across the street from the Glen Park BART station before choosing Berkeley. The Glen Park area seems underrated.

I'll throw out my vote for the Haight and Hayes Valley in SF, they're pretty laid back, and there's surprising number of tech people.<p>Just ignore all the 18 year old fauxbos in upper Haight, theyre harmless.

I love the "Most yuppie / soulless area to live in SF" aka SoMA. It's also the most practical.

I'm moving to SF in 10 days and I'd like to know the best way to go about securing an apartment. I've been trolling Craigslist for a couple weeks but have not received one response despite in-depth emails. Should I just have my credit report, a couple grand and the ability to drop everything and go look at a place? My friend (who, unfortunately for me, is moving from the Mission to Berkeley) suggested that a lot of people just leave things 'til the last minute. Any insight would be appreciated.

This is a great map. I'm considering moving from Europe to SV after my work contract expires to do a startup...so really useful.<p>It would be very cool to get a similar map of HN startup locations, IT giants' original garage (YouTube etc), well known web 2.0 startups locations etc....obviously some of these won't be easily available due to founders not willing to divulge their location...would still be cool all the same.

Berkeley all the way. North side of campus is quiet and cheap, and I'm sure you can get rent down to the $700s if you share a house/apartment. It's also close to all the engineering buildings, so any interns you want to hire will be within shouting distance. South side has more (cheap) food options though, but it's also less quiet and more messy (Telegraph, etc).

Anyone looking for a place to stay, send me an email. There is an extra room available in my 5BR house in North Berkeley, available right now. ~$750/month +utilities.<p>Live with hacker types, and... me. If you're interested, send me an email and tell me about yourself, what you're looking for in a housing situation, etc.

What's the north side of Mission Bay like? I'm not in SF, but "strolling" down Berry on Google Maps, it seems like it's <i>really</i> nice. Anybody on HN live in that area?

Hi, I'm bootstrapping, just recently moved to SF. Generally clueless of the goings'on around here other than there's stuff goings'on. What should I check out?

I will go out on a limb here and say you live in Berkeley. The description should read "Recommended for foodie hackers who don't mind hippies and homeless."

Here's a sweet mashup, was posted to Netted yesterday:<p><a href="http://nabewise.com/sf/nabefinder" rel="nofollow">http://nabewise.com/sf/nabefinder</a>

i think there is a bug in his description of the mission. i think Garry meant to say east of valencia

This is sort of silly. You can put your start-up anywhere in San Francisco and be reasonably close to the start-up community. The only real benefit to being in SOMA that I see is that it's easier to stumble to events straight after work like SFBeta, New Tech, or any of the various tech parties that happen within 3 blocks of Moscone (including but not limited to conference related parties). Having lived and worked at 3rd &#38; Folsom for the past year and a half, I've become somewhat tired of spending so much time around the start-up community. All restaurants within 3 blocks of my apartment are filled with people talking about Twitter, constantly.<p>A cool start-up would get office space in the Outer Richmond so you can hike around Land's End every day before you start working, or maybe up in Nob Hill so you're essentially forcing your employees to use public transit some part of the day, giving them that 15 minutes of zen before work.

perfect