In California overall, prices dropped year-over-year, as sales collapsed, supply more than doubled. No dear, this isn’t just a seasonal dip.

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

San Francisco and Silicon Valley are now in the solid leadership role of the housing bust playing out in California with sales collapsing and prices heading south from the peak in April at an astonishing pace.

Just about everything that could come together came together. After a two-year outflux of workers due to working from anywhere, there came the collapse of the startup and crypto scenes, starting in 2021 and continuing unabated, leading to the early entries into my pantheon of Imploded Stocks. In early 2022 came the spike in mortgage rates. In mid-2022 came the downturn in employment at Big Tech. By that time, the Fed had been hiking its policy rates relentlessly, and Quantitative Tightening had kicked off. This was punctuated over the past two months by the chaotic dismantling of the workforce at Twitter and its ecosystem.

Local budgets have fallen into deep deficits – although most are still flush with cash from the pandemic funds received from the federal government and the state.

Vacant office space that is on the market for lease and sublease continues to balloon, while landlords have started to file for huge reductions in assessment values ​​to lower their property taxes, which is going to cut revenues further.

This comes garnished by stories in the New York Times that Twitter stopped paying rent on its leased office spaces, and that it was instructed not to pay vendors. At least one of those unpaid vendors – a Silicon Valley company whose software Twitter had licensed – filed a lawsuit last week in the San Francisco Superior Court for nonpayment. It stated, “shortly after Musk’s purchase of Twitter closed, Twitter refused to pay the outstanding quarterly invoice, which was due on November 30, 2022, and Twitter disclaimed any obligation to pay any future invoices…”

These are all signs that the housing market is going to get a lot messier. Prices have plunged the most in San Francisco, followed by the Silicon Valley counties of San Mateo and Santa Clara.

In San Francisco.

The median price of single-family houses sold in November in San Francisco plunged by 11.4% from October to $1.50 million, and by 27% from the peak in April, according to the California Association of Realtors. A nasty-looking chart:

Condo prices plunged by 4.3% from the prior month to $1.15 million, and by 9.5% year-over-year. Since the peak in April, the median condo price is down by 15.5%. Condo sales in November have collapsed by 49%.

Seasonally, the lowest months are December and January. So that’s still to come.

But who is going to buy in the spring selling season? Prices normally rise as demand picks up in the spring; but who will be the exuberant tech workers that will want to overpay for a house by borrowing against the collapsed value of their stock options? Those lucky ones that still have jobs and stock options?

The housing markets in San Francisco and Silicon Valley are tied to the boom-and-bust cycles of the startup scene – now combined with the crypto scene and cryptos – and they’re tied to the stocks of startups and big tech and social media companies in the area, to the jobs that have to be done locally, and to the value of the stock options. All of them are puking.

Year-over-year, the median price of single-family houses in San Francisco plunged by 21%, the sixth month in a row of year-over-year declines. It was the biggest year-over-year plunge since the peak of Housing Bust 1:

Silicon Valley, San Mateo County.

The median price of single-family houses in San Mateo County, which forms the northern part of Silicon Valley, plunged by 6.2% from October to $1.78 million, and by 26% from the peak in April.

Year-over-year, the median house price plunged by 20%.

Silicon Valley, Santa Clara County.

Santa Clara County, which forms the southern part of Silicon Valley and includes the Bay Area’s largest city, San Jose, is lagging behind but is moving right along. The median price of single-family houses dropped by 1.5% in November from October to $1.60 million, and by 19% from the peak in April:

Year-over-year, the median house price dropped by 5.5%, the first significant year-over-year decline in this cycle. Prices had already undergone significant year-over-year declines in 2018 and 2019, and were on a downward path until the trillions in money-printing, the surge in the stock market, and the interest rate repression began to boost prices again.

Currently, Santa Clara County lags San Francisco and San Mateo by a few months, it seems.

In all of California.

Sales of single-family houses in California collapsed by 47.7% in November, compared to a year ago, the biggest decline since 1980, according to the California Association of Realtors. Condo sales collapsed by 46%.

Unsold inventory more than doubled year-over-year to a supply of 3.3 months, and days on the market also more than doubled – before sellers pulled the unsold homes off the market again.

For all of California, the median price of single-family houses plunged another 3.0% in November from October, which pushed the price down year-over-year (-0.6%). The median condo price fell 2.1% in November from October, which whittled down the year-over-year gain to just 2.7%.

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The post San Francisco & Silicon Valley Housing Markets Puke Enormous Worth Drops, as Startups, Crypto, Tech, Social Media Make Whole Mess appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

After a 21st-century gold rush created by big tech, downtown San Francisco is going to have to reinvent itself. Again.

The city of undulating streets, panoramic views, and booms and busts is now facing a major economic upheaval, as persistent crime, homelessness and high costs are keeping many tech office workers away, and making tech companies rethink their offices. While the city is lately portrayed as going through an apocalyptic descent into hell, this is really just another bad bust cycle for a downtown core that has experienced many before.

After a host of companies moved out in the 1980s, San Francisco saw the beginnings of an economic rebirth in the mid-1990s, when it became the hipper outpost of Silicon Valley, beginning with the dot-com boom with startups renting former industrial spaces in the then-low-rent South of Market district.

But the city became an extension of Silicon Valley for the first time in the past decade, as a generation of startups like Salesforce Inc.
CRM,
-1.70%,
Twitter Inc.
TWTR,
Pinterest Inc.
PINS,
-1.63%,
Uber Technologies
UBER,
+11.97%
and Airbnb
ABNB,
+2.00%
grew up, went public and stayed in San Francisco’s Financial District or nearby environs, as the city became a major hotbed of new tech, rivaling the Valley for software and mobile-app companies.

An even bigger change came from a massive influx of tech workers. So many tech workers decided to live in the city that Valley giants like Alphabet Inc.
GOOGL,
-4.27%

GOOG,
-4.39%
opened offices there, and shuttled their workers to offices in sleek but reviled buses from their San Francisco residential neighborhoods down the Peninsula to Google, Apple and Facebook headquarters in Mountain View, Cupertino and Menlo Park.

But as housing costs climbed, and homelessness and crime increased everywhere, the pandemic fueled a migration of about 7% of San Francisco’s population, or around 59,000 residents, to more affordable cities from April 2020 to July 2021, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Cities like Atlanta and Miami are becoming new tech centers, and rural towns in Montana and Wyoming are attracting dispersed tech workers and bosses. Even cities in the surrounding region such as Oakland, Berkeley and into the Sierra Nevada, are benefiting.

Now tech companies are joining their workers, scaling down their presence in San Francisco, shedding office floors and keeping a smaller, almost satellite presence in some cases. Sentiment in the city is depressed, as crimes caused by opioids and homelessness have turned many residents, possibly for good.

A recent poll by the San Francisco Chronicle found little hope among citizens in the city’s ability to fix its chronic problems, with most of the 1,653 people surveyed expressing worry, frustration and pessimism. But the mood is no better in the real Silicon Valley, where more than half the residents said in a recent poll that they plan to leave the region in the next few years, unchanged from last year’s poll.

San Francisco’s worker problem, though, is putting its economic engine — the downtown core — at risk. Karen Chapple, director of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto and professor emerita of City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, led a group of researchers to study economic recoveries of downtowns across the U.S. since the start of the pandemic.

San Francisco came in dead last.

“There will always be some interesting new tech phenomenon in San Francisco,” Chapple said. “Because of the nature of the beast and the smart people and the culture, it’s a magnet, but I don’t think you will see a huge scale-up anymore, with the Big Five taking millions of square feet in downtown San Francisco, I think that is probably over.”

Kelsey Bishop, founder and chief executive of Candor, a startup professional network to help co-workers connect in a remote environment, agrees. Bishop left San Francisco in 2021 and now divides her time between Lisbon and New Jersey, mostly working remotely.

“I think San Francisco is going to have a hard time recovering from this,” she said. “What we have seen, whether it is a hybrid model or not, people want to live in beautiful places…Why work in downtown SF? I frequently heard gunshots out there, I remember huddling under my desk because there was an active shooter outside.”

How the pandemic slapped San Francisco

The pandemic-era vibes dissipated last month, when San Francisco got a nice little economic boost from Salesforce Inc.’s
CRM,
-1.70%
Dreamforce, the largest in-person tech conference since the pandemic began. Many of the 40,000 attendees celebrating Salesforce and its products were spending money downtown in hotels and restaurants.

While the feeling of a bustling downtown was a nice diversion from the emptiness that the Financial District has largely felt during the pandemic, it was only a temporary infusion into San Francisco’s economy.

The city’s downtown Financial District and South of Market have some of the lowest office attendance rates in the U.S., and San Francisco’s commercial office vacancy rate was 23% in the third quarter, according to Cushman & Wakefield Research, the same level it reached in 2003 amid the fallout of the dot-com bust. Data from the UC Berkeley researchers indicated that Salt Lake City; Bakersfield, Calif.; Columbus, Ohio; and Fresno, Calif., were the top four recovering cities, based on cellphone data of workers returning to the office. More recent data since Labor Day from Kastle Access Control Systems, the card key entry company, found 39.7% of workers in San Francisco offices were back in the office, up from 14.7% a year ago. That data is compared to a pre-COVID baseline, Cushman & Wakefield noted.

A pedestrian walks down a quiet California Street in the Financial District of San Francisco on May 9.

Bloomberg News

SocketSite created a graphic of the amount of empty office space in San Francisco, showing the equivalent of 13.8 Salesforce Towers — the 1,070-foot-high skyscraper towering over downtown — is sitting unoccupied, based on 18.7 million square feet of vacant office space in the second quarter, including 5 million of sublease office space on the market. In the third quarter, that number grew to 19.9 million square feet of available space, according to Cushman & Wakefield.

“We need to re-envision how the city is structured,” said Jennifer Stojkovic, executive director of sf.citi, a tech trade association. “I think there has been a large number of legislative officials who have not taken the downtown recovery seriously. Most people were banking on things recovering by now.”

San Francisco’s proposed $14 billion annual budget is estimating an almost 6% drop in business taxes, to $902.3 million in fiscal 2022-’23, from $957.1 million in 2021-’22. But the city will make up those lost funds with an estimated $60 million in taxes from the newly enacted executive pay tax, a measure that sf.citi fought against.

“San Francisco has a Frankenstein tax system,” Stojkovic said, adding that all the recent tax measures voted on by the city were during boom times. “It was all based on the longest bull market in 100 years. We said we cannot keep adding all these taxes.”

The city is projecting that both sales taxes and hotel taxes will grow this fiscal year, but those numbers could prove to be optimistic if more business does not return. Another looming potential revenue loss, albeit temporary, could come from property owners who are appealing their property assessments with the city, arguing that their property taxes should be reduced to reflect lower assessed property values. Ted Egan, the city’s chief economist, said that there has been a large number of appeals filed, but they have not been heard yet. He noted that the reassessments are mostly being filed by newer property owners, who bought buildings in 2019, for example.

Based on the amount of office space available, a lot of tech may be gone for good, or stay with a vastly reduced presence. For example, in August 2020, Pinterest canceled its plans to lease 490,000 square feet in a downtown office building under construction near the CalTrain transit station, paying $89.5 million to cancel the lease. Instead, it is keeping its nearby headquarters. Oracle Corp.
ORCL,
-1.23%,
which moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas, from Redwood City, Calif., subleased four of its five floors in San Francisco, or about 86,000 square feet.

A failure to act

There have been some discussions on how to remake parts of downtown, or include more culture and arts. But San Francisco Supervisor Ahsha Safai, who represents District 11, which includes southeastern residential districts but not downtown, has been one of the more cautionary voices trying to get the city to wake up. He said the issues downtown have a spillover effect, hurting union workers, such as janitors and hotel workers, and small businesses, to name a few.

“All this has a massive ripple effect on our economy,” he said. “We can’t just hope that people are going to come back to the office.”

Safai organized a couple of sessions of the Board of Supervisors’ Land Use Committee to discuss the problem over the past year. This month, he proposed a working group to focus on the problems, saying it is essential to have an “honest conversation” about how to reinvent the downtown core.

“There might be some land-use changes. We might need to allow more conversion of buildings to residential, convert more to entertainment,” Safai told MarketWatch. “But we have to go through that process of change, determine what level of office needs to be preserved and what needs to be transitioned.”

Many in the real estate community, though, see the city keeping its status as a tech center. “There is some concern about the future of the leasing market in San Francisco,” said Bill Cumbelich, an executive vice president of CBRE in San Francisco. “With some tech companies going completely remote, questions rise there, but I have to say now that San Francisco has established itself as a tech city, it is very good for the city going forward, compared to where we were in the ’90s.”

Cumbelich recalled the 1980s, when companies like Bank of America
BAC,
+0.44%,
Chevron
CVX,
+0.73%
and Pacific Bell moved their headquarters out of the city, as a real stagnant time, until tech began to emerge as a new industry in the mid-1990s.

“Since that early ’80s exodus, before that I don’t think we had seen those types of big shocks to the office market,” he said.

Cumbelich believes that the so-called Class A property buildings, such as 140 New Montgomery, the former headquarters of Pacific Telephone and then AT&T, will fare well in the current upheaval. Last year, Yelp Inc.
YELP,
+0.65%
did not renew its 14 floors, or about 162,000 square feet of space, in the building, but some of that has since been leased, Cumbelich said. He said many building owners are currently engaged in an “amenities arms race” to fix up their buildings to attract new tenants, adding that some of 140 New Montgomery’s features — like its garden courtyard, bike parking and gorgeous lobby — attract tenants and their workers.

“There are a lot of lobby refreshes going on, exterior decks, conference centers, activation of lobbies, lot of upgrading and improvements going on,” he said. “A lot of offices are adopting a hospitality focus, having things that are appealing like a hotel would…to make it more appealing for workers.”

Indeed, some areas of downtown are busier. Some lunch restaurants have reopened since the pandemic, and there are more people walking in the streets during the day. On a Monday night after Dreamforce was long over, it was busy at Tadich Grill, one of the city’s oldest restaurants. But it’s still not like it was, and some businesses are still seeing a huge drop in revenue.

“Our hours are reduced,” said Steve Sarder, co-owner of Ladle & Leaf, a popular family-owned soup-and-salad restaurant chain. “The locations that used to be open for breakfast are no longer open for breakfast.” Ladle and Leaf closed three of the 13 locations it had prior to the pandemic.

Pedestrians walk by an empty Financial District restaurant on Aug. 25, 2022 in San Francisco.

Getty Images

“We are down 65%. It would be worse if it weren’t for so many restaurants being closed. When I look at the traffic in the buildings that we occupy, I think the downtown traffic is around 25% of what it was, pre-pandemic.” When workers only come downtown to the office once or twice a week, they are only spending a fraction of what they used to on a daily basis, he noted.

“That doesn’t make the economic core a vibrant community,” Sarder said.

“The changes we went through with the pandemic are somewhat permanent,” said Jeb Miller, general partner in Icon Ventures, a venture-capital firm with offices in Palo Alto and San Francisco. “About half of our portfolio companies have an office-space location and are fully remote. But that kind of hybrid state of one or two days in the office seems to be where we are heading.” Miller said that in the South Park neighborhood, for example, where his San Francisco office is located, things are happening, even if remote and hybrid work are becoming a permanent way of life.

“You see kids coming back, entrepreneurs and VCs are out on the lawn, I think that’s the first place that will recover,” he said. Miller remains optimistic about San Francisco. “I think S.F. will still remain the heart of innovation, we have a lot of success that fuels the flywheel of giving back. Talent that is here, that helps the next wave of companies. I think our tolerance for failure here is high, there is a lot of experimentation. There will be some creativity, companies sharing office space, probably a little more reduced footprint, a more creative use of space.”

Egan, the city’s chief economist, believes that working from home is still evolving, and is very fluid, and could change on a dime.

“A recession could change the mood for work from home,” he said. “Employers could change. If the market loosens up a lot employers will be a better bargaining position. Ultimately companies have to be productive…it’s far from settled.” However, if the current situation does become as permanent as some VCs and entrepreneurs believe, “it could have a big shock on property values.”

Indeed, according to CEOs interviewed for a study by KPMG this week, over 50% of them are considering job cuts over the next six months. In a separate survey by beautiful.ai, a majority of managers (60%) said remote workers would likely be among the first to go.

But as seen in the Chronicle poll, the dour look at crime and safety in the city pervades many viewpoints.

“You have become a victim of your own success,” said Robert Ackerman Jr., managing director and founder of AllegisCyber Capital, who sold his home in the city’s posh Pacific Heights neighborhood and moved to Wyoming two years ago. Doing a renovation on his building with a scaffolding required a 24-hour security guard. “I live on airplanes so I can live anywhere…I just saw the steady decline of quality of life in the city, it’s not for me.” Ackerman said some of his investments have been taking him frequently to Maryland, where there are an increasing number of cybersecurity startups, founded by engineers who got their start at places like the National Security Agency.

Ackerman believes that the old adage for entrepreneurs that you had to be in Silicon Valley or San Francisco to start a company is no longer true. “Once upon a time Silicon Valley had the whole game, that is not true anymore.” He said other cities that have been attracting entrepreneurs do not have all the whole ecosystem that has been in place in the Bay Area for decades: mentoring, access to capital, legal services, stellar talent from top universities — but that infrastructure is coming.

Recent Cushman & Wakefield and PitchBook data indicate that funding for San Francisco-based startups is on the wane as well. In the third quarter, San Francisco-based startups raised $5.5 billion, down 48% from the second quarter.

 “I am relatively bullish on the Bay Area, but I am also bullish on other cities rising further than they have in the pandemic,” said Gaurav Gupta, a partner at Lightspeed Ventures. “Founders want to be around the founders of their peer [companies], who they admire; they also want to be near where the talent is. And finally they want to be near their investors.” He said he has seen a few companies opening up offices in San Francisco, as a home base or a place to host company events. He said deal cycles are a bit slower now, and pricing is coming down too.

“Things were extremely concentrated in San Francisco for many, many years,” Gupta said. “That does get more distributed to these other hubs, including New York.”

One possibility some have discussed is whether large building owners will look into converting all or some of their office towers for residential use, as some cities have done, such as in New York’s Battery Park City and downtown Los Angeles. But for building owners, converting an office building, especially the more contemporary ones, to apartments or condos would be a costly and unprofitable proposition.

“I think it has potential on a limited basis,” said John Bryant, chief executive of the Building Owners and Managers Association of San Francisco. “People thinking a mass conversion is going to solve the problem is shortsighted. I don’t think it’s technically or financially feasible.” He pointed out that some of the big challenges are the floor plates of big office buildings, and the tall glass windows in so many skyscrapers.

“How do you break it up, versus an office environment?” Bryant said. “You will probably lose 10-15% of rentable square footage. What is the premium I am going to get on residential? It’s not going to be much higher.”

Moscone Center was busy with 40,000 attendees in September for Dreamforce

Therese Poletti

The past shows that the future is not hopeless

San Francisco has rebounded from hard times before. The flag of the city has an image of a Phoenix, the mythical bird that rises from the ashes, which has often been thought to reference the city’s emergence from the devastation of the crippling 1906 earthquake and fire, but likely actually stemmed from the early fires of the early 1850s and its frequent rebirths after the 1849 Gold Rush.

But the bounce-back from the 1906 devastation had powerful business leaders behind it, including French immigrant, department-store magnate and philanthropist Rafael Weill, who led a group of merchants to find and open temporary store locations while their stores were being rebuilt.

The city currently lacks any vocal or involved tech executives who are passionate about San Francisco. Marc Benioff, the co-founder and co-CEO of Salesforce.com, who was once bandied about as a mayoral candidate, now seems more focused on employee retreats near Santa Cruz and his life in Hawaii, rather than on what ails San Francisco. Salesforce, the city’s largest corporate employer, canceled its lease for 325,000 square feet of space in an unbuilt skyscraper near Salesforce Tower.

San Francisco has a history of creating and recreating itself, from an instant city during the Gold Rush, to rising from the ashes of the 1906 quake, to an eventual recovery after the dark days of the 1970s and the assassinations of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. The city that knows how will always evolve and change, but hopefully will never lose its magic.

The post Opinion: Downtown San Francisco turned the epicenter of Silicon Valley’s growth, however now it have to be reinvented appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

After a 21st-century gold rush created by big tech, downtown San Francisco is going to have to reinvent itself. Again.

The city of undulating streets, panoramic views, and booms and busts is now facing a major economic upheaval, as persistent crime, homelessness and high costs are keeping many tech office workers away, and making tech companies rethink their offices. While the city is lately portrayed as going through an apocalyptic descent into hell, this is really just another bad bust cycle for a downtown core that has experienced many before.

After a host of companies moved out in the 1980s, San Francisco saw the beginnings of an economic rebirth in the mid-1990s, when it became the hipper outpost of Silicon Valley, beginning with the dot-com boom with startups renting former industrial spaces in the then-low-rent South of Market district.

But the city became an extension of Silicon Valley for the first time in the past decade, as a generation of startups like Salesforce Inc.
CRM,
-3.33%,
Twitter Inc.
TWTR,
-0.43%,
Pinterest Inc.
PINS,
-2.75%,
Uber Technologies
UBER,
-5.58%
and Airbnb
ABNB,
-2.72%
grew up, went public and stayed in San Francisco’s Financial District or nearby environs, as the city became a major hotbed of new tech, rivaling the Valley for software and mobile-app companies.

An even bigger change came from a massive influx of tech workers. So many tech workers decided to live in the city that Valley giants like Alphabet Inc.
GOOGL,
-2.70%

GOOG,
-2.61%
opened offices there, and shuttled their workers to offices in sleek but reviled buses from their San Francisco residential neighborhoods down the Peninsula to Google, Apple and Facebook headquarters in Mountain View, Cupertino and Menlo Park.

But as housing costs climbed, and homelessness and crime increased everywhere, the pandemic fueled a migration of about 7% of San Francisco’s population, or around 59,000 residents, to more affordable cities from April 2020 to July 2021, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Cities like Atlanta and Miami are becoming new tech centers, and rural towns in Montana and Wyoming are attracting dispersed tech workers and bosses. Even cities in the surrounding region such as Oakland, Berkeley and into the Sierra Nevada, are benefiting.

Now tech companies are joining their workers, scaling down their presence in San Francisco, shedding office floors and keeping a smaller, almost satellite presence in some cases. Sentiment in the city is depressed, as crimes caused by opioids and homelessness have turned many residents, possibly for good.

A recent poll by the San Francisco Chronicle found little hope among citizens in the city’s ability to fix its chronic problems, with most of the 1,653 people surveyed expressing worry, frustration and pessimism. But the mood is no better in the real Silicon Valley, where more than half the residents said in a recent poll that they plan to leave the region in the next few years, unchanged from last year’s poll.

San Francisco’s worker problem, though, is putting its economic engine — the downtown core — at risk. Karen Chapple, director of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto and professor emerita of City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, led a group of researchers to study economic recoveries of downtowns across the U.S. since the start of the pandemic.

San Francisco came in dead last.

“There will always be some interesting new tech phenomenon in San Francisco,” Chapple said. “Because of the nature of the beast and the smart people and the culture, it’s a magnet, but I don’t think you will see a huge scale-up anymore, with the Big Five taking millions of square feet in downtown San Francisco, I think that is probably over.”

Kelsey Bishop, founder and chief executive of Candor, a startup professional network to help co-workers connect in a remote environment, agrees. Bishop left San Francisco in 2021 and now divides her time between Lisbon and New Jersey, mostly working remotely.

“I think San Francisco is going to have a hard time recovering from this,” she said. “What we have seen, whether it is a hybrid model or not, people want to live in beautiful places…Why work in downtown SF? I frequently heard gunshots out there, I remember huddling under my desk because there was an active shooter outside.”

How the pandemic slapped San Francisco

The pandemic-era vibes dissipated last month, when San Francisco got a nice little economic boost from Salesforce Inc.’s
CRM,
-3.33%
Dreamforce, the largest in-person tech conference since the pandemic began. Many of the 40,000 attendees celebrating Salesforce and its products were spending money downtown in hotels and restaurants.

While the feeling of a bustling downtown was a nice diversion from the emptiness that the Financial District has largely felt during the pandemic, it was only a temporary infusion into San Francisco’s economy.

The city’s downtown Financial District and South of Market have some of the lowest office attendance rates in the U.S., and San Francisco’s commercial office vacancy rate was 23% in the third quarter, according to Cushman & Wakefield Research, the same level it reached in 2003 amid the fallout of the dot-com bust. Data from the UC Berkeley researchers indicated that Salt Lake City; Bakersfield, Calif.; Columbus, Ohio; and Fresno, Calif., were the top four recovering cities, based on cellphone data of workers returning to the office. More recent data since Labor Day from Kastle Access Control Systems, the card key entry company, found 39.7% of workers in San Francisco offices were back in the office, up from 14.7% a year ago. That data is compared to a pre-COVID baseline, Cushman & Wakefield noted.

A pedestrian walks down a quiet California Street in the Financial District of San Francisco on May 9.

Bloomberg News

SocketSite created a graphic of the amount of empty office space in San Francisco, showing the equivalent of 13.8 Salesforce Towers — the 1,070-foot-high skyscraper towering over downtown — is sitting unoccupied, based on 18.7 million square feet of vacant office space in the second quarter, including 5 million of sublease office space on the market. In the third quarter, that number grew to 19.9 million square feet of available space, according to Cushman & Wakefield.

“We need to re-envision how the city is structured,” said Jennifer Stojkovic, executive director of sf.citi, a tech trade association. “I think there has been a large number of legislative officials who have not taken the downtown recovery seriously. Most people were banking on things recovering by now.”

San Francisco’s proposed $14 billion annual budget is estimating an almost 6% drop in business taxes, to $902.3 million in fiscal 2022-’23, from $957.1 million in 2021-’22. But the city will make up those lost funds with an estimated $60 million in taxes from the newly enacted executive pay tax, a measure that sf.citi fought against.

“San Francisco has a Frankenstein tax system,” Stojkovic said, adding that all the recent tax measures voted on by the city were during boom times. “It was all based on the longest bull market in 100 years. We said we cannot keep adding all these taxes.”

The city is projecting that both sales taxes and hotel taxes will grow this fiscal year, but those numbers could prove to be optimistic if more business does not return. Another looming potential revenue loss, albeit temporary, could come from property owners who are appealing their property assessments with the city, arguing that their property taxes should be reduced to reflect lower assessed property values. Ted Egan, the city’s chief economist, said that there has been a large number of appeals filed, but they have not been heard yet. He noted that the reassessments are mostly being filed by newer property owners, who bought buildings in 2019, for example.

Based on the amount of office space available, a lot of tech may be gone for good, or stay with a vastly reduced presence. For example, in August 2020, Pinterest canceled its plans to lease 490,000 square feet in a downtown office building under construction near the CalTrain transit station, paying $89.5 million to cancel the lease. Instead, it is keeping its nearby headquarters. Oracle Corp.
ORCL,
-3.08%,
which moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas, from Redwood City, Calif., subleased four of its five floors in San Francisco, or about 86,000 square feet.

A failure to act

There have been some discussions on how to remake parts of downtown, or include more culture and arts. But San Francisco Supervisor Ahsha Safai, who represents District 11, which includes southeastern residential districts but not downtown, has been one of the more cautionary voices trying to get the city to wake up. He said the issues downtown have a spillover effect, hurting union workers, such as janitors and hotel workers, and small businesses, to name a few.

“All this has a massive ripple effect on our economy,” he said. “We can’t just hope that people are going to come back to the office.”

Safai organized a couple of sessions of the Board of Supervisors’ Land Use Committee to discuss the problem over the past year. This month, he proposed a working group to focus on the problems, saying it is essential to have an “honest conversation” about how to reinvent the downtown core.

“There might be some land-use changes. We might need to allow more conversion of buildings to residential, convert more to entertainment,” Safai told MarketWatch. “But we have to go through that process of change, determine what level of office needs to be preserved and what needs to be transitioned.”

Many in the real estate community, though, see the city keeping its status as a tech center. “There is some concern about the future of the leasing market in San Francisco,” said Bill Cumbelich, an executive vice president of CBRE in San Francisco. “With some tech companies going completely remote, questions rise there, but I have to say now that San Francisco has established itself as a tech city, it is very good for the city going forward, compared to where we were in the ’90s.”

Cumbelich recalled the 1980s, when companies like Bank of America
BAC,
-2.26%,
Chevron
CVX,
-0.86%
and Pacific Bell moved their headquarters out of the city, as a real stagnant time, until tech began to emerge as a new industry in the mid-1990s.

“Since that early ’80s exodus, before that I don’t think we had seen those types of big shocks to the office market,” he said.

Cumbelich believes that the so-called Class A property buildings, such as 140 New Montgomery, the former headquarters of Pacific Telephone and then AT&T, will fare well in the current upheaval. Last year, Yelp Inc.
YELP,
-1.15%
did not renew its 14 floors, or about 162,000 square feet of space, in the building, but some of that has since been leased, Cumbelich said. He said many building owners are currently engaged in an “amenities arms race” to fix up their buildings to attract new tenants, adding that some of 140 New Montgomery’s features — like its garden courtyard, bike parking and gorgeous lobby — attract tenants and their workers.

“There are a lot of lobby refreshes going on, exterior decks, conference centers, activation of lobbies, lot of upgrading and improvements going on,” he said. “A lot of offices are adopting a hospitality focus, having things that are appealing like a hotel would…to make it more appealing for workers.”

Indeed, some areas of downtown are busier. Some lunch restaurants have reopened since the pandemic, and there are more people walking in the streets during the day. On a Monday night after Dreamforce was long over, it was busy at Tadich Grill, one of the city’s oldest restaurants. But it’s still not like it was, and some businesses are still seeing a huge drop in revenue.

“Our hours are reduced,” said Steve Sarder, co-owner of Ladle & Leaf, a popular family-owned soup-and-salad restaurant chain. “The locations that used to be open for breakfast are no longer open for breakfast.” Ladle and Leaf closed three of the 13 locations it had prior to the pandemic.

Pedestrians walk by an empty Financial District restaurant on Aug. 25, 2022 in San Francisco.

Getty Images

“We are down 65%. It would be worse if it weren’t for so many restaurants being closed. When I look at the traffic in the buildings that we occupy, I think the downtown traffic is around 25% of what it was, pre-pandemic.” When workers only come downtown to the office once or twice a week, they are only spending a fraction of what they used to on a daily basis, he noted.

“That doesn’t make the economic core a vibrant community,” Sarder said.

“The changes we went through with the pandemic are somewhat permanent,” said Jeb Miller, general partner in Icon Ventures, a venture-capital firm with offices in Palo Alto and San Francisco. “About half of our portfolio companies have an office-space location and are fully remote. But that kind of hybrid state of one or two days in the office seems to be where we are heading.” Miller said that in the South Park neighborhood, for example, where his San Francisco office is located, things are happening, even if remote and hybrid work are becoming a permanent way of life.

“You see kids coming back, entrepreneurs and VCs are out on the lawn, I think that’s the first place that will recover,” he said. Miller remains optimistic about San Francisco. “I think S.F. will still remain the heart of innovation, we have a lot of success that fuels the flywheel of giving back. Talent that is here, that helps the next wave of companies. I think our tolerance for failure here is high, there is a lot of experimentation. There will be some creativity, companies sharing office space, probably a little more reduced footprint, a more creative use of space.”

Egan, the city’s chief economist, believes that working from home is still evolving, and is very fluid, and could change on a dime.

“A recession could change the mood for work from home,” he said. “Employers could change. If the market loosens up a lot employers will be a better bargaining position. Ultimately companies have to be productive…it’s far from settled.” However, if the current situation does become as permanent as some VCs and entrepreneurs believe, “it could have a big shock on property values.”

Indeed, according to CEOs interviewed for a study by KPMG this week, over 50% of them are considering job cuts over the next six months. In a separate survey by beautiful.ai, a majority of managers (60%) said remote workers would likely be among the first to go.

But as seen in the Chronicle poll, the dour look at crime and safety in the city pervades many viewpoints.

“You have become a victim of your own success,” said Robert Ackerman Jr., managing director and founder of AllegisCyber Capital, who sold his home in the city’s posh Pacific Heights neighborhood and moved to Wyoming two years ago. Doing a renovation on his building with a scaffolding required a 24-hour security guard. “I live on airplanes so I can live anywhere…I just saw the steady decline of quality of life in the city, it’s not for me.” Ackerman said some of his investments have been taking him frequently to Maryland, where there are an increasing number of cybersecurity startups, founded by engineers who got their start at places like the National Security Agency.

Ackerman believes that the old adage for entrepreneurs that you had to be in Silicon Valley or San Francisco to start a company is no longer true. “Once upon a time Silicon Valley had the whole game, that is not true anymore.” He said other cities that have been attracting entrepreneurs do not have all the whole ecosystem that has been in place in the Bay Area for decades: mentoring, access to capital, legal services, stellar talent from top universities — but that infrastructure is coming.

Recent Cushman & Wakefield and PitchBook data indicate that funding for San Francisco-based startups is on the wane as well. In the third quarter, San Francisco-based startups raised $5.5 billion, down 48% from the second quarter.

 “I am relatively bullish on the Bay Area, but I am also bullish on other cities rising further than they have in the pandemic,” said Gaurav Gupta, a partner at Lightspeed Ventures. “Founders want to be around the founders of their peer [companies], who they admire; they also want to be near where the talent is. And finally they want to be near their investors.” He said he has seen a few companies opening up offices in San Francisco, as a home base or a place to host company events. He said deal cycles are a bit slower now, and pricing is coming down too.

“Things were extremely concentrated in San Francisco for many, many years,” Gupta said. “That does get more distributed to these other hubs, including New York.”

One possibility some have discussed is whether large building owners will look into converting all or some of their office towers for residential use, as some cities have done, such as in New York’s Battery Park City and downtown Los Angeles. But for building owners, converting an office building, especially the more contemporary ones, to apartments or condos would be a costly and unprofitable proposition.

“I think it has potential on a limited basis,” said John Bryant, chief executive of the Building Owners and Managers Association of San Francisco. “People thinking a mass conversion is going to solve the problem is shortsighted. I don’t think it’s technically or financially feasible.” He pointed out that some of the big challenges are the floor plates of big office buildings, and the tall glass windows in so many skyscrapers.

“How do you break it up, versus an office environment?” Bryant said. “You will probably lose 10-15% of rentable square footage. What is the premium I am going to get on residential? It’s not going to be much higher.”

Moscone Center was busy with 40,000 attendees in September for Dreamforce

Therese Poletti

The past shows that the future is not hopeless

San Francisco has rebounded from hard times before. The flag of the city has an image of a Phoenix, the mythical bird that rises from the ashes, which has often been thought to reference the city’s emergence from the devastation of the crippling 1906 earthquake and fire, but likely actually stemmed from the early fires of the early 1850s and its frequent rebirths after the 1849 Gold Rush.

But the bounce-back from the 1906 devastation had powerful business leaders behind it, including French immigrant, department-store magnate and philanthropist Rafael Weill, who led a group of merchants to find and open temporary store locations while their stores were being rebuilt.

The city currently lacks any vocal or involved tech executives who are passionate about San Francisco. Marc Benioff, the co-founder and co-CEO of Salesforce.com, who was once bandied about as a mayoral candidate, now seems more focused on employee retreats near Santa Cruz and his life in Hawaii, rather than on what ails San Francisco. Salesforce, the city’s largest corporate employer, canceled its lease for 325,000 square feet of space in an unbuilt skyscraper near Salesforce Tower.

San Francisco has a history of creating and recreating itself, from an instant city during the Gold Rush, to rising from the ashes of the 1906 quake, to an eventual recovery after the dark days of the 1970s and the assassinations of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. The city that knows how will always evolve and change, but hopefully will never lose its magic.

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Leading Digital Personal Finance Company Earns Spot for Sixth Time

SAN MATEO, Calif., May 9, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Freedom Financial Network (FFN), a leading digital personal finance company, announced today it was named to the 2022 Best Places to Work in the Bay Area, an annual list presented by the San Francisco Business Times and the Silicon Valley BusinessJournal.

The company rankings are based on the results of confidential surveys sent to each firm’s Bay Area employees. The survey assesses various aspects of company culture, including communications, managerial effectiveness, team dynamics and trust in leadership, to gauge overall employee sentiment. FFN, which is headquartered in San Mateo, Calif. and employs more than 2,400 people nationwide, which was recognized in the large company category of the rankings. This year marks the sixth time FFN has been named to the list.

“At Freedom Financial Network, our employees play a critical part in furthering our mission to help everyday people get on — and stay on — a path to a better financial future,” said Brad Straw, co-founder and co-CEO of Freedom Financial Network. “Together, we focus on our customers to understand what’s working for them and what’s not and we tailor personalized approaches to meet their personal needs and goals. We innovate to offer the best financial solutions, using data and AI to speed decisioning, improve transparency and And finally, we build relationships so that we can help our customers on their first step, and every next step, on their journey.”

Freedom Financial Network helps people make better financial decisions by managing expenses and debt, saving money, and planning. The company provides innovative technology and relationship-driven support for every step of a consumer’s financial path, including personal loans, debt resolution and restructuring, home equity lines of credit and financial tools and education.

“This recognition is especially meaningful because it is based on the feedback from our employees. We strive to provide an environment where employees can have fulfilling careers and the opportunity to grow, both personally and professionally,” said Linda Lumanexecutive vice president of human resources at FFN.

FFN recently surpassed $15 billion in consumer debt resolved and has served over 1 million customers since its founding in 2002. The company is continually innovating new solutions to expand the depth and breadth of its financial services offerings and is actively hiring for remote and hybrid roles in sales, engineering, technology and product development in California, Arizona other Texas.

Earlier this month, FFN was named to the Phoenix Business Journal’s 2022 Healthiest Employers List in recognition of its efforts to motivate employees to achieve and maintain wellness through a strong emphasis on mental and physical health. FFN has also been named to the Phoenix Business Journal’s annual “Best Places to Work” list 11 times, including winning first place in the extra-large company category in 2021. Last year, FFN was also named one of “Arizona’s Most Admired Companies” by AZBigMedia and a “Top Workplace” by the Arizona Republic.

Full details of the 2022 Best Places to Work in the Bay Area can be found here.

About Freedom Financial Network
Freedom Financial Network is a leading digital personal finance company. We do what traditional banks don’t: Put people first. Our solutions help everyday people get on, and stay on, the path to a brighter financial future, with innovative technology and personalized support. By leveraging proprietary data and analytics, our solutions are tailored for each step of a consumer’s financial journey and include personal loans (FreedomPlus), home equity loans (Lendage), help with debt (Freedom Debt Relief), and even financial tools and education ( Bills.com). Freedom Financial Network has more than 2,300 dedicated employees across California, Arizona other Texas and is recognized as a best place to work.

For information on career opportunities at Freedom Financial Network, visit: https://jobs.freedomfinancialnetwork.com/

SOURCE Freedom Financial Network

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Steve Case, Mitbegründer von AOL und CEO von Revolution, tritt auf Yahoo Finance Live auf, um zu diskutieren, wohin sich die innovative Wirtschaft entwickelt, während Risikokapitalfirmen versuchen, Start-ups in Städten außerhalb des Silicon Valley zu finanzieren.

Videotranskript

BRIAN CHEUNG: Silicon Valley, das Land, in dem VC-Gelder bekanntlich wie Honig fließen, aber die Frage ist, ob die Bay Area bereits den Sättigungspunkt erreicht hat, in den Unternehmen investieren können? Sie können den vor Ihnen liegenden Chart sehen, wie der Anteil der Seed- und Early-Stage-VC-Dollars in den letzten Jahren zurückgegangen ist. Und ein Bericht von Revolution sagt ja, er könnte mit Küsteninvestoren gesättigt sein, die nach neuen Gelegenheiten in Orten wie Philadelphia oder Austin suchen.

Wer könnte also besser über diesen und andere wichtige Technologietrends sprechen als AOL-Mitbegründer und Revolution-CEO Steve Case? Und Steve, es ist großartig, dich heute Morgen in der Show zu haben. Auch hier hat Revolution diesen neuen Bericht, und damit möchte ich anfangen.

Sie beschreiben in diesem Bericht diese aufstrebenden Städte, die San Francisco und der Bay Area möglicherweise einen Teil dieses Anteils wegnehmen. Welche Städte sind das zunächst, und was steckt dann hinter dem Trend, den Sie beobachten?

STEVE-FALL: Nun, in den letzten zehn Jahren wurde die Innovationswirtschaft wirklich vom Silicon Valley und in gewissem Maße auch von New York City, dieser Gegend und der Gegend von Boston dominiert. Und der Großteil des Rests des Landes kämpfte die meiste Zeit des Jahrzehnts um Risikokapital. 75 % des Risikokapitals sind in nur drei Bundesstaaten geflossen.

Aber wir beginnen zu sehen – und es hat sich in den letzten Jahren aufgebaut, aber ich glaube, aufgrund der Pandemie beschleunigt – eine Zerstreuung des Kapitals, und das nicht nur in einigen anderen Städten. Es sind wirklich Dutzende von Städten. Wir haben jetzt unsere Rise the Rest Bust-Touren in 44 Städten gemacht. Unser Rise the Rest Seed Fund hat in 80 verschiedenen Städten investiert.

Es ist also eine breit angelegte Anstrengung und geht über die üblichen Verdächtigen hinaus, über die Leute wie Seattle und Austin sprechen. Wir sehen viel Dynamik in Chicago, in Los Angeles, in Raleigh-Durham, in Dallas, in Phoenix, in Columbus, hier in Washington, DC. Ich denke, in den nächsten zehn Jahren werden Dutzende von Städten entstehen, nicht nur ein paar.

Die Geschichte geht weiter

JULIE HYMAN: Und, Steve, wie Sie sagten, es scheint sich durch die Pandemie wirklich beschleunigt zu haben. Dies ist kein Schock, denn wir haben gesehen, wie sich die Bewegung beschleunigt hat, richtig, Menschen, die aus den großen Städten wegziehen. Sprechen Sie mit mir darüber, wie sich diese Dynamik auf die Investitionssumme ausgewirkt hat und was Sie meinen, und die Fähigkeit der Leute, auch aus der Ferne zu arbeiten, hat sich auf das ausgewirkt, worüber Sie sprechen.

STEVE-FALL: Nun, es war definitiv ein Wendepunkt. Ich denke, die Leute – wir trennen oder trennen Arbeit und Leben, und es gibt mehr Flexibilität in Bezug auf die Art und Weise, wie Sie arbeiten möchten und wo Sie leben möchten, und mehr Remote-Arbeit, mehr hybride Arbeit, die den Menschen mehr Möglichkeiten bietet, entscheiden, wo sie leben wollen.

Und sobald sie das tun und an einem anderen Ort leben, wahrscheinlich zunächst für ihr bestehendes Unternehmen arbeiten, werden sie im Laufe der Zeit wahrscheinlich etwas mehr vor Ort machen, entweder dort etwas anfangen oder dort etwas anfangen. Das wird also beschleunigen, was mit diesen Startup-Communitys passiert.

Aber wie der Bericht, den wir mit PitchBook erstellt haben, sagte, gibt es drei besondere Punkte, die ich für interessant halte. Zum ersten Mal seit 10 Jahren liegt die Menge an Risikokapital, die in die Bay Area fließt, unter 30%. Die zweite ist in diesen anderen Städten außerhalb der großen Drei. In den letzten 10 Jahren ist das Risikokapital von 4 Milliarden US-Dollar vor 10 Jahren auf jetzt 24 Milliarden US-Dollar gestiegen.

Und die dritte, die meiner Meinung nach am bemerkenswertesten und ermutigendsten ist, ist, dass in den letzten 10 Jahren 1.400 neue regionale Wagniskapitalfirmen gegründet wurden, die in einigen dieser Städte einen Teil dieses Anfangskapitals bereitstellen. Und wenn einige dieser ersten Unternehmen gegründet werden und mit der Skalierung beginnen, werden sie offensichtlich auf mehr Kapital zugreifen, auch von Investoren an der Küste.

Unsere Erwartung für das nächste Jahrzehnt ist also, dass wir tatsächlich eine Kapitalstreuung sehen werden, die teilweise durch diese Streuung von Talenten getrieben wird. Und während das Silicon Valley mit Sicherheit immer noch der Spitzenreiter sein wird und New York und Boston immer noch sehr, sehr stark sein werden, werden wir eine stärker verstreute Innovationswirtschaft haben, mehr Arbeitsplätze in verschiedenen Teilen des Landes geschaffen werden, wirtschaftlicher Wachstum in verschiedenen Teilen des Landes und Investoren, die dies als Trend erkennen. Wir machen das seit einem Jahrzehnt, aber wir haben in den letzten Jahren immer mehr Leute gesehen, die wirklich auf den Zug aufgesprungen sind, was sehr ermutigend ist. Ich denke, was in den nächsten zehn Jahren passieren wird und wie viele große Multimilliarden-Dollar-Unternehmen in Städten gegründet werden, die die meisten Leute nicht als Startup-Städte betrachten, ich denke, die Leute werden in den nächsten zehn Jahren wirklich ziemlich überrascht sein.

BRIAN SOZZI: Steve, gibt es eine Stadt, die dir außerhalb von Silicon Valley und New York offensichtlich auffällt, in der du viel mehr Start-ups siehst, und was würde das antreiben?

STEVE-FALL: Nun, wie gesagt, wir haben jetzt in Dutzende investiert, und wenn Sie nur eines auswählen, fragen Sie sich, wer ist Ihr Lieblingskind? das ist keine Frage, die niemand beantworten möchte. Wir versuchen wirklich, all diese verschiedenen Städte zu vertreten, und wir investieren – wie gesagt, wir haben 185 Investitionen in 80 verschiedenen Städten neben über 300 regionalen Risikokapitalgebern. Wir sehen dies also als eine breitere Bewegung und sehen viel Dynamik in vielen verschiedenen Städten.

Aber was den Antrieb angeht, gab es in diesen Städten im Allgemeinen ein Tent-Poling-Unternehmen, das erfolgreich war und Spin-off-Kapital geschaffen hat, und einige andere Leute, die andere Dinge tun. Oft gibt es dort eine starke Universität. Oft wird die Geschäftswelt engagiert, um die Startups zu unterstützen, nicht nur die großen Unternehmen, die sich selbst helfen, sondern auch die großen Unternehmen, die mit kleineren Unternehmen zusammenarbeiten, manchmal als Mentoren tätig sind und in die kleineren Unternehmen investieren.

Normalerweise treten der Bürgermeister und die Gouverneure für Start-ups ein und erkennen wirklich, dass dies ein besserer Weg ist, um die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung voranzutreiben. Versuchen Sie nicht, große Unternehmen dazu zu bringen, ihren Hauptsitz zu verlegen. Versuchen Sie, kleine Unternehmen zum Erfolg zu bringen.

Und in diesen Städten gibt es normalerweise eine Zusammenarbeit. Es gibt eine Art Netzwerkeffekt, Netzwerkdichte, wenn Sie so wollen, was eines der großartigen Dinge im Silicon Valley ist. Die Menschen in dieser Stadt schließen sich wirklich zusammen, um zu versuchen, mehr Dynamik zu erzeugen und ihre Geschichte zu erzählen, sowohl vor Ort, um einige Investoren zu gewinnen, die sie – insbesondere diese frühen Angel-Runden – als auch auf nationaler Ebene, um mehr von den Küsteninvestoren darauf zu achten, was ist Ereignis.

Und dann haben wir das jetzt gesehen – weil wir seit fast einem Jahrzehnt vor Ort sind, haben wir das in Dutzenden von Städten gesehen, und es ist wirklich bemerkenswert, was passiert. Die einzige Neuigkeit bei diesem Bericht ist, dass die Leute jetzt anfangen, es zu bemerken und die Dollars zu fließen beginnen, und das wird sich meiner Meinung nach im nächsten Jahrzehnt beschleunigen.

BRIAN CHEUNG: Hey, Steve, ich möchte von Startups, Tech-Startups zu Big Tech wechseln, und es gab viele Fragen zur Regulierung in DC, von denen ich verstehe, dass Sie von dort aus zu uns kommen. Gestern trat der Instagram-CEO auf dem Capitol Hill auf und sah sich einigen Fragen zur Monetarisierung dieser Social-Media-Apps speziell für Kinder gegenüber. Ich möchte Ihnen einen Clip vorspielen, in dem Amy Klobuchar gestern den Instagram-CEO drückt. Hören Sie zu.

AMY KLOBUCHAR: Betrachten Sie die Kinder als Zubringer für die Menschen, um in Ihr Produkt einzusteigen? Haben Sie nicht– haben Sie nichts unternommen, um mehr Teenager für Ihr Produkt zu interessieren? Haben Sie keine Angst, sie an andere Plattformen zu verlieren? Du sagst besser die Wahrheit. Sie stehen unter Eid.

ADAM MOSSERI: Absolut, Senator. Senator, wir versuchen, Instagram für Menschen jeden Alters, einschließlich Teenager, so relevant wie möglich zu machen. Teenager tun jeden Tag erstaunliche Dinge auf Instagram, aber wir investieren auch, glaube ich, mehr als alle anderen, um die Sicherheit von Menschen, einschließlich Teenagern, zu gewährleisten.

BRIAN CHEUNG: Und das war wiederum der CEO Adam Mosseri von Instagram. Aber, Steve, meine Frage an Sie ist, dass AOL Instant Messaging für AIM hat. Das habe ich als Teenager benutzt. Ich schätze, die Frage ist, was ist die Balance zwischen dem Angebot von Produkten, die Teenager verwenden möchten, um mit anderen zu kommunizieren, aber gleichzeitig sie sicher zu halten?

STEVE-FALL: Sie müssen sie sicher aufbewahren, und das haben wir in den frühen Tagen des Internets gesehen. Als wir 1985 mit AOL begannen, waren nur 3% der Leute verbunden, und sie nutzten das Internet im Durchschnitt nur eine Stunde pro Woche, also war es noch ziemlich früh. In diesen frühen Tagen sollte die Position der Regierung in Bezug auf die Regulierung ein wenig sein. Wir verstehen nicht ganz. Lass es laufen.

Nun, offensichtlich ist das Internet allgegenwärtig. Soziale Medien sind allgegenwärtig. Es ist daher nicht verwunderlich, dass mehr Wert darauf gelegt wird, was die richtige Regulierung sein sollte.

Das habe ich vor fünf Jahren vorhergesagt. Ich habe ein Buch mit dem Titel “The Third Way” geschrieben, dass mehr Dialog zwischen den Innovatoren im Silicon Valley und den Regulierungsbehörden erforderlich ist, sei es hier in Washington, DC, Brüssel oder anderswo auf der Welt. Das fängt jetzt an zu passieren.

Daher bin ich froh, dass sie diese Gespräche führen – auch das Gespräch gestern über die Krypto-Seite der Dinge. Dieser Dialog ist wichtig. Das ist es nicht – an diesem Punkt, da das Internet wirklich ausgereift ist, überrascht es mich nicht, dass es einen stärkeren Fokus gibt und sogar einige der Dinge überdenkt, wie etwa die sogenannte Section 230, die eingeführt wurde, als ich AOL leitete . Wissen Sie, die Umstände haben sich geändert und es verdient einen neuen Blick.

JULIE HYMAN: Steve, wenn wir von dieser Krypto-Anhörung sprechen, haben Sie in dieser Anhörung ausdrücklich einen Shoutout erhalten, und ich möchte nur den Ton aus dieser Erwähnung spielen.

– Nochmals vielen Dank für die Anhörung. Ich habe das Gefühl, als hätte ich etwa 1990 mit Steve Case gesprochen, also danke für die Vision, die ihr habt, und danke für die Anhörung, Frau Vorsitzende.

JULIE HYMAN: Steve, ich war amüsiert, das zu hören, vor allem, weil ich wusste, dass wir heute mit dir sprechen würden. Und das führt mich zu dieser Frage, wenn ich mir diese aufkeimenden Technologien ansehe und wie Sie all diese Start-ups im ganzen Land sehen, ob es sich um Web 3.0 handelt, ob es um die Gerede über KI oder das Metaverse usw. geht , auf welchen dieser Trends freust du dich am meisten oder wo denkst du, wird diese Art von nächster technologischer Welle kommen?

STEVE-FALL: Nun, ich denke, wir betreten das, was ich die dritte Welle des Internets nenne, die wirklich ist, wenn das Internet auf die reale Welt trifft und einige der wichtigsten Aspekte unseres Lebens beeinflusst – wie wir bleiben gesund, wie unsere Kinder und wir lernen, wie wir Geld anlegen, wie wir uns bewegen, was und wie wir essen. Einige dieser Sektoren wie Gesundheitswesen und Lebensmittel und Landwirtschaft und andere sind diejenigen, die wirklich immer mehr Aufmerksamkeit erhalten. Das wurde im letzten Jahrzehnt aufgebaut, ich denke, dass es im nächsten Jahrzehnt noch stärker werden wird.

Für mich geht es also darum, wie Technologien zusammenlaufen, um diese Probleme wirklich zu lösen? Ein Unternehmen, das wir mit unserem Revolution Growth Fund unterstützt haben, ein Unternehmen in Chicago namens Tempest, nutzt KI, um wirklich viel genauere Diagnosen für Krebs und andere Krankheiten zu ermöglichen. Daher ist es wahrscheinlicher, dass Menschen, wenn sie diagnostiziert werden, die Therapie erhalten, die tatsächlich funktioniert und ihr Leben retten oder ihr Leben verlängern kann. Hier liegt meiner Meinung nach die Technologie im Fokus.

Diese erste Welle brachte alle online, baute die Auffahrten zum Internet, die Server und die Modems und all das Zeug. Die zweite Welle war wirklich Software und Apps, die auf dem Internet reiten. Google, Facebook gehören natürlich dazu.

Der dritte Weg ist, wie gesagt, wenn das Internet wirklich mehr mit der realen Welt verbunden ist, aber das Interessante an dieser dritten Welle ist, dass sie stärker reguliert wird, weil diese Sektoren reguliert werden, weil sie für das tägliche Leben so grundlegend sind — welche Medikamente wir einnehmen, welche Lebensmittel wir essen und so weiter — und Partnerschaften sind entscheidend, die man nicht alleine schaffen kann. Es geht nicht nur darum, eine App in einem App Store abzulegen.

Unser Schwerpunkt bei Revolution liegt auf der Unterstützung von Unternehmen außerhalb des Silicon Valley, die erkennen, dass Partnerschaften für den Aufbau eines Netzwerks rund um Ihr Unternehmen von entscheidender Bedeutung sind, und Richtlinien sind ebenfalls entscheidend, und Sie müssen sich verantwortungsbewusst mit politischen Entscheidungsträgern auseinandersetzen.

BRIAN CHEUNG: Alles klar, Steve Case, AOL-Mitbegründer und Revolution-CEO. Wir werden Sie das nächste Mal wieder aufnehmen, wenn Ihr Name in einer Kongressanhörung erwähnt wird. Danke noch einmal.

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SAN JOSE (KPIX) – The Santa Clara Valley Water District, the wholesaler for the South Bay, is making efforts to polish the image of purified wastewater and lay the groundwork for the replenishment of local aquifers.

At a press event at the Silicon Valley Advanced Water Purification Center, Rick Callender, CEO of Valley Water, spoke about the need to keep saving while developing ways to increase supply.

At the event, employees distributed water bottles to elected officials and dignitaries with this message printed on the label: “That used to be wastewater #GetOverIt.”

“(Recycled water) may have an image problem, but I think once people are educated they will understand that if you look at the ecosystem, all water is recycled,” Callender said.

The cleaning center receives water from the regional sewage system San José-Santa Clara on the opposite side of the street, which is pumped through a microfiltration and reverse osmosis system and guided by UV light.

At this stage, the water is cleaner than what can be achieved with home filtration systems, the district said. However, it cannot legally be considered “potable” until it has undergone “advanced oxidation”. The district wants to upgrade the cleaning center and install the technology.

Currently the purification center produces 8 million gallons per day, the majority of which is diverted for industrial use, landscape irrigation, and agricultural crops, while the remainder is dumped into the bay.

Once classified as “potable,” it is up to the state Water Resources Control Board to approve the use of millions of gallons of purified water to recharge aquifers in Campbell.

Callender commented on the district’s efforts to get the water resources committee to act quickly.

“I think this is just the beginning of a conversation we need to have. We need to have it now, we need to finish it, and we need to be able to find ways to ensure that we can use advanced purified water for water supply. I think this is just the beginning of a very long conversation and hopefully the state will be able to step on the regulatory accelerator and figure out how to do this quickly, ”Callender said.

The district will decide whether to expand the current water treatment center on Zanker Road or build a new facility in Palo Alto. Callender said the district is reviewing options for both.

“We are in the worst drought since the 1970s. Our reservoirs will be empty if climate change doesn’t go away. Droughts won’t go away, ”Callender said.

Drinking the purified sewage, Shane Kent said in San Jose, it tasted “good.”

“It’s not like tap water or anything like that, but I don’t notice that much of a difference,” said Kent. “But if I saw a fresh bottle of water and something that was treated wastewater – although technically the same – I’d probably prefer the regular bottle of water to this. So it’s definitely a strange image problem. “

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Austin made The headlines last year were for a number of reasons. There is a new headquarters for Oracle.Tesla Large Gigafactory in the capital of Texas. People, mostly technicians, have settled in the city away from the Bay Area, driving home prices soaring.

But it’s not just engineers. Austin has many venture capitalists including: Jim Breyer of Breyer Capital and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale said last year that he is running his venture capital company 8VC from Silicon Valley to the city.

“I don’t think everyone should move to Austin. I don’t think it’s right for everyone, but I think it’s right for us. ”

The Latest VCs to Call Austin Hometown Jeff Lewis Founder and Managing Partner of Bedrock Capital, an early stage venture capital firm four years ago with $ 1 billion in assets under management. Lewis began his investment career at the Founders Fund, where he was a partner for several years. He was or was a board member of companies such as Lyft, Nubank, Vercel and Workrise.

Lewis also led initial investments in Wish, Upstart, Tilray, Canva, Rippling, ClearCo, Flock Safety and many other unicorns. He is highly regarded for using the term “narrative break” to describe promising companies that are overlooked or undervalued because they do not align with popular narratives.

When moving to Austin, investors were disaffected with Silicon Valley and said they weren’t focused on solving what the region identified as a real problem.

Middle Officer Lewis said he first became acquainted with Austin after supporting Workrise (formerly known as RigUp), a market for skilled workers. In fact, he was the company’s first seed investor eight years ago and has invested in the company eight times since then.

Lewis said he’s drawn to the company not only because it’s “getting huge,” but also because “it’s far more interested in real people and places than today’s Silicon Valley giants.” ..

“Simply put, it’s a more humane tech company,” writes Lewis. “And what brought me to Texas was to look for this more humane genre of innovation. I live on the coast and am building a career as a technology entrepreneur and investor in Silicon Valley. I was there but I never felt it. As a coastline or an insider in Silicon Valley – I didn’t go to Stanford or get rich. “

TechCrunch spoke to Lewis to learn more about his decision to relocate his business to Austin and learn why Silicon Valley has become a “bubble” (spoiler note: you are you). May not be popular with many of them!) And he plans to invest more in Texas startup connections.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You said you grew up in Canada. What made you want to get into the technology industry?

I started out as an entrepreneur and founded a SaaS company in the travel industry. [Topguest].. I started the company in New York City and moved my team to San Francisco in 2009. I spent most of my career from 2009 to 2021 commuting between New York and science fiction. We eventually sold the company in 2011, which was a pretty good result. I joined the Founders Fund in 2012. So I’m addicted to investing. I made a very special career there and 2012 was a great opportunity to be a young VC in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Ultimately, I focused on both consumer and corporate markets, helping companies like Lyft and Canva early on. I also made my first FinTech investment in Latin America and helped Nubank. The company is currently valued at $ 30 billion.

I grew up pretty humble and in 2017 I thought I was pretty successful as a VC. I have to make an effort to get back to what I want to do, which is more entrepreneurial. That is why we founded Bedrock at the end of 2017. I am currently using Fund III, which corresponds to my investment philosophy. That is, we try to find so-called narrative violations, or those narrative companies that are overlooked or undervalued. We were very early investors in cameos. Cameo, for example, is clearly a fairly well-known business by now.

You originally decided to lay the foundation in New York. Why?

When I was at the Founders Fund, I had houses in both cities (SF and NYC) so I was a kid who grew up in Calgary, Canada and wanted to live on the beach and be the center of the action. However, Silicon Valley tended to be a little overly self-referential and a little bit out of the way of the noise, so we decided to move to our headquarters in Bedrock, New York, in 2017. New York is not a city of horses so I decided to start a company there, but I have actually invested and continue to invest all over the country and honestly all over the world. We invested in WordPress early on and more recently in Argyle and Lambda School.

VC Geoff Lewis on moving to Austin and bursting the “self-referential” bubble in Silicon Valley – TechCrunch Source link VC Geoff Lewis on moving to Austin and bursting the “self-referential” bubble in Silicon Valley – TechCrunch

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The list of tech companies leaving the Bay Area or downsizing their office space is a little longer now.

Snowflake, a cloud software company, is no longer headquartered in San Mateo, as the San Francisco Business Times first reported. Bozeman, Montana, will replace the Silicon Valley address as the new “main business office”.

The strange title was chosen because the company stated that it no longer had a headquarters at all, but instead advocated a globally distributed workforce. In an earnings call this week, executives said they chose Bozeman because the Securities and Exchange Commission required corporations to appoint a chief executive officer. Since both CEO Frank Slootman and CFO Mike Scarpelli are based in the mountain town, the Montana address made more sense.

The San Mateo office remains open and the company employs 983 people in the Bay Area, according to LinkedIn.

Many other high profile tech companies took steps in 2021 and 2020. Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced in 2020 that it would move its headquarters to Houston, although the San Jose campus was retained. Oracle, based in Redwood City, is also moving to Texas and is choosing Austin as the headquarters for its “more flexible workplace policy.” Digital Realty, a data center company, also announced that it will move to Austin earlier this year.

Meanwhile, other large companies have reduced their space. Salesforce, the city’s largest private employer, canceled its 325,000-square-foot lease for the undeveloped Parcel F tower in the Transbay neighborhood of San Francisco in March. Airbnb offers space in three office buildings to sublet with an area of ​​more than 424,000 square meters.

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Upwork, a service for freelance workers to register on a digital marketplace, will be relocating its headquarters from Santa Clara to San Francisco.

Part of this is for convenience, reported the San Francisco Business Times. The new offices are more easily accessible to customers outside the bay and are located near a CalTrain stop.

However, a key component of the business is less floor space, according to the Business Times – the offices in San Francisco will be much smaller than the current offices, which will be sublet for the next 10 years to overcome the current rental situation. The new office is located in SoMa, 47 Brannan St.

In fact, CEO Hayden Brown told the Silicon Valley Business Journal that the move is part of an effort to normalize remote working after the pandemic – and not force people to come to the office every day.

“That will create a magnetic pull,” said Brown. “I don’t want other people to feel the pressure or that I try to create a kind of face-time culture myself by being there.”

Brown also said that much of Upwork’s 570 workers stayed in the bay during the pandemic. (Also note: she said her employees are paid by location.)

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Have you heard the one about Rachmaninoff and Anastasia? Well, Hershey Felder has quite a tale to tell you! On Sunday, May 16th, acclaimed pianist/performer Felder will portray the iconic Russian composer in Nicholas, Anna & Sergei, his latest world premiere livestream from Florence, Italy. Nicholas, Anna & Sergei explores the little-known story of a strange meeting of Russian piano virtuoso Rachmaninoff and Anna Anderson, a woman who claimed to be Princess Anastasia, the sole surviving member of the Romanov Dynasty. Set in the Beverly Hills house in which Rachmaninoff died in 1943, Nicholas, Anna & Sergei is a mesmerizing memory play imbued with the composer’s most-beloved music.

Presented by Hershey Felder Presents Live from Florence in conjunction with TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, the show was written by Felder and directed by Felder and Italian film artist Stefano DeCarli. It promises Felder’s uniquely entertaining blend of live performance, filmed elements, sumptuous visuals, gorgeous music, compelling drama and fascinating cultural history, all leavened with bits of wry humor. The production will also include guest stars such as world-famed soprano and actor Ekaterina Siurina as Natalia Alexandrovna Rachmaninoff, Klezmerata Fiorentina violinist Igor Polesitsky as Dr. Golitzin, and theatre and film actor J. Anthony Crane (who played the title role in TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s Cyrano) as Tsar Nicholas II. Helen Farrell will play Anna Anderson. Nicholas, Anna & Sergei will stream live at 5pm PDT, on Sunday, May 16, 2021 (with streaming on-demand access through May 23). To purchase tickets or find more information, visit TheatreWorks.org. Ticket sales directly benefit TheatreWorks Silicon Valley.

I spoke with Felder last week from his home in Florence while he was in the whirlwind of creating this world premiere. We talked about the craziness of producing these incredibly complicated multimedia livestreams during Covid times, how Rachmaninoff’s music and story resonates so deeply for him, and his plans for a whole new season of offerings. Felder is always a delight to talk to – instantly engaging, funny, warm and knowledgeable – and any conversation with him is apt to go off on a number of unanticipated tangents. For example, who knew that Rachmaninoff was tickled pink by Mickey Mouse playing his Prelude in C #? Felder’s use of language is also uniquely musical. But then, what else would you expect from a Canadian who grew up speaking English, Yiddish and French, and is now creating his latest work in Italy surrounded by a team of Russians? The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

So Nicholas, Anna & Sergei is another world premiere for you! How are things going?

Oh, it’s a zoo! [laughs] You know, they’re downstairs in one part of the – how do you call it, borgo – with the costumes one set is doing, another set is making supper for crew. You can’t imagine what goes on here. Pianos were moving all around the place today, and locations in palazzos and things to make the Tsar’s winter palace. Finding as much red fabric as there is in all of Florence, because of course if you’re dealing with tsarist Russia, it has to be red. So, you know having fun, almost too much.

The way you describe where you’re at with putting this show together right now, it sounds like the ultimate “Hey, kids! Let’s put on a show!” situation.

[dubiously] Ehh – a little bit different. It still requires a lot of [Covid] testing, and now Italy is so demanding that if anybody comes here, it’s not just a rapid test, it’s a PCR test, and it needs to be within 48 hours of arrival. It’s lots of protocol, lots and lots of tough stuff. And so on that front, it’s less about “Oh, let’s just put on a show.” than it is “We’re going to put on a show and we’re going to have to be very careful how we do it.” We have to be very conscious that there are rules and we must take care of people, and at the same time produce something that’s a bit of a spectacle. So it’s a tall order!

This one is close to my heart. It’s emotional, it’s about a pianist and it’s also about someone who’s suffers greatly – not that I’m someone who suffers greatly. I mean, I suffer like a normal person, I don’t suffer like an unhappy Russian. [laughs] – But like most people I suffer, and I know what it means to be an artist, and I know what it means to always feel unfulfilled, even if it’s on a different level than Rachmaninoff did. I know what it means to be displaced, as so many of us do, running from home to home until you actually find one and feel comfortable.

So I understand that character. I understand to a degree what it must have been like to be in America, finally getting American citizenship 8 weeks before being diagnosed with severe terminal cancer and being pumped up with morphine in bed. And that’s really his story, being 70 years old and just having so much more to do and say, and not being able to. And that’s heartbreaking. So this is one that might make you cry – but that’s okay. [laughs]

Another thing I imagine you connect with is that he was a great performer.

Well, great is probably an understatement. He was a staggering performer. But he wasn’t a performer in the traditional sense that Horowitz was. Rachmaninoff was a great, great pianist and a great, great musician, but he was not a showman. His music can be very showy, but that’s not really what it’s about; it’s emotional. And finding that, finding the sadness of this loss of Russia and wanting to go home, and wanting to find home is really what the story is about. It’s not at all about “Oh, look at what I can do at the piano.” He left that to Horowitz, you know? He was asked what is the right interpretation of the 3rd Concerto and he said, “Ask Horowitz. He’s the one who knows.” [laughs] Because Horowitz knew how to show off with that piece. Rachmaninoff was not really a showoff. He was a really serious musician. And the more I study it, the more I really appreciate the deftness, the elegance, the quiet nobility that he brings to his music. It’s quite moving.

There’s also the story of Anna Anderson, which is completely nuts you know, why he all of a sudden got involved with her. I mean, it’s kind of crazy, but he was so desperate for home that even a fraudulent person was enough to make him want to do something with her. Amazing.

Once again you have soprano Ekaterina Siurina in the cast.

Yes, Kat is going to play Natalia Rachmaninoff, and she’s going to sing one of the famous Rachmaninoff pieces. And look, she’s Russian and she’s born in Yekaterinburg so you know we’re going with as much authenticity [as possible]. In fact, my whole cast is all my Russian friends. [laughs]Hershey Felder as Sergei Rachmaninoff & J. Anthony Crane as Tsar Nicholas II
in Nicholas, Anna & Sergei

You originally titled the piece just Anna & Sergei. Did you rethink how you wanted to tell the story?

Well, it was written for [in-person] theater. When the pandemic hit, I was rehearsing here and we were scheduled literally to go to America with the whole team, two weeks later, something like that. March 10th everything shut down here, so all that was annulled of course.

So this was supposed to be a stage play and that was the way we worked it. And then as I started adapting it for the screen I realized Nicholas has a much bigger part onscreen because Rachmaninoff is talking directly to the audience in a fever dream, and who he’s talking to in the fever dream is the Tsar. But you can’t quite do that on film; it would be very awkward. You can do it in the theater because, you know, it captures differently. So I realized we can’t just say “Anna & Sergei” when the Tsar is one of the main characters. The structure of the play is the same; it’s just how it’s told on film is with more characters, and so I thought it would only be fair to give them their due in the title.

That’s interesting. Like many folks, I’ve been watching lots of plays on video this past year, and there have been times I’ve felt like, “Yeah, I bet that kind of switching up characters in direct address worked really well in the theater, but on my TV set, not so much.”

It feels uncomfortable, you know? And scenes played out on the TV screen are complicated, so it has to be adapted properly, and not just sort of – I don’t want to say “lazy,” cause it’s not; it’s just not having quite solved all the problems that need to be solved.

And they’re different problems than they would be onstage.

Completely different problems, and you can’t just pretend that “Well, it’s fine.” [laughs] Which is a lot of what we’ve seen this year, and I’m sure early on I was guilty of that a lot too, but at least I was always pushing forward to try and figure out a better way to make it work.

Given the drama of Rachmaninoff’s music, I’m guessing this show will give you a major workout at the piano.

Oh, for god’s sakes, talk about exercise! It’s really not fun! [laughs] I mean I love to do it cause it’s really in my nature and I have a good time doing it, but “easy” is not what I would say it is, you know?

Unlike many of the musicians you’ve portrayed, Rachmaninoff lived well into the 20th century so there are existing audio and video recordings of him. Did you find that at all helpful in developing your characterization of him?

Well, video not really. There are home movies that people made. You know, it was fashionable, kind of like us with our cell phones? It’s him with his wife, with his daughters, with this or that pianist, but there’s no real film of performances. He wasn’t into that. In fact, he was highly against it for the simple reason that he never felt he sounded or came off on film or in recording the way he did in concert hall. Whether that was just his impression or whether that was the case, who knows? But this was the situation so there’s not really much extant video, of his playing anyway.

Rachmaninoff suffered greatly from depression, which is an illness that is still so misunderstood. How was it dealt with in his time?

Well, he was very depressed and couldn’t compose, and his aunt insisted that he go see a shrink, Dr. Dahl, or more specifically a hypnotist. One of the lines that I actually say in the piece is that he was asked what the hypnotist did and he said, “I was hypnotized – how should I know?” [laughs] But the truth is we don’t really know how he dealt with it or treated it. He didn’t talk very much about that. So we know what happened to him, but we don’t know much about the details about his illness.Ekaterina Siurina & Hershey Felder as Natalia & Sergei Rachmaninoff
in Nicholas, Anna & Sergei

I was surprised to learn that Rachmaninoff died in Beverly Hills, of all places.

Can you imagine? He died at 610 N. Elm Drive and the theater that I was meant to premiere this at was the Beverly Hills Wallis Annenberg [Center for the Performing Arts]. The Wallis is four houses from the house that he died in. I really felt very poorly for people who were living in his house now, because I figured everybody’s gonna leave the theater and go over and take pictures at 10 o’clock at night. [laughs]

He was brought to LA to give concerts. He was not feeling well at the time, and there was a great Russian community in Los Angeles. Of course, remember when ’43 is, three years time of the war, across the pond, so he didn’t want to be there. They had left Switzerland, their special home so to speak, at [Villa] Senar in Lake Lucerne. He ultimately got sick. Cancer was eating every part of him, and he had to stay, and he actually enjoyed the Russian community there. And there were some cute things about him there, like he went to see with Horowitz a tour of Disney studios, and the first sound that was used with Mickey was actually Rachmaninoff’s Prelude [in C# Minor], Opus 3.2. He was fascinated that a mouse was playing his prelude on film. [laughs]

When you do these livestreams from Florence, you finish your performance at some ungodly hour like 4AM. What do you do immediately afterwards? I mean, it’s not like you can go out to dinner.

Usually – the talkback, cause that’s important for the audience. So you know I’m up at 4 o’clock in the morning having to talk to the audience live from Florence.

And then there are the cooking shows, because now we’ve decided to associate all these events with a cooking show – “prepare Rachmaninoff’s favorite foods.” A friend of mine who’s a Cordon Bleu chef in Florence, the two of us together, we cook. We made a whole ton of Russian food yesterday and filmed it for TV. And that’s the fun part of it, a little too much fun considering what’s going on in the world, but you know that’s OK, too, sometimes.

Once Nicholas, Anna & Sergei has premiered, you’ll have completed the full slate of “Live from Florence” shows that you had announced last year so –

– except we’ve already got our next season scheduled. So having completed it? Meaningless! [laughs] We’re already starting on the next bit. It’s a lot of work, but I mean how lucky am I compared to what’s going on in the world? June 15th is the announcement for the next season. We’ve got a slate of 8 pieces, and you know we’ll see, we’ll see…

(All photos courtesy of Hershey Felder Presents)

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