‘The Worst City in the United States’

At the Silicon Valley Bigwigs Conference, a senior technology executive who pulled his company out of the Bay Area exploded, calling San Francisco “perhaps the worst city in the United States.”

Drew Otting, president of 8VC, who was once headquartered in San Francisco but moved to Austin Texas, said homelessness, crime rates, covad lock measures and high taxes have led to a good dance.

“San Francisco is probably the worst city in the United States,” Oetting told colleagues at Fortune Brentstone Tech in Aspen, Colo.

Otting says he and his company chose Austin because of its “power” and very low cost of living.

But Otting received a strong response from another technology executive, Bloomberg Beta’s Roy Bahat.

Bahat, a San Francisco resident, said the Gulf area will remain a hub for technology companies due to the large number of flying colleges and universities.

“A lot of people in California made a lot of money, they just left for tax reasons,” Bahat said. “I really think this is very disgusting.”

Bahat added that the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn Rovi Wade, Texas’s strict abortion laws and Florida’s “Do Not Gay Homosexuality” law primarily prohibits liberal technologists from living there.

“I’ve heard from many women who aren’t very happy about their position on Texas when it comes to women,” he said.

OUTING says the cost of living exceeds social concerns.

“I don’t pay taxes to the government. The government is in debt,” he said.

Last year, more than two dozen California-based companies, including Tesla and Oracle, moved their headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin.

On the panel, another technology executive, Lucy Guo, a moment’s CEO, welcomes the LGBT community to her hometown of Miami.

“It’s one of the happiest places I’ve ever been,” says Guo Miami.

“It’s one of the best places to start a company,” she said.

In addition to Tesla and Oracle, Infrastructure Engineering giant Ecom, telecom company DZS, financial services provider Charles Schwab and real estate investment firm CBRE Group have all moved from Golden State to Dallas-Fort Worth Metrolex.

Since the beginning of 2018, some 300 companies have relocated their homes from California to Texas, Arizona, Nevada and Tennessee, according to the Hoover Institute.