Similar views are held by Anh-Tho Chuong, CEO and co-founder of Lago, an open-source billing platform. Her company and she are moving from Paris to San Francisco, even though Paris is a center of activity for European AI startups, home to successful companies like Mistral. Moving to the US was always Lago's intention, she claims, since she is also a YC graduate (S21) and was born and raised there. However, the goal was to go to New York due to its convenient location and time zone.
She told Imagine Future "Everyone was moving from SF to New York and they were saying SF was dead a year ago." She did, however, spend the month of May in San Francisco on business, where she observed that "everyone is back."
Not just her has noticed and expressed this. The creator of SaaStr, a network for entrepreneurs in business software that is well-known for its events, Jason Lemkin, wrote on X this week, saying, "So I'm back full time-ish to the SF Bay Area." As are so many executives and leaders I've known for years, usually in silence.
Even though many of them are based outside of it, in Paris and other places, Lemkin clarifies that the region is "clearly the center of the AI Boom." Like many others, he attributes the arrival of companies in the area to YC and other accelerators. "The SF Bay Area has returned.
Chuong chose San Francisco because of how much simpler it was for her to establish her business there. Even though Lago is not an AI company, its clients include them. It focuses on metering and usage-based charging and provides what it calls an open-source substitute for Stripe. According to Lago, she has already raised $22 million from a variety of angel investors and VCs, including SignalFire and FirstMark.
Most of Lago's clients are cloud startups, a big number of which are AI firms. She has been expanding the business by word-of-mouth and incoming requests, the majority of which come from businesses in the Bay Area. "We feel like the talent pool is better," she says as she searches for her first marketing hires. Additionally, she claimed that San Francisco has a "better customer pool" than any other place.
fabricated good fortune
Chuong also gave YC credit for turning San Francisco into such a hotspot, pointing out that the company regularly hosts a variety of events, such as happy hours with AI founders and alumni get-togethers. That's on top of the official gatherings it hosts for the current class and its alumni-only Bookface social network.
But there are plenty of gatherings, events, and employable individuals in every city. These founders' perspectives, along with the SignalFire statistics, highlight another benefit that the Bay Area, particularly San Francisco, has to offer: random encounters.
Meeting someone helpful becomes the rule rather than the exception when so many people in the same business are crammed into a smaller space. Chuong claims that when she was temporarily residing in a SoMa area building in San Francisco, she met three other YC founders who were working on similar firms. We recently began working together on our issues and what we're building, and everything came together rather naturally. I also thought that going to New York made little sense because there is such a strong support network here.
This is not to argue that businesses founded abroad cannot be successful. A lot of them do. Nonetheless, people decide to go because they believe that "San Francisco is the place in the world where you can manufacture luck," as Y Combinator partner Diana Hu put it in a recent podcast.