Venture funding has run the course

Guardian: If you were looking for an apartment in the Bay Area 18 months ago, realtors recommended you took your checkbook to viewings and were prepared to fork out for the deposit and first month’s rent – that’s $8,000 to $10,000 for a two-bedroom place in San Francisco – on the spot.  

“There was no negotiation because there were 10 people behind you saying, ‘We’ll take it’,” said Ron Stern, CEO of housing relocation service Bay Rentals. Today, rents are still expensive, but the market has plateaued after years of painful increases. It’s part of a broader trend in the Bay Area: Silicon Valley’s technology bubble has had some of its wind knocked out – not bursting, but fizzling – with VCs making fewer investments, startup valuations falling, and recruitment slowing. 

 Scraping by on six figures? Tech workers feel poor in Silicon Valley's wealth bubble “We’re starting to get a lot of résumés from [software engineers at] companies where the business model isn’t working and they can’t get funding, so they are closing down or cutting back,” said Mark Dinan, a software recruiter based in the Bay Area, who keeps track of companies’ hirings and firings.

Whoops, I was going to start a cab company and become a billionaire.