Billionaire Peter Thiel leads minor exodus from Silicon Valley

Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel is fleeing liberal Silicon Valley for – well, Los Angeles, which some might say is not much less liberal.

Peter Thiel

A story from The Wall Street Journal this week reports that Thiel is planning to relocate to a home he bought in the City of Angels six years ago. Fifty staffers from Thiel Capital and the Thiel Foundation are also reportedly planning to move to Los Angeles.

Thiel was reportedly driven out, in part, by the cultural uniformity and liberal 'echo chamber' he feels has developed in Silicon Valley. In San Francisco, nearly 90 per cent of voters cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

And according to the WSJ, Thiel isn't the only one. Several tech workers and entrepreneurs also have said they left or plan to leave the San Francisco Bay Area because they feel people there are resistant to different social values and political ideologies. Groupthink and homogeneity are making it a worse place to live and work, these workers said.

Liberal and conservative tech workers alike are expressing dissatisfaction with Silicon Valley, thanks to its homogeneous thinking and its ever-increasing cost of living.

A conservative and libertarian thinker who backed Donald Trump in the 2016 election, Thiel thinks Silicon Valley's hostility to non-liberal values isn't just bad for conservatives. He believes the political bias will harm Silicon Valley's ability to innovate, according to a local San Francisco TV station, which spoke with a source close to Thiel.

''SF is still important, but the most exciting future tech developments may come outside of it,'' the source told San Francisco's KPIX 5.

VentureBeat reports that popular podcaster Tim Ferriss moved from San Francisco to Austin in order to escape what he called ''a mono-conversation of tech that is near impossible to avoid.'' Y Combinator president Sam Altman and Sequoia's Michael Moritz also both drew criticism for blog posts saying that China's tech community is better than Silicon Valley's in welcoming controversial ideas and outworking the competition (though neither of them is about to leave Silicon Valley).

But while the news that some well-known investors and entrepreneurs are now looking outside of Silicon Valley for inspiration might excite entrepreneurs and in places like Provo and Pittsburgh, a handful of high-profile techies leaving the Bay Area is unlikely to move the needle all that much, according to VentureBeat. The reason is simple - people are most likely to move to places where they already have connections.

Ferriss mentioned that he was already familiar with Austin's tech scene, having interviewed for a job at Trilogy Software after college. He also mentioned in a Reddit AMA that he's visited Austin every year since 2007. Thiel is likely planning to move to Los Angeles because he already has a house there, and because he is reportedly planning on launching a media startup, which would be right at home in Los Angeles.

Others leaving the Bay Area often do so to return to their roots. Kansas native Brian McClendon, creator of Google Maps, moved back to his home state to get involved in local politics. Married Google executives Steve and Mary Grove are moving from the Bay Area to Steve's home state of Minnesota, while Mary plans to leave Google to work for Steve Case's Midwest-focused startup fund.

What leaders in emerging tech hubs should take away from the increasing criticism of Silicon Valley is this: if a city is waiting to recruit Bay Area tech workers and executives as soon as they express dissatisfaction with Silicon Valley, it's already too late. The areas that are most likely to attract Bay Area expats are cities like Austin, a place tech workers are likely to have been visiting for years, thanks to the annual SXSW festival, and other coastal hubs, like Los Angeles, New York, and Boston, or cities the tech workers originally hail from.