Silicon Valley has always meant higher prices. Years ago, when I traveled to work with clients in the heart of the Valley, I paid at least three times, and sometimes five or six times, what a nearly identical hotel room cost anywhere else in the country. This was during the internet buildout. I remember business trips in those early days spent scrolling through page after page of search results just trying to find a hotel with a vacancy, at any price.
The AI boom is, curiously, yet another California gold rush. About three-quarters of Nvidia employees are reportedly millionaires, and a huge share are worth tens of millions.
Why do Valley prices stay so far above everyone else's? Some are just spikes. Gold Rush eggs didn't stay at $3, and Valley hotel rates fell when the dot-com bubble burst. But I have an odd theory about the rest: Silicon Valley sits closer to the future.
If you had told someone in 1970 that a typical home would someday cost over a million dollars, they'd have dismissed you as speaking nonsense. In Silicon Valley, that day has already come. Time has a way of making outrageous prices seem normal.
Silicon Valley isn't just a place out West. It's a place further into the future, where people are already paying prices that will seem normal nearly everywhere in a decade or three.
No comments:
Post a Comment