San Francisco, located in Northern California, is the fifth most populous urban area in the United States, with over 7.75 million inhabitants. San Francisco is world-famous for its Golden Gate Bridge, designed in 1917, which spans the Golden Gate, a 1 mile-wide strait linking San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean. Since the emergence of the Internet and Silicon Valley, San Francisco’s reputation has gone global. Today, it is the world’s largest innovation ecosystem in terms of the number of startups and investments.

The average per capita income of 145 k$ per year is correlated with a very high cost of living. However, the San Francisco Bay Area’s salary level, which is the highest in the US, remains an attractive factor for talent. The region has three international airports located on both sides and to the south of the bay: San Francisco International Airport (SFO), Oakland International Airport (OAK) and San Jose International Airport (SJC).

Today, new information and communication technologies are dominant in Silicon Valley, with four successive generations of companies living side by side: the “very old” HP and Intel, the “old” IBM, Apple and Oracle, the “mature” Alphabet (Google) and Meta, and the “new” Twitter, Netflix and Uber and, more recently, OpenAI. Other related sectors are also being developed, such as blockchain, robotics, medtech and renewable energies.

The Bay Area’s ecosystem is valued at $2T, making it the largest in the world, 5 times larger than that of New York, for example. What’s more, the region benefits from the presence of talent, tech companies and an entrepreneurial culture, which boosts its competitiveness. Since 2014, 15% of patents filed in the United States have been registered in this region. This dynamism and excellence attracts and retains talent from all over the world. The flexibility of the labor market, partly linked to the absence of non-competition clauses in California, allows talent to move from one company to another. In an interview for a BFM business report, Stanford professor Fred Turner summed up this mentality in one sentence: “I don’t work for my company, I work for the Valley”. As a result, the San Francisco Bay Area forms a nebula of talent with extensive interconnections and networks.

Three world-class universities are located in this ecosystem: Stanford University, University of California Berkeley (UC Berkeley) and University of California San Francisco (UCSF). Stanford and Berkeley rank among the world’s best in the Shanghai 2022 rankings, particularly in computer science, engineering, energy and environmental sciences, and medicine. UCSF is unique in that it only accepts students at doctoral level and above. The university is particularly well known for its medical research. UCSF’s Quantitative Bioscience Institute (QBI) has strong links with France, and in particular with the Pasteur Institute.

Innovation and entrepreneurship are an integral part of the curricula and ethos of these institutions. For example, Google was originally a student project at Stanford. As a result, their incubators and accelerators are at the forefront of idea development and fund-raising. At Stanford University, the  Launchpad and StartX incubators have facilitated the raising of over $8B; at UC Berkeley, the Skydeck and Blockchain Xcelerator incubators have helped their startups raise nearly $2B.

More than 25,000 startups have been created in the San Francisco ecosystem since 2012. Entrepreneurial culture is ubiquitous, even within large corporations, which encourage their employees to work on personal and creative projects. As a result, many Bay Area startups have been founded by former employees or partners of major tech companies who have chosen to outsource the development of an innovative idea by creating their own startup. Uber and Airbnb, for example, were founded by former PayPal employees, and Linkedin was founded by a former Apple employee. Large corporations also support the development of innovative startups through their own investment funds, also known as “corporate ventures”. This strategic financing enables them to acquire emerging technologies rapidly and at low cost. For example, Google invested in a Glassdoor fundraising round.

The many globally competitive accelerators, incubators and support programs present in the San Francisco Bay Area cannot be listed exhaustively. However, we can mention a few of the best-known, such as Plug and Play Tech Center, Y combinator, 500 Startups, AngelPad, HAX and Launch Accelerator.

Finally, venture capital funds also have a strong presence in the San Francisco Bay Area, grouped together at Sand Hill Road. In fact, in 2021, more than a third of venture capital investments in the United States were made in this region.