Reed Jobs says SF's darkest period helped fuel its latest tech boom

Steve Jobs' son thinks San Francisco's pandemic-era real estate slump helped shift Silicon Valley's center of gravity up north.

Reed Jobs said on the Sabrina Halper Show that Palo Alto and the South Bay were "where all the juice was" during his father's career, when companies including Apple, Google, HP, IBM, and Sun Microsystems clustered there.

"And where is the energy now? I would say it has really migrated north of San Francisco," Jobs said, pointing to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Chai Discovery. "The energy is here, and the companies are here."

Jobs, who grew up in Palo Alto and has lived in San Francisco for nine years, said the pandemic "made a lot of office space really cheap" in the city, so although San Francisco "got very dark" as residents and companies departed, the upheaval made it cheaper to launch businesses.

"It was just a natural turning point for the city," Jobs said. "It's really all happening up here in San Francisco."

Affordable office spaces are highly preferred by tech startups. San Francisco itself is seeing the AI boom shift to smaller neighborhoods instead of the traditionally sought-after Financial District. According to a fourth-quarter 2025 report from Cresa, the Design District, for example, where office space costs around $59.53 per square foot, is seeing a startup cluster. By comparison, office spaces in the Financial District and Mission Bay both cost at least $70 per square foot.

Compared to the sparse Mountain View and the sprawling campuses of Silicon Valley, experts in urban planning and innovation have also previously told Business Insider that startups prefer energetic areas, with mixed-use and easily reconfigurable office spaces that don't come at a premium, due to the need to accommodate long work hours and collaboration.

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Jobs, 34, is the son of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs. He previously led healthcare investing at his mother's Emerson Collective before spinning out Yosemite as an independent firm in 2023. The San Francisco-based venture firm invests exclusively in oncology, combining investments in cancer-focused companies with philanthropic grants for academic research.

"So for me, I love following where the action is," said Reed. "We're building Yosemite to be right in the thick of things. So, we're building it here in San Francisco."