Silicon Valley is losing another tech icon after Keith Rabois announced that he’s fleeing the Bay Area and moving to Florida.
Rabois, a prolific startup investor, is best known for being an early executive at PayPal, Square, LinkedIn, and Yelp. In an interview with Fortune, the tech giant revealed that he finds it “impossible to stay” in San Francisco. He also announced that he is leaving the Bay Area, where he lived for two decades, and is planning to move to Florida.
“I think San Francisco is just so massively improperly run and managed that it’s impossible to stay here,” Rabois said.
Rabois rose to prominence as one of the first PayPal employees. He joined Peter Thiel and Elon Musk in the PayPal Mafia—all of whom are now big names in the tech industry.
In 2017, the tech icon submitted a proposed renovation to the city. His proposal caused his neighbors in Glen Park to worry over him creating a “Mark Zuckerburg” tech compound. They built a website to protest against Rabois’ plans.
His plans to move out of San Francisco comes nearly three months after the real estate site Zillow released a 2020 Urban-Suburban Market Report that showed inventory in the Bay Area rose by 96% each year.
“It may be tempting to credit the city of San Francisco’s inventory boom to the advent of remote work that came with the pandemic, but one only has to look at San Jose to question that narrative,” Josh Clark, an economist for Zillow, told the San Francisco Gate.
“The San Jose metro, which like the city of S.F. is dominated by tech workers, has not seen a similar rise. Two things that could drive the difference are San Francisco’s density and its smaller share of family households,” he added.
