Moving to the South SF Bay Area
The eVTOL talent density is the best in the US by far.
Packing up and moving to the Sunnyvale in the South SF Bay Area!
The VTOL is wrapped and ready for the 1500 mile trip. Flight testing will have to wait.
Why the South Bay? I'm on a quest to build eVTOLs for personal use. The South Bay has incomparable talent density to help me do this.
Most cracked aero, mechE, electrical and embedded system engineers working on eVTOLs stateside are at companies there. Tesla's engineering HQ is still minutes away in Palo Alto, not in Austin. Apple's consumer hardware engineers are close by in Cupertino. America's best robotics (various South Bay startups) and AI engineers (SF) are in the region.
As I get closer to starting an eVTOL company, it's a no brainer to be near this density of talent.
My wife and I visited the area two weeks ago, and were surprised at how livable it was and family friendly. The South Bay is worlds apart from the Gotham City that SF has become since we left there for Austin in 2021. In Sunnyvale and surrounding areas, we saw people leave personal belongings unsecured outside their front doors and leave food on the table at a restaurant to say hi to friends (would be stolen within seconds in SF). Crime overall is far lower than SF, and even lower than Austin.
We also saw less homeless people than in Austin, and way less than in SF. The only few tents we saw were pitched at Sunnyvale public library, yet there were barely any downtown or in Mountain View.
There's also the nature. Before the trip I had not spent much time in the South Bay. Driving around, up into the Santa Cruz mountains and the redwood forests, it's just beautiful. Having grown up near the ocean and in the southern hills of Adelaide in Australia, it was incredibly refreshing to see the mountains, the ocean and the Bay.
Yes the Bay Area is probably the most expensive metro to live in the world. But for all these reasons, and despite all the negative Bay Area and California chatter we hear online, I think it's actually underrated for building high volume and complexity consumer hardware.
Austin has been a good base for us for the last four years. People are friendly and I had space to design, build and fly my VTOL models. In the last four months in my garage here, I've built two VTOL models from scratch. I did numerous flight tests on the v0.1 foam and the v0.2 printed endurance bird is the one that's built and packed.
It's time to move to the South Bay and the next chapter of my quest!
Exciting!!
Great blog, thanks for this