If you could pick only one counterintuitive number from the YC 2026 batches, make it this one: out of 477 real-ish company records, 366 list San Francisco as their location — roughly 77%.
For comparison: New York City has 24. London 10. Boston 7. Los Angeles 4. Fully remote? 3 companies. Even if you add the 11 tagged "San Francisco + Remote", the conclusion doesn't budge: AI startups aren't spreading across the map. They're re-concentrating in one city.
This isn't Bay Area nostalgia. It's industry structure casting a vote.
Remote won work. It didn't win startup density.
One of the most popular takes of the past few years: software teams can start anywhere, so companies no longer need the Bay Area. That take wasn't entirely wrong — tooling, cloud services, open models, and online fundraising genuinely lowered the barrier to starting a company.
