Capital Concentration Is a Pricing Distortion — Even for SF
I posted yesterday about that SF wealth concentration chart making the rounds. Quick gut reaction — here's the longer version.
This is what’s wrong with the markets and the world atm …
sorry, but SF is really the worst place to be and even if the numbers were correct it should never be that concentrated and that’s what next revolution is gonna be about … peaceful or violent
h/t to Moonshots
The specific number is almost beside the point.
The SHAPE is what should worry everyone.
Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud:
When 90% of capital, talent, and decision-making lives inside one Bay Area zip code, you don't get more innovation. You get more correlation.
Every "contrarian" SF founder is reading the same blog posts as 50,000 other contrarian SF founders. Every investor is hearing the same pitch 17 times. Different words, same thesis.
That's not a market. That's a feedback loop.
And feedback loops do something specific to value — they inflate it.
Here's the part most people miss: the over-concentration we're seeing in US public and private markets right now isn't just inequality. It's a pricing distortion. When the same handful of names absorb most of the capital, "fair value" stops meaning anything. You're not paying for the company. You're paying for the consensus around the company. And consensus, as anyone who's lived through a cycle knows, is rented — not owned.
That's bad for everyone outside the bubble.
The Eye of the Storm Has the Furthest to Fall
But it's worse for everyone inside it.
Because when the consensus shifts — and it always does — the people living in the eye of the storm have the furthest to fall. The same concentration that made them feel safe is what makes the unwind brutal.
The interesting bets keep coming from the wrong cities anyway. Berlin. Lagos. Buenos Aires. Bucharest. Sofia.
Not because the people are smarter. Because the feed is different.
If you're building outside SF and wondering if you're behind — you're not. You're decorrelated. And in a market this concentrated, decorrelation is the only edge that compounds.
Till next time, let's BUILD BETTER!
BFG
ICYMI: Technology Cycles and The Anti-FOMO Playbook (Carlota Perez) — the framework for spotting which phase of the cycle we're actually in.