Michael Hiltzik: They say San Francisco is coming back as a tech hub, but it never really left

Michael Suswal's first eye-opening encounter with the vibrancy of San Francisco came in 2017.

That's when he and his fellow co-founders of Standard AI, an artificial intelligence startup funded by the incubator Y Combinator, moved from New York to San Francisco for the summer.

"Initially we planned on going back to New York," says Suswal, 44. "But after living in the Bay Area for two or three months, between us we had way more network contacts than we had had in our combined 50 years living in New York."

When COVID hit, Suswal told me, he moved to Seattle and worked from home. Last year, when he and a partner opted to co-found a new company, they pondered the best place to start.

"We thought, where else would you go that would have more support, more connections, the right type of environment and the right investors? Building a company is hard. It takes everything you've got, and even then there's an 80% chance of failure. So why would you stack the deck against yourself? It was a