Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Getty

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Mark Zuckerberg has a message for budding entrepreneurs considering following his footsteps and moving to Silicon Valley to launch build a startup: Don't bother.

In an interview on-stage at a conference in Utah on Friday, the Facebook CEO said he wouldn't launch a new company in the San Francisco Bay Area, long the tech capital of the United States — home to titans like Apple, Google, and Facebook itself.

"I like the Bay Area, so I'm not super negative on it, but I do think on balance if I was starting from scratch now, I  would not pick the Bay Area," Zuckerberg said.

It's a resounding rejection of the region by one of its most famous success stories, at a time of already-mounting debate over high living costs, income inequality, and other dysfunction in the region.

He said that when he first moved to Silicon Valley, he was 19 years old, and "didn't know anything about building a company," and that "at the time a lot of the tools for building a company weren't as built out as they are now."

Now, though, he said, social media makes it easier for a new company to find their customers, and adding new servers to power a new app or website is just a matter of renting capacity from the Amazon Web Services cloud platform.

"Back then it was a lot more complicated," Zuckerberg said.

He says that it was difficult for Facebook to get the servers and data centers it needed to establish itself, let alone find the necessary venture capital amid the downturn in the tech sector following the dot-com bust. He had to come to Silicon Valley to find the solutions to all those problems, he said: "It really felt like it was going to be impossible."

Things have changed, though, and the conditions are right for more startups to appear in more places.

"I think the world is in a different place now," Zuckerberg said. "I think the infrastructure exists for people to do stuff like this in more places."

Furthermore, he said that it's not only easier to go outside Silicon Valley, but that there are now upsides to doing so.

"There's a lot of advantages to building a company that is not in such a monoculture," he said, adding that "Silicon Valley being an all-tech town there's not as much diversity of how people think about things as you'd like, in a lot of ways." 

Zuckerberg is only the latest, but certainly the most high-profile, tech exec to cast doubt on the future of Silicon Valley as the tech hub of the world. Last year, Reddit cofounder and investor Alexis Ohanian said that "no one in their right mind" would base a new startup entirely in San Francisco, citing the region's prohibitively high cost of living as a major barrier to doing business and recruiting talent.

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Rob Price was a senior correspondent at Business Insider, based in San Francisco. He wrote investigations and long-form features about platforms, people, and power in Silicon Valley.His stories variously led to attorney general investigations, large-scale internal reviews at major tech companies, high-profile personnel departures, citation by state and federal lawmakers, and the closure of a well-funded startup. His 2022 story on the Bitfinex hack is being adapted into a feature film, and in 2024 he received an SPJ NorCal Excellence in Journalism award for his reporting on AI and relationships.Rob's scoops and exclusive stories were cited by The New York Times, Bloomberg, the BBC, Associated Press, Reuters, CNBC, Politico, The Guardian, Axios, and many other national and international publications. His writing has also been published in or syndicated by The Washington Post, The Independent, Vice, Slate, and elsewhere, and he appeared on CNN, the BBC, CBS, Reuters, ABC Australia, and other broadcast media to discuss technology, business, and culture.He worked for Business Insider from 2015 to 2025. Prior to joining the features team, Rob covered Facebook and Silicon Valley, and before that wrote about tech business, policy, and the gig economy in London. Between September and October 2019, he was acting executive editor for Business Insider's UK bureau. He also sat on the board of directors for the San Francisco Press Club, the leading non-profit media advocacy group in the Bay Area, and was a volunteer crew member at the Marine Mammal Center, the world's largest animal hospital for marine mammals. You can contact Rob Price via email at robaeprice@gmail.com, or +1 650-636-6268 (Signal / WhatsApp / Cell). Selected stories:— They spoke out against their employer. Then they were hit with trade secrets suits.— The rise of 'shadow stand-ins'— App, Lover, Muse: Inside a 47-year-old Minnesota man's three-year relationship with an AI chatbot— Deel Speed: The inside story of a $12 billion HR startup's breakneck growth— Private islands, flying cars, and psychedelic parties: Inside the wild post-Google lives of Larry Page and Sergey Brin— 'I want your Instagram account': First came the threatening texts, followed by the SWAT teams. Then someone wound up dead.— Inside Iconiq: How Mark Zuckerberg's banker built a secret Silicon Valley empire and made billions— Gaia was a wildly popular yoga brand. Now it's a publicly traded Netflix rival pushing conspiracy theories while employees fear the CEO is invading their dreams— A drunken late-night assault allegation has roiled the secretive world of Mark Zuckerberg's private family office. Personal aides are speaking out about claims that household staff endured sexual harassment and racism from their colleagues.

Matt is a former Deputy Editor, Tech based in San Francisco. Matt came to Business Insider in 2015 from IDG Enterprise, where he reported on application development and new enterprise technologies for CITEworld, Computerworld, and Networkworld.