[jlaurend]

Probably both, I'd imagine. Regarding cost, Stripe was pretty outspokenly against Prop C in SF last year (which passed, to their dismay). The result is an added tax on revenue which hits Stripe hard since they have a high volume, low margin business. Not to mention CA is already a very expensive place to run a company.

With rising costs in SF, they likely had to explore viable long-term solutions. They can start moving more jobs to their other offices, open new secondary offices, or expand their remote presence. With remote, they're able to keep SF as the HQ while lowering costs. It's also popular among devs, so it'll keep their brand image good amongst their target demo and among their current employee base.

[pault]

Are they not in Austin? I don't see it on the jobs page. Austin is the perfect combination of low COL and available talent in my opinion.

[Bartweiss]

> Austin is the perfect combination of low COL and available talent in my opinion.

Some evidence for that: half the game studios I know of have programmers in Texas, or occasionally elsewhere in the southeast (e.g. North Carolina). If you want a dense talent pool around your office, but don't have the margin/capital to pay coastal cost of living, there aren't many other options to rival those.