You Don't Need to Be in San Francisco to Build Your Software

This week a few of us are setting up a folding table at an AI expo in Kansas City. The room sold out, a couple hundred people who build, fund, and run companies, none of whom had to book a flight to be there. That detail would have been unremarkable a decade ago and quietly impossible a decade before that. It is worth sitting with, because it points at something most founders still budget and plan around as if it were 2015.

For a long time, building real software carried a geography tax. The senior engineers clustered in a few zip codes. The money that funded ambitious products clustered in the same ones. If you had an idea and you were not in the room, the advice was to get to the room: move, network your way into a technical co-founder, or raise enough to hire a team that was already there. The barrier was not only money. It was proximity. Who you could reach determined what you could build.

I think that barrier has quietly fallen, and I do not think most founders have updated their plans to match.

Our studio is named after a number for exactly this reason. In a printing press, every letter of movable type was cast to a standard height of 0.918 inches. That single dull measurement is what let anyone with a press reproduce anyone else's words. Before it, copying a book meant a monastery and a year of somebody's life. After it, knowledge stopped belonging only to the people who could afford scribes. The barrier did not get lowered. It got deleted, and a whole class of people who had been locked out walked in.

Software is having its 0.918 moment. Not because a chatbot writes code, though that is part of it. It is because the whole set of things that used to require proximity and capital no longer does. A small senior team with modern tooling can build a production application in six to twelve weeks that used to take a large team two quarters. Those tools work the same whether you open your laptop in San Francisco or in a converted office off a Kansas City side street. The senior people who were once reachable only through a warm introduction now take a call from anyone with a real problem to solve.

Here is what that changes for a founder who is not in a hub, said plainly. You do not need to move. You do not need a technical co-founder as the price of admission, though a good one is a gift if you find them. You do not need a quarter-million-dollar budget and a twelve-person team to reach a first version that real users can touch. What you need is a working v1 in a couple of months and a real path to whatever comes next. Where you happen to sit while that gets built stopped being the important variable.

San Francisco, in this piece, is not a real place. It is shorthand for wherever you have decided the real builders are and you are not. For some founders that is New York. For some it is Austin, or a specific accelerator, or a friend of a friend who once worked at a company you admire. The instinct to get near that gravity was correct for a long time, because the gravity was real. The argument here is only that it has weakened, and that planning your product around reaching it is now a way to lose months you do not have.

What has not changed is the part everyone wishes would. The tools got cheaper and faster. Judgment did not get automated. A model will generate a screen full of code that runs, and a person still has to know whether it is the right code, whether it holds up when the tenth user does something the demo never tried, whether the thing being built is even the thing the business needs. That work is still human, still senior, and still the expensive and valuable part. The drop in cost is real, but it is a drop in the cost of the mechanical work, not in the cost of knowing what to build. Anyone selling you the second one is selling vapor.

So the practical shift is not that software is free now. It is that the scarce thing moved. It used to be access: to engineers, to money, to a city. Now the scarce thing is clarity. The founder who knows exactly which single workflow has to work first, who can say what the product is for and who it is for and what it is deliberately not going to do yet, is in a stronger position than the founder with a bigger network and a fuzzier idea. That is a genuinely more level arrangement. It rewards the person who understands the problem, which is usually the founder, over the person who happened to be standing near the capital.

I do not want to oversell the geography point into something it is not. There are real advantages to being in a dense place, and in-person still matters for some kinds of work. If you can be in the room cheaply, be in the room. But treating your location as the thing standing between you and a real product is, in 2026, mostly a story you are telling yourself. The table we are setting up this week sits a long way from anywhere anyone would call a tech hub, and every company represented in that room is being built anyway.

If you have been waiting to be somewhere else, or to know someone else, or to raise enough to hire your way into the room, that wait is the expensive part now. The barrier already fell. The only question left is what you are going to build with the door open.