The main obstacle to more rapid high-tech growth, he says, is that it can be hard to persuade executives to live there.In November the people of San Francisco will vote for a mayor.
And what causes cynicism is when you allow executives to live in an organization and prosper even though everything about them undermines where you're trying to go as a company.
Tesco spent 20 years considering a move into the US market, and put in two years of intensive on-the-ground research, even sending senior executives to live with Californian families to observe the way they shopped and ate.
Why? "It's easy to recruit executives to live in Palm Beach," says Gale. "It's a nice place to live, and there's great golf".
First, consider the courage it takes for C-Suite executives to live their purpose despite the risk that investors may abandon them and thereby put their own jobs in jeopardy.
In some ways, chief executives seem to live in a world apart when it comes to pay.
But our nation's top executives seem to live by a different set of rules".
When executives fail to live up to their predictions, the cases are less clear-cut than those in which companies rewrite their financial history, corporate governance experts say.
After collecting $31.5m between them in 2000 from an incentive plan linked to the company's share price, Boeing's top five executives had to live off their salaries, bonuses, restricted stock and perks alone last year, as the incentive plan failed to pay out a cent.
Now, in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event landing on the back of a faltering economy, brokers in the elite communities where a preponderance of financial and corporate executives choose to live are concerned about the impact on that rich source of clients.
