I live a 20 minute drive (after 10am or 7pm) from ~all the startups in SF (in SOMA or Midmarket). My rent would be ~$1800-2500/mo for a 1BR. (GF owns the condo, so no rent now). While Oakland is moderately "real", I've never "had to use the AK" -- it's realistically about as safe where I live as in SF (I live near a Whole Foods, after all). I do spend about $660/mo on commute ($260 parking, $100 bridge toll, $300 or so on gas and vehicle operating expenses). I could do a 50 minute BART ride for $0/mo total if I wanted, and it'd be 30 minutes if I lived a little closer to BART and worked at Twitter or Lookout instead of by Caltrain.

There are probably >10k jobs in that commute footprint I could have within a week at $150k base plus $100-300k/yr in equity. If I were a competent 5-10y experience frontend developer, maybe 50k jobs in the same range. That's without even touching Silicon Valley itself, or remote-but-through-SF-connections.

This is the advantage of SV as an employee. You can work for a startup knowing that you'd literally have a new job before the day is out if your company imploded in the morning.