Exactly. Even in decent areas of Oakland you can find sub 1k rent with a roommate. Currently live in an apartment that's a 5 minute walk away from a BART station in Oakland and pay 1800/month for a 1 bedroom that I split. Takes me 35 minutes to get to work in the SF Financial District.
While housing is very expensive here (especially if you have family), there are definitely ways to find cheap housing.
Anecdotally I know people who are renting rooms out of their homes in San Leandro/Hayward for $750/month.
Completely agree. While there are a lot of startups that may not be tackling "meaningful" problems, there are plenty that are. On top of the ones you mentioned there are many FinTech companies that are focused on helping middle and lower class Americans.
The Financial Solutions Lab has tons of startups interested in tackling large financial problems. Even works on income smoothing to make hourly and seasonal workers have steady paychecks. Digit helps with automated saving. Tala uses machine learning to create credit scores for people in Kenya, Tanzania, and other developing countries. Nova Credit helps immigrant gain better credit. There are dozens more that are all helping people get access to better/fairer financial products.
Facebook IPOd at ~$100B with annual revenue of roughly 4B. Snapchat is estimating 2017 revenue at 500mm-1B so it is not much different than what FB IPOd for. While the comparison of FB and Snapchat may not be the most valid, I still think it is worth noting that the Snapchat valuation isn't exactly unheard of.
Leaflet is amazing. The documentation is very straightforward and Leaflet makes it easy to produce high-quality maps in a short period of time.
I was doing most of my mapping work in R, but needed something interactive to use for a website and am very pleased with Leaflet so far. If you're interested in mapping I'd definitely try it out (interesting datasets would be city crime data and humanitarian data from here: https://data.humdata.org/).
While housing is very expensive here (especially if you have family), there are definitely ways to find cheap housing.
Anecdotally I know people who are renting rooms out of their homes in San Leandro/Hayward for $750/month.