This is 100% not true. Yishan wanted the team to move to the same location and the board supported him. This was a question of office location, not centralizing.
With ~sama's revelation that Wong preferred a Daly City HQ, the battle-lines could have been:
Pro-Daly-City: "more space, cheaper, less-cool, longer-runway, more employees who've self-selected for willingness to do Reddit muckwork vs. glamorous SoMa networking, outsider perspective"
Pro-SF: "continuity with current employees, top talent prefers SF, worth the extra cost/cost-of-living, more transit links, closer to other media/advertising"
My company is in SoMa, and recruiting is not super easy, I'm confident if someone really wanted to work at Heap, they'd work in Daly City or Sunnyvale. Location has never been a great selling point.
Maybe there is a certain kind of candidate for whom not being in the city is a dealbreaker, but I'd like to see numbers.
That's not to say that this isn't a common and seemingly true myth of recruiting, but it would be interesting to be able to dispel or confirm it.
I do it once a week and, starting driving at 7:05 AM from San Mateo, it takes until 8am or just before to get into soma. Leaving at 8-9 would take longer.
See also: Google, Apple, Facebook, et al running comfy buses for SF residents to their distant HQs.
And now the Reddit board is another data point. They didn't trust their CEO's call, unless they got more proof about employee retention after choosing a non-SF location.
It's young / youngish single people who are willing to kill their bodies with insane hours at the office that most startups are after.
Those people are generally in SF, or at least the kind of people who can actually afford to live in SF on ~$100k.