SF Stories
I spent 5 weeks living in SF to:
find cutting-edge info on AI,
meet people to potentially work with, and
make some loose connections for future fundraising.
Did I succeed? I’ll comment on each in turn, and wrap up with some short stories.
Did I learn more in SF than I can online?
Yes – I found startups already building specific ideas I had in mind, e.g. a tool to more easily train and deploy open source models.
Yes – I got a sense for the current focus of startups, e.g. tools to help companies gauge the performance and accuracy of AI integrations are hot (aka “evaluations”).
No – some of the best latest information is available online, e.g. latent space podcast, Rick Lamers’ newsletter, Simon Willison’s substack, marginal revolution website.
No – many entrepreneurs are spending time building, not socializing or going to events. (? Although maybe the very top entrepreneurs get the blend right).
Did I meet people to work with?
Yes – I made a few loose connections on GPU rig building, evaluating audio models, and evaluations (what I mentioned above).
Yes – I met a guy working on sensor/measurement technology I’m interested in… at a touch rugby game!
No – if you’re 30+ , people are busy at that age and it is harder to get into social groups (could just be me).
Did I make connections for fundraising:
Yes – I made 3 loose contacts.
No – I’m not fundraising and tried to avoid investor events. Btw, being an investor is difficult in SF because there is a high supply of cash around from angels and VCs. See the story below. Also, smart investors also know to avoid founder-investor meet-ups in favour of finding founder-only type events.
Time for stories… but just one quick comment before then… My (low confidence) view is that the Bay Area has too much focus on raising money versus generating revenue. People respect it if you say you’re running a profitable business, but it comes off as odd if that business is early-stage. That said, there is a third focus that is obvious in the Bay Area – hacking. Hackathons are events you show up to unprepared and build a product within a day or two. Status at hackathons is more attached to building a cool project than to raising money or (perhaps) the project being useful. This is a big strength of the Bay Area imo.
Now. Short stories.
What part of the city are you staying in?
I was asked this question more often than I expected. I’m not sure what combination of status or safety was beneath. I was in Inner Sunset and people’s reactions seemed to imply the place had an appropriate amount of safety and modest amount of status.
How to Busk?
There was a talented violinist busking by Marina Bay, not far from Golden Gate Bridge.
Anywhere else (well, say ireland or France), the musical talent would have sufficed to draw donations. But in SF, it seems optimal to supplement one’s talents with a placard and verbose plea to donate.
Groundhog Waymo.
There’s a soft brr in the air of SF. It is the safety sound of white Waymo cars navigating with no driver.
I sat waiting for the bus one day by Marina. One bus didn’t show up and the next one broke down. I had the time to see a Waymo pull up by the corner of the esplanade every five minutes, pick up a passenger, and move on. In fact, I had the time to see this five times. Was like Groundhog Day.
Whale Sperm in Bean Soup.
said the stranger I passed by, muttering to himself. That man had a vocabulary.
He says the women are in New York.
That was a young lad in his twenties, bemoaning the poor dating scene in San Francisco. Unprompted.
Tsunami.
I was with another Irish guy, coming to the end of a meeting. Our phones started buzzing – “Get immediately to higher ground”. No one did – at least that I saw.
I was in Mission District. It’s only 20 feet or so above the sea. On the second floor, perhaps I was 30-40 feet high.
Is that high enough to be safe? I had no idea. Google had no idea. The City of Francisco had no idea.
Forty five minutes later, the tsunami was called off. Fifteen minutes later again, I saw a friend post a map of “tsunami risk zones” on X. Turns out I would have been safe. One mile inland or 200 feet above sea level, is apparently where you want to be.
Low Politics:
I arrived in SF the day before the election. Apart from a visit to a friend’s house, I had very few conversations about politics for the rest of the five weeks.
Maybe I’m deaf to it. Maybe events/people were focused on AI. Maybe enough people voted for Trump in California that people were more quiet on the topic?
Things felt more relaxed on language than when I last lived in the US (2020) – less gymnastics with words like man-hours, tradesmen. The circles I was in likely ranged from blue (social stuff like salsa, touch rugby) to red (in AI). Generally, I felt less social tension (I could be hallucinating).
Salsa bands are forever.
I went to a salsa social. Two actually. I wrote down this phrase afterwards and now have no idea why I write that down.
Tenderloin
I was warned (usually after being asked where I was staying) not to go there.
You walk the long “Mission Street” and Tenderloin arrives suddenly with people stumbling in the middle of the paths.
It’s (partly) not new. Tenderloin has long had issues with homelessness and drugs. Fentanyl and allowing tents to build up on the streets made things worse. Apparently the area is much better now than it was two years ago – so said some uber drivers. But it was bad. The rest of SF that I saw was fairly grand.
On a related note, I recommend this video for a recent overview of SF and what has improved over the last two years.
Finding events:
-SF Demo Day.
-Luma (it’s an app for events, you can find calendars for AI).
-Latent space discord.
Plush Quiet Offices:
I was at events at Notion, GitHub, Chroma, and some others I don’t remember. Generally the events were on at around 6-7 o’clock. In each case, the offices were very quiet with few if any employees there.
There’s b2b, b2c and b2vc.
Let me spell out the business models:
Business selling to other businesses = B2B
Business selling directly to customers = B2C
Business selling/fundraising from venture capital firms (no need for revenue when you can fundraise) = B2VC.
Reach out if you need money.
There was a day-long workshop on data visualisation (well organised and a good event fwiw).
[It is mundane how X, TikTok and Netflix involve linearly scrolling through content. Why don’t they use clustering? i.e. see a video I like, then see a cluster of related videos with the ability to zoom in and out.]
In any case…. It’s the end of the day, and one of the partners is wrapping up the event. She says:
Partner: “Thank you all for attending, and, if you need money, just let us know.”
Audience question/comment: “and free compute credits!”
Partner: “Yeah I suppose we have good compute credits, but really just if you need money…”