San Francisco now has become the center of the startup world. In the present, people talk about Silicon Valley as a state of mind rather than the real physical world. It is similar to the Empire of State as a symbol of New York. The heart of the community is now no longer close to Mountain View, Palo Alto, Sunny Valley or Menlo Park where Big Techs are located. It is a city with a boom of new generation of software startups, especially from YC like Stripe, AirBnB, Pinterest, PageDuty, etc.
I visited San Francisco during the holidays. My flight was changed at the last minute - I transited in Boston in 20 minutes. It was a nightmare to put a giant winter coat into my luggage that fit the airport policy. After going through a security check, the luggage exploded into two segments. Upon arrival, I dragged the luggage around the Bay Area to search for a home stay. The city and building was empty. Most of the people I contacted were out of town or that was the last day they were in the city.
I could not buy any tickets to move to other places and had to stay in the Bay Area. Finding houses was difficult compared to my budget. There was a time I slept on an air bed in a garage and alone in an empty house of a friend of friends. However, to me this is more like an exciting challenge. It felt like reviewing the history of the Valley with stories of garage startups. Later I moved to the Valley and became a temporary house manager of some of the biggest houses there.
The trip’s purpose was to find more resources to work on the research. I would die in frustration by locking myself in a room and waiting for better weather in Montreal. If I wanted to go out, I would need a lot of extra items. My budget was not enough to let me survive the Winter. If I got stuck for too long, I would have to leave the research behind. It almost happened when I was in Vietnam. If everything was OK, I would return to Montreal in Spring.
Most of the people in my old network or new network were not there. I learned to make new friends with the rest of the city by actively knocking on other people's doors. I joined several learning groups - their last session before a vacation. Tried to catch a conversation with people in a restaurant and asked for a reference about where to find others. The most ironic thing is that the most fruitful conversation was in coffee shops and restaurants. I found a group of Uber Engineers and an alum of YC - how I decided to jump further into the ecosystem.
In tech meetups, I found most unrelated people coming from somewhere else. Often opportunity seekers from other countries and regions with a strange story. We have spiritual teachers, marketer, sales, etc. Newcomers tend to live in hacker houses or co-living places. It was small and cozy but very helpful to do networking. I personally found lots of people really working in tech as an engineer there. Those are indeed super difficult to find and you need a referral to join. I spotted two folks from a well-known house while joining a hackathon. In a room full of hackers, we just had a random conversation and they mentioned about 40 people in the house. Then I stopped - “hold on, what ?!” - walk me there. I made a tour and a few later I moved to the house. I used to try to get into those two years ago, but did not make it. This time I made another try.
In my previous stay in a student house, I made friends with three roommates from three continents. It was pretty interesting. I used to host a house on behalf of friends and got 5 star reviews. I did believe that this should have been an easy challenge. Well, it was indeed a nightmare. The manager of the house went on a vacation to celebrate his promotion when a company was acquired by another big company. That left an entire house without proper care. Every day was like a sitcom scenario. Something happened. Fire in the kitchen. Somebody left a pizza in the oven and forgot to watch over it. Undetectable droplets from the celling to the kitchen table during meals. Somebody's girlfriend spotted some real mushrooms in the basement. 3AM conversation. Somebody also tried to sell me drugs. That was last month - My only month.
To be fair, that was ironically similar to how startup forms at the early stage. Full of chaos and unexpected incidence. If you don’t really enjoy this rolling coaster process, it is just hard to stay long in the game. For those into this experience, we just wanna stretch out to try harder and harder.
When coming to the Valley, my initial goal was to find some autonomous self-driving startup but finally I spotted a self-driving food delivery bot. It happened when I took a bus to Las Vegas to attend CES - the largest tech show on the planet. I did have lots of interesting experience, but I did not have any fruitful results in a search for resources and connections. I started to think of something I left behind in 2016, e.g. starting a company.
I was lucky to spot a VR/AR engineer & game designer. Through interviews and extra experience in the Game Developer Conference, I realized why I was so lonely in the city because I moved too early compared to the rest of the crowd -- I got stuck here for an entire vacation. It would be a good fit to build a design tool that captures the future growth of the field. I also tried some technology and saw the pain point of people working in this area, especially when the new version of the headset was released.
Then Nvidia releases a demo that turns a 2D picture into a super realistic photo with a few buttons. It was like Photoshop 2.0 when you don’t have to do several layouts and edits to make an effect of the shapes.