Summer 2022.
I packed my entire life into two suitcases and flew halfway across America to California.
When I landed, I had no friends, no couch to crash on, and a measly 12 followers on Twitter. Human waste littered the streets where I lived. Your shoes crunched as you walk on broken car glass. This was it – the city where autonomous cars roam and nerds overshadow jocks.
Like many, I came to San Francisco to build. After starting a modestly successful company in college, I wanted to venture out West and try my luck in the mythologized tech mecca of the world, San Francisco.
My first few months were spent scouring for a community. I hopped between cafes, hoping to run into other founders and builders. I started tweeting. I came to tech events. But all this ‘networking’ rarely amounted to anything. I seem to keep on running into people who want to be founders, but aren’t founders themselves.
I struggled to find a group of friends/founders in my first months. But in a random act of serendipity, I found myself invited to a dinner sponsored by a local VC firm. I can’t recall the name of the restaurant, but they had some of the juiciest rotisserie chicken I’ve ever had. There I met a guy named Jeson. He introduced himself as a founder amid a pivot. I noticed he had an accent. I asked where he was from – Malaysia.
We quickly bonded over our shared heritage of being from Southeast Asia, talking about our experiences as an immigrant and starting companies while in college. The conversation took a lighter, more comical turn when we realized we both just broke up with our girlfriends and were coping by hitting the gym.
Suddenly we weren’t a couple of founders sizing each other up. We were just two dudes, bonding over sour romance. Jeson invited me to his apt-proclaimed Founder’s House, a house he shared with four other builders.
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A consumer social founder on their fifth product idea.
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A banker who quit to work on his fintech app.
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An AI founder amid a $3m raise.
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A guy who sold his previous startup and is looking for his next thing.
The place smelled a little. The trash hasn’t been taken out in days and someone’s missing a bed frame. It didn’t matter. The scent of ambition overpowers all.
Months passed. The steep hills and Karl the Fog became less foreign and grew familiar, like the briny air and the low tides of Rhode Island. The seasons also began to change.
If Earth runs on climate cycles, San Francisco runs on hype cycles. Winter rolled around the corner, and soon the frosty snows of crypto & Web 3.0 melted and made way for the refreshing spring that is AI.
A new generation of builders emerged, all vying for the checkbooks of eager technocrats. When I met Jeson, he was incubating an idea in maritime logistics. Now he’s working on an AI agent. These hype cycles make San Francisco a very transitory city. They tend to go like this:
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A large market shift happens (technological breakthough, COVID, etc.)
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Trend emerges and herds flock to chase it (B2B SaaS, AI, Web 3.0, IoT, etc.)
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Ideas emerge but few are good.
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Some get funded.
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The hype fades and people move to the next trend.
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The previous wave of builders leave the city and make way for the next cycle.
In a city of so much change, the only constant is the founders’ obsession, hustle, and optimism. Everyone here believed that they were onto something big. Something unicornian. Past failures didn’t deter anybody. In fact, we wear our wounds as badges of honor. They prove that we are in the arena, fighting.
Having spent four years across three American cities, I’ve yet to encounter a place that embraces ‘the grind’ more than San Francisco.
This ecosystem normalizes arduous work hours, hyper-focus, and repeat failures. It promotes a monastic life, free of distractions from your craft. It helps that restaurants close at 9 and cafes at 5. You’d rather eat soggy cardboard than go to a nightclub here.
So – why do we flock to San Francisco?
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We come because we are enchanted – no longer by gold but by technology.
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We come because we thirst for greatness and crave connection with those who seek it too.
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We come for its cult of productivity – where all you do is hack for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.
And in that endless, clockwork motion of rise, create, and repeat, greatness blooms.
