There is a whole different SF that I know nothing about
This is going to be a tech post, take proper precautions
I just learned about the existence of GREG ISENBERG, a “multipreneur/CEO” who apparently recently visited San Francisco and wrote one of those thousands of words Twitter posts about it. I found it interesting because it describes a San Francisco I am not familiar with!
It starts like this:
I just got back from a 5 day trip to visit San Francisco.
I met 1 billionaire, 30 founders and startups execs from Google, Meta and Apple.
11 honest observations from having 50+ meetings in San Francisco this week:
Wow! I don’t think I’ve ever met a billionaire but I have laughed at Mark Zuckerberg in a restaurant in the Mission, so CLOSE. Let’s get to the observations!
1. Bryan Johnson is a hero in SF. The guy who spends $2M/year on “not dying”. I met lots of people who were on his “blueprint” and drizzling his $60 olive oil over everything. He has obtained cult-like status in SF.
Literally zero people talk about Bryan where I live.
Literally zero people talk about Bryan where I live, too, and that is in San Francisco! I had to Google Bryan Johnson, in fact, because I didn’t know that was the name of that nuclear-level weirdo who is injecting himself with all that shit and stealing his son’s plasma to pretend he looks young and is frequently laughed at on the Internet. I have yet to meet a single person who thinks he’s anything other than a mentally ill laughingstock.
2. People are still drunk on venture capital. A buddy of mine recently moved to SF from Florida. This is a guy who runs a bootstrapped 7 figure year cash-flowing tech-enabled business.
Now, all of a sudden he’s got a term sheet from a leading VC. . . . [blah blah blah lots of boring founders VC talk]
My takeaway: if you’re in SF long enough (even if you’re a bootstrapper), you’ll probably raise a round.
I’ve been in SF for more than 30 years and I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to “raise a round” unless you mean A ROUND OF DRINKS AT MY LOCAL WATERING HOLE HA HA HA.
3. Everyone is “crushing it” but not really at all. It was hard to find people who would actually tell me how things are going. Virtually everyone I spoke to told me they were “crushing it” or some version of that.
The reality is being an entrepreneur is 3% crushing it and 97% being crushed (if you’re lucky).
What is it about SF that makes people do this?
I am not crushing it. But I am also not being crushed. Oh I guess this applies only to entrepreneurs, not me, never mind.
(4 was boring)
5. Uber/Lyft drivers are confronting Waymo. I was at a stoplight in a regular uber with a guy 70 year old driver named Pedro. Pedro looks to his right. It’s a self-driving Waymo car. He goes: “my days are numbered.
He puts his foot on the gas and tries to cutoff the Waymo and starts laughing.
This human vs robot saga is probably going to get weirder.
Cool story that never happened, bro! You don’t know your Uber driver’s age, and Pedro did not look at a Waymo and say “my days are numbered” and then cut off the Waymo. None of this happened.
(6 and 7 are boring)
8. Very few people drink alcohol. I lived in SF from 2012-2019. Probably 10x the amount of people drinking alcohol drinking 3x the amount of alcohol. Everyone is “sober” but everyone is on some form of “organic” drug like mushrooms.
This is just ridiculous. I doubt if this is even true for the people Greg met. SF has always been a hard-drinking city and I have seen zero evidence that’s changed. People slow down and quit when they get older and I know a ton of people who take drugs, both organic and not, but “very few people drink alcohol” is not true.
(The rest are boring too)
Of course there are a hundred blue checks in his replies saying shit like “Right on, totally accurate insights bro 100 underlined” but the reason I put this up is because it’s exactly why people dislike tech people so much. They see a tiny sliver of San Francisco and extrapolate it to the entire city. It’s like if a doctor came here and met with a bunch of doctors and said “SF is amazing, everyone there earns six figures, does killer thoracic surgery, and loves golf!”
I suspect Greg Isenberg, who is much, much richer than me and lives on an island in Florida, meant this to apply only to his social circle. But that’s just it - he didn’t say that, he said “Bryan Johnson is a hero in SF,” which is stupid when 99% of SF has no idea who that gigafreak is. And this plays into the stereotype of techies - they come to SF, interact with each other, occasionally write posts about they saw a poor and got upset, and leave. They don’t engage with the city in any meaningful way. They go to that ping-pong bar, if it still exists.
OK, have a good weekend.
1) The Time long-read on that crazy guy is very much worth reading -- I'm afraid a link will get this comment tagged as spam but it's the one titled "The Man Who Thinks He Can Live Forever." So much shade thrown.
2) Anyone who has tried to raise a round in the past year knows that it is anything but easy to "raise a round" and part of why you're seeing so much M&A activity is that the companies who ran out of money and were no longer able to "raise a round" are getting sold at fire-sale prices, and the rest of us are trying to stay profitable and/or stretch any remaining cash until the market gets better or we are able to go public.
8) A lot of people I know don't drink alcohol or have mostly switched to legal weed, but I also have tapered off relationships with anyone I know who drinks a lot so that might just be my experience. I also think that everyone I know who has aged 10+ years since 2012 and/or had kids is drinking a lot less or not at all, so I'm guessing he is assuming "the city has changed" rather than that he's not hanging around with 20/30somethings single bros as much.
Anyway this is all to say that this guy sounds like a garbage person and unfortunately, the ping pong places do still exist (they're actually not that bad for teambuilding type events, and they have other games like shuffleboard too). Sorry this comment was so long but there were a lot of triggers in there