Fire In The Valley: What I Learned From Three Trips To The San Francisco Bay Area
Extremely smart people who are extremely driven make opportunities for themselves. Silicon Valley exists where they exist.
If you are driven and smart, you don’t have to be there. If you are not driven but extremely smart, then simply being there won’t lead to success. There is no magical pixie dust, except hard work, grit and ingenuity at play.
Visit frequently to learn & network
“Silicon Valley” is a state of mind. You can start and run a startup from anywhere in the world, and compete against the best of what Silicon Valley has to offer — the only winning factors are drive, ingenuity and your ability to hustle.
Of course, if you are driven enough, you will figure out that there is value in the form of advice, experience and fundraising which can happen in the San Francisco Bay area so it would make sense to go there frequently and capture that value. But you don’t need to live there. You don’t need to waste your time and money chasing anybody except your customers.
If you have product/market fit, good things will naturally happen. You need to believe in yourself and not be intimidated by any competitor from Silicon Valley. In fact, share openly — get feedback and observe people’s reactions to your UVP. It will help you build a better product, or more importantly, not build one if there are major gaps in your product/market thesis.
SF Bay Area is a breathtakingly beautiful place
The more I visit, the more I fall in love with the SF Bay area. One of the more memorable moments I had there was several years ago driving on the Pacific Coast Highway (in a PT Cruiser paid for by Microsoft on an interview trip) on meandering roads through mountains at the edge of the ocean shore. Miss one sharp turn and you go right into the ocean to swim with the fish.
My favorite spot in the Bay area is the Muir Woods forest (just north of SF), which has amongst the tallest, oldest (over 1000 years old!) trees on the planet. The size and serenity of the place is breathtaking.
And of course there are the sprawling campuses of the tech companies located there which are worth a visit once, even better if you can get a friend to show you around.
Co-working spaces & coffee shops is where the excitement happens
Once you have done all of that, or skipped it optionally, the real excitement is in the coffee shops and co-working spaces spread across downtown San Francisco. Hang out at a lively coffee+code space like Workshop Cafe, or a co-working space like WeWork, or for a more quieter, serious but still tech campus-like space such as RocketSpace (which has housed over 15 unicorns till date in their early days).
Yes, there are unfortunately a lot of homeless people on the streets and the city/local population has a lot to do to make their lives better, but step inside these co-working spaces and you can literally start breathing in the startup oxygen. There is a constant buzz and energy with people talking about startups, products, valuations, etc. Attend local events and you can get to meet and experience how smart some of the folks working here are, and how driven some of them are at the same time. Some of them are what you are up against if you are working on addressing a compelling market opportunity. Your paths will converge eventually, even if you choose to stay small and local, because they are not — they are looking to get bigger and compete in your home turf with you eventually.
Breathe in, and breathe out. San Francisco Bay area has a lot to offer. But you don’t need to move there to do a startup, just make sure you/one of your key co-founders visits once every few months to network and has a chance for serendipity, you never know whom you will meet and where/how one thing will lead to another — just place yourself in the right events and meetings. On a chess board, this is equivalent to having a knight in the right place — it can move in many different ways when the opportunity presents itself, but it also shouldn’t be held back behind the gates. Make a move!
SF to live and work in has its challenges like any other city
It is a wonderful tech hub, but in regards to moving your startup permanently to the Bay area, you would need to grapple with these questions:
- Homeless: Do you really want to spend on the high cost of office space in SF, and then walk amongst several homeless people to get to your place of work everyday ? Try walking on Mission Street and not getting accosted by a homeless person who is down in the doldrums while you attempt to walk into your office “solving the world’s problems”. It’s sad to see these two worlds co-exist side-by-side. SF has the worst homeless situation anywhere in the US or Canada I have ever seen. Reminds me of the sad abject contrast between the haves and the have-nots from when I was growing up in India.
- Traffic/Commute: If you can’t afford to live in SF, or don’t want to raise a family there, do you really want to endure the long winded commute from the Silicon Valley area to SF, or the other way around ? The rush hour is a nightmare. Do you really want to be driving uphill and downhill, with the munis, and several pedestrians and cars and homeless people in the SF downtown area ? It is a challenging commute, having done it a few times. It is a bustling area with a lot of people and that commute is not for everybody. Think Toronto and its Highway 401 for driving challenge, and Manhattan level of busy city streets. Public transit might be better, but I haven’t tried that yet, so I could be wrong.
- Suburban life: Be based in Palo Alto then ? Except, the real estate there is the most expensive in the entire area. Can you afford to buy or rent a home in that area ? If not, then your options include areas like Fremont, where literally nothing happens; and San Jose. You would be driving 30 mts one way at least as in a suburb there are limits to public transit options. It is doable, like every other major hub. Pros and cons.
- Competition for talent: Do you think you would be able to attract and retain the right people with your opportunity considering everything else they have access to ? Would you rather be a small fish in a big pond or a big fish in a small pond ? Is it critical for your product development and growth team to be based there ?
- Is it worth it ?: What kind of life outside work do you want ? What are you missing out on if you move ? No family connections are worth missing out on for the highly uncertain startup life. You startup may or may not work out, but the time which you could have spent with your family and friends once gone won’t return.
There are others who can offer better advice and have deeper connections in the Valley (“warm introductions”, etc ). Conventional wisdom has been for meetings, have something to offer (a new perspective on an existing market perhaps ?). There is the world of fundraising and pitches which I haven’t experienced.
Make not being in the Valley an advantage and focus on your customers
Sometimes you need to unplug from the Valley mindset and focus on your customers. That is an advantage which you have not being in the valley, to be able to disconnect from the chatter, and build a sustainable business. Once you have product/market fit, hop on a plane and go there!
