how i met sf

In a little over a month in SF, I ended up not doing what most people had recommended I do: meet people and builders in tech. Instead I got introduced to life in SF in a way I couldn’t have planned.

I’d come with a list of side projects I wanted to show people: Mahilo, which connects OpenClaw agents to each other; Spot Scout; a game I wanted to build. I’d thought of the month as coffee shops and hacker houses with agent builders. The city itself would just be cherry-on-top: I knew about the hills to the north and Ocean Beach, and was already amazed that people here get an ocean to surf in and preserved hills to watch sunsets from, but I hadn’t really thought about the people much beyond the tech part.

So what do I do on my first weekend? Lie on the grass in Golden Gate Park on a sunny Saturday with friends I’d known for about a day; friends of a mutual friend who decided we should hit the park. In the distance, I could hear a really banger set being played, probably in the meadow where I was strolling around earlier. And at some point that afternoon, I stopped feeling like I’m visiting. I felt like I live here and these are people I know. Like this is just my ordinary Saturday now. The city kind of unlocked, if you get what I mean.

finding a spot in ggp

The night before had been a set at The Great Northern: completely different vibe to what I had imagined, the music was eccentric in a way that got me wondering about the demography of the city. What kind of people live where? What’s the history of settlement? Where does this music come from: here, LA, somewhere I hadn’t heard of? What representation do local artists get? What inspires them?

Part of the answer to this came on Haight Street. I was walking to a church and saw a guy on the sidewalk with a bunch of interesting art for sale. We got talking. He ended up giving me and my friends each a CD copy of his music. We swapped Instagrams. A few hours later, I’d run down into the GGP meadow chasing music I could hear, barged into the group standing next to the decks, and learned they were all friends just taking turns playing. I watched them pack up and walk into the sunset together. Then I checked my phone and there was a notification from the artist; he’d looked up my website, found Spot Scout, and hit me up about how much he liked it.

CD that Brycon handed me

I kept meeting more people naturally. Chris drove me in an Uber one afternoon and pointed at the pots of plants outside the buildings we were passing: those will be full of California poppies (the state flower) in a few days when the rain comes, bright orange. Then he switched to restaurants. Cuisines worth trying. Where to go for what. He just knew everything about everything, and he wanted to share it.

At a cafe in North Beach, an old man from Basque Country struck up a conversation with me at the counter. I was looking at the pastries in the case, and he was behind me, and he said something about how he couldn’t order any of them anymore, too much sugar at his age. That’s how he started the conversation, insane. I invited him to my table. We talked for a long time about his life and the SF he’d known. He invited me to come work in his garden at Fisherman’s Wharf someday.

A friend would introduce me to another friend, and then that friend would introduce me to another circle. People offered me their houses to stay in the next time I was here. People kept handing me their worlds.

dipping in the ocean beach at sunset

If you’re outside, if you’re open, if you let yourself follow the music down into the meadow and barge into the group standing by the decks, the city does the rest; it accepts you. I think what people on Twitter mean when they talk about SF’s energy is kinda this: the density of people who are passionate about what they do is high enough that you only need to be present for them to find you, and for you to find them.

And it was overwhelming, in a good way. There is the nature part of the city. You can cycle around nice neighborhoods, cycle up and down Russian Hill, Pac Heights (kinda tiring though), go to Presidio and watch the sunset, go to Crissy Field for a picnic, lie on the grass in the park, play frisbee, stumble into sets, talk to people. Then there is the tech part of it, which is what I thought I had come here for in the first place. I did some of that too. I went to a hacker house in SoMa called Vivarium and met people trying to do projection on every wall and surface in this huge garage-like space with a bunch of hardware lying around. That was also SF. Then there is the road trip part of it. You can go north near Muir Woods and Trojan Point, or drive down the Pacific Coast Highway all the way to Vandenberg to watch a SpaceX launch.

a no-tech picnic at crissy field

There is just so much to do, and so many different angles from which you can enter the city.

As I lay down on the grass at Alamo Square Park to jot it all down, I realized that I had never felt the returns of going outside so clearly. SF is a great city to be living in if you let yourself be pulled outside. It made me realize that most of the projects I have built recently have also had a huge social component, but more on that in a different post about what I want to build.

Even going home in a Waymo or a cab at night, I’d look up at the bay windows of SF’s houses. Some had purple lights. Some warm yellow. Some had chandeliers, some had wall art, some looked hippie, some were dark, some had a skeleton hanging by the glass, some had people celebrating something, each contributing to the aura of the city. You could see different personas, different tastes, different lives running in parallel, and I am lucky that I’d been let into a few of them this past month.

a pretty house down the block

There was just more on offer than a month could hold, and the experience makes you think about life and what you want from it. It made me want to be outside more, meet more people, expose myself to more ideas, and live in a city that feels alive. “how do I build a life with more of this in it?”.

Special thanks to GB, Rahul, Vikram, and the people at str8 line for showing me around and always being down for side quests in the city.

just sf