Visit to San Francisco – Royksopp, Udemy, Twitter and more

I just got back from my first ever visit to San Francisco. My wife Beth got us tickets to watch Royksopp and Robyn at the Bill Graham auditorium.
We were in SF for 3 full days and we had a great time getting to know a bit of this unique city in Northern California.

To me it was a very special trip because as a hard core startup geek, SF is where many of my favourite startups are located. Among the famous you’ll find Twitter, Dropbox, Craigslist, Pinterest and many many more household names.

Less known but more dear to my heart startups like Hipmunk (the startup that helped launch Grumo Media) and Udemy (the online education platform where I’ve been selling courses for almost 3 years).

You can read much about life in San Francisco in other blogs. And so I did just before getting there.
The main things are: SF is full of mega rich and mega poor living next to each other, rent is insanely expensive, there are many hills, there are homeless everywhere, there are many cute old victorian houses, and of course every other startup you heard of has its headquarters here.

Because there are so many startups you’ll find tons of kids making $100K+ a year walking the streets of SoMa listening to their iPods (I’d say about 1 in three startup looking kid was listening to music/podcasts with white Apple looking earphones).

And next to them you’ll see countless homeless people asking for change or shouting gibberish at whoever crosses their path. If you are looking for extreme diversity in people SF is the place to go for sure.

In this trip we encountered even more diversity than usual because it happened to be gay pride weekend.
On Sunday, the gay parade marched along Market street which was one block from our hotel.
We learned that SF was the first city in North America where the parade started and also where the famous rainbow flag originated.

Now here is a quick account of each of our days in San Francisco.

Day 1: Royksopp and Robin Concert.
The concert was at the Bill Graham auditorium about a 15 mins walk from our hotel down Market St.
For me the best part of the concert was that the auditorium was right across from Twitter headquarters so I got to do the nerdiest thing a nerdo like me can do. I tweeted from Twitter HQ and my wife rolled her eyes back several times and said: “..and this is what I picked as my husband..”.

Ok, the concert was great. The auditorium is hugenormous, was packed, and the acoustics were great.
Although I am quite music illiterate Royksopp is one of my favourite groups and I was able to recognize about 4 songs the whole night. Robyn came after and it’s obvious we don’t know what’s cool these days because everyone got way more excited when she appeared on stage.

Another highlight of the night was the discovery of Fireball. A cinnamon whisky that makes everything more interesting and blurry.

Day 2: Walking, Shopping, and Gay Pride
Because our late start due to the previous night shenanigans this day was a bit of a write off.
The main event of the day was watching the gay pride parade go by market street.
There were so many people it was hard to find a good spot to watch so Beth and I went to the Nordstrom mall across the street and it turned out that you could see down the street from there.
So while Beth was all happy shopping around I stayed by the window and enjoyed the parade.

After Nordstrom we walked East towards Embarcadero where there is a ferris terminal.
Then we walked back via south of market (aka SoMa) checking Yelp for places to eat or visit.

Regarding Yelp and any popular app in general. Way before any app becomes famous most likely it was famous first in this part of California. Almost every establishment has hundreds if not thousands of Yelp reviews which can both help and confuse the heck of tourists looking for places to check out.
The confusion comes mainly from decision paralysis since there are so many options it can be hard to choose one. Although in our case it prevented us from eating at a place we were about to go in by the pier. It looked like an expensive tourist trap which was confirmed by Yelp.
BTW, Yelp was founded in San Francisco back in 2004.

Day 3: Tour of SF, Musée Mécanique, Twitter nostalgia and visit to Udemy HQ

This day we fully assumed our tourist status and decided to take one of the many hop on hop off buses departing from Union Square every few minutes. We chose a double trip from San Francisco deluxe tours.
The first trip on the red line took us over to Fisherman’s Wharf and over the Golden Gate and back.

Here is Beth collecting knots on her hair over the Golden Gate bridge:

On our way back from the bridge we stopped at Fisherman’s Wharf were had clam chowder, visited an old WWII submarine (which reminded me of how some startup guys apartments must look like inside) and played some very old games at the Musée Mécanique antique penny arcade.

It is amazing how much fun we had considering many of these games are over 80 years old but they are still fully functioning.
Here is Beth mini-bowling:

All the games cost either one or two quarters. Interacting with this old relics was worth every penny!

The second part of the tour was on the blue line around downtown which although we had already walked much of it by foot it was nice to hear more about it from our very entertaining tour guide.
I actually recorded his voice because I thought it was full of San Francisco soul.
Here is the voice:

After the tour I had arranged a short visit to Udemy’s head quarters and then dinner with a small group of Udemy folks.

Having just finished reading “Hatching Twitter” I had already spend hours on Google Earth flying virtually over many of the landmarks mentioned in this book about the Twitter’s dramatic rise to universal fame.

One of these landmarks was a little office at 164 South Park where Twitter originally started.
In the book this location is mentioned several times as the place were some of the most defining moments in the history of Twitter took place. I won’t tell you which ones as to avoid spoiling the story in case you read the book.

Here I am in geek heaven at 164 South Park (my wife rolling her eyes taking the picture).

We arrived just on time at 6pm at Udemy’s head quarters. I was received by the great Alex Mozes and his crew.
Alex gave me a quick tour of Udemy and introduced me to a few of the employees including Dinesh Thiru their VP of Marketing. To my surprise everyone already knew me and I felt a bit like a celebrity.

I’ve been selling courses on Udemy for almost three years and have emailed or Skyped back and forth many times with them. It was super exciting for me to finally meet so many of these super smart and friendly guys and girls in the flesh for the first time.

Here is me posing with Alex Mozes and Peter Sefton in front of Udemy HQ.

I brought Alex a Grumo shirt and in exchange I was given an official Udemy hoody. I was so happy I could have exploded!

After the tour we went for dinner and a beer and we talked a bit about Udemy’s future plans and their recent launch of an instructors council. Udemy now has over 9000 instructors and are looking for ways to address and implement requests by instructors. They hope this council will help improve the feedback look between instructors and Udemy.

As it seems the case in SF, most conversations bring about the sharing of the new apps in town.
Not new in SF but new for me and Beth was the app Alex was using to rent electric scooters to commute to work. the app is called Scoot and works much like Zipcar where you book a scooter from your phone and pay by the hour. Two great things about Scoot are that you don’t have to return your scooter to the original station and that the first 30 minutes of riding are free. Alex’s commute is less than 30 mins so he is in heaven!

Surprisingly enough they had never heard of Car2Go which employes a similar concept but instead of scooters it has a huge fleet of cute Smart cars you can rent by the minute and that you can park anywhere within a large home area in Vancouver – including residential only areas.

Day 4: World Cup soccer, meeting with investee and Flight back.

Tuesday we woke up a bit earlier to watch Argentine defeat Switzerland 1-0 in overtime .
For lunch I met Ali Saheli the founder of Truth. An app that allows anyone in your phone’s contact list to exchange anonymous messages. Last year I invested in Ali’s company and even produced a demo video for them (watch here).

Ali’s company was called Foro but a few months ago he pivoted to build Truth. Very recently he moved to San Francisco where we hope he will be able to encounter more opportunities for funding and networking.

Ali is truly living the startup life. San Francisco is very much like the Hollywood for whiz kids hoping to strike gold in the startup world. Thousands of young ambitious entrepreneurs drop out of university or leave cozy jobs to purse big dreams to make a dent in the world and hopefully become wealthy in the process.

The reality is that as in Hollywood very few make it big. Ali like many other entrepreneurs struggles to make ends meet. One of the main reasons is because rent in SF is astronomically high. A small 1 bedroom apartment near downtown can cost $4000 a month. To save in rent these highly driven kids cram themselves in apartments meant for two people by piling bunk beds next two each other.
If you been inside a WWII submarine sleeping quarters you’ll know what I’m talking about.

This however is not much of a big deal. Ali is enjoying his time in SF tremendously. Most of the time he and his friends are outside their crammed apartments coding at coffee shops or startups incubators like 500 startups or YCombinator. The weather helps too, it’s practically sunny all year round which makes SF a great city to spend time outdoors walking, cycling or relaxing at one of its many parks.

Well, I hope you enjoyed learning a bit about our first visit to San Francisco.
We had fun and we’ll come back for more! I mean we didn’t have time to visit Mythbuster’s headquarters right Beth? 🙂