Visiting San Francisco as a European resident
A quick context on me: I am born and raised in Istanbul, I have been living in Berlin for the past 6 years, building a data company there.
I visited San Francisco for the first time in September 2024, for 2 weeks. I had a few friends there, and a conference I wanted to attend, so it ended up being a good time to visit.
Below are some random notes on my visit, mostly comparing it with Berlin.
The city
- The first place my friend took me was Tenderloin, which was quite a shock, to be honest. The place was full of homeless people, and it was quite dirty.
- The city is rather hilly.
- After living in Berlin for quite some time, I somehow got this silly idea that every major city is flat.
- There’s a nice tram line that goes up and down the city, which seems beautiful.
- I used to play the game Driver on Playstation 1, and some parts of the game was taking place in San Francisco. Walking around the city reminded me of the game, which was quite fun.
- Surprisingly, I found the game online and it is playable on the browser.
- Turns out, the city is far more beautiful outside of Tenderloin. My friends took me around the city to the nicer parts, such as Haight Ashbury, Mission, and the Golden Gate Bridge. The city is quite beautiful, to be honest.
- The city is surprisingly foggy.
- It was far more expensive than Berlin, especially for food.
- There was generally good food around, although I didn’t have a chance to try many places.
Palo Alto
Turns out Palo Alto is a very different place than San Francisco downtown. I thought these two would be quite similar to each other, but SF downtown is way more like London, whereas Palo Alto is more like a small town.
Even though it is small, Palo Alto was quite posh, and there were many beautiful houses around. The weather was also quite nice, and the Stanford campus was beautiful. I saw the first Facebook office.
I also ran into Tim Cook, enjoying a coffee walking around. I guess this is one of the things that makes the area special. You can run into important people in tech quite easily.
The people
- The people in SF were quite friendly. I had random conversations with strangers, and generally everyone was quite open to chatting.
- I picked up this habit of going to a shop and saying “how are you?” from London, and it never works in Berlin. It worked quite well in SF, everyone responded in a nice, chatty way.
- The city was quite international, way more than Berlin.
- Generally, people seemed chill. The traffic was not aggressive, people were not in a rush.
A surprising bit was that people were generaly curious about other people, especially what they are building. People in Berlin wouldn’t be very interested in a new company or a project someone is working on, wheras in SF, people were genuinely interested in what I was doing, and they were asking questions. The curiousity was quite nice.
The tech scene
- I attended the Small Data Conference, which was quite lovely.
- If you are interested in local-first movement, and DuckDB, I’d recommend checking it out.
- I have also attended a few meetups, and met with genuinely interesting people.
- Far more in 2 weeks than I would in 6 months in Berlin.
- There seems to be a very vibrant community in SF, whereas almost every evening there was a meetup, and it was full of interesting people, mostly builders.
- I attended a meetup where there was a researcher from OpenAI, a VP AI at Snowflake, and an AI lead from Superhuman, and the things they talked about were quite interesting.
- People were open to meeting up in person, and I had a few coffees with people I randomly dropped a Twitter DM to, even though we didn’t know each other before.
Overall, the city felt quite lively, and I felt like I found my own community there. Being a founder in Berlin is rather lonely sometimes, and it was nice to be around people who are also building things.
