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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

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.

The first-ever 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

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


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.