We have about 20 hours of video that should make it into another feature soon. We also have the rest of this 4th bottle of scotch to drink tonight.
But come tomorrow, We are all heading back to dry and hot Arizona, yes that retarded state that is currently trying to protect the English language from the taint of illegals and their Spanish. I have a long form post in my head I will write soon but for now here is my summation on our month in San Francisco.
Would we live here? Probably not. Maybe down in the Valley.. I am a suburb guy, I want my 3 car garage and some privacy on my front porch. SF is a wicked nice place, but it is also dirty, smells like urine at times and something unclassified by science at others, seems overrun by deranged homeless and hipster’s posing as deranged homeless to be ironic. It also had amazing weather, excellent food, great public trans, culture, great museums and my personal car service @uber. The people we know here are fantastic and really did a great job welcoming us in and showing us around. As for meeting new people; we hit our share of tech events and conversations seemed to be motivated by superficial tech name dropping; but everyone seemed like good people.
Would we move Page.ly here? Maybe. Although I actually think the vibe here is antithetical to our Work ethic. In SF it is: Idea > Funding > Pivot > Funding > Pivot > Funding > Maybe Profit > Maybe exit. Out in the desert, every plant or cactus you see had to endure the elements and scarcity for years to stake a claim, and will be around long after the spring flowers burn up in the summer sun. With no access to capital we had to actually test and build our business, a real business that made revenue on customer #1 and customer #1000 to survive. I think overall it has made us a much better business with staying power. Now that we have built a solid foundation, perhaps moving the company to SF to accelerate it makes sense, but for now we will just keep our office here.
Is SF better then PHX? Yes in about 1000 ways. But that backasswards red state that forgot it used to be part of Mexico doesn’t suck all that bad, especially when folks like us choose to change it for the better vs. abandoning it and moving to SF.
I have prodded Chase, Benner, Sally, and Chavez to all write a post about their time here, we’ll see if they do.
