Darren Fu

Along with the tours scheduled by UQ Ventures , I was lucky to have my good friend Andrew Su take me around to see what he knew of the Bay Area over the first week.

The Bay Area

With our hostel situated in the middle of San Francisco not too far away from Union Square, the main region that I travelled over the first few days started up north from Berekely (in the slightly rougher city of Oakland) and stretched down all the way to Palo Alto in the South Bay area.

From a tech perspective, the South Bay area is where it all started, historically with the (silicon) beginnings of Silicon Valley, and today with the headquarters of Google, Facebook, Apple and the like as well as Stanford University and an entire group of VC firms. Palo Alto is one of the most expensive zip codes in the world and attracts not only some of the world's brightest technologists, but also some of it's biggest egos.

As you go up you get to San Francisco, which has only in the last decade or so become the hub that it is for startups and tech companies. The city is surprisingly compact geographically, and packs a dozen or so culturally distinct suburbs in an almost perfectly rectangular grid of streets and alleys. To the east of San Fran you then have Oakland, which is actually also known as the Ghetto. Oakland then sits right next to Berkeley, which is of course famous for the University of California Berkeley.

Walking around SF

Following Andrew on his personal tour of SF I ended up covering a large portion of the city on my first day here. We started by walking from the hostel straight into the slum of the Tenderloin district, and continued through SoMa (South of Market) to a film shop in the Mission District and moved onto the very liberal main street of Castro. We Yelp'd our way into an authentic Mexican burrito shop for dinner, and after that caught a Lyft going through the Design District and South Beach to get to the Embarcadero waterfront.

I probably wouldn't be the first person to say this, but the first thing you notice about San Franscisco on arrival is the huge juxtaposition between its rich and its poor. It's quite an image seeing lines of homeless people lying helplessly on streets and gathering around bus shelters in a city known for its tech billionaires and unicorn startups.

At the same time, it's also surprising how unassuming a lot of the city looks when everything that happpens here is taken into consideration. This is especially true in the tech-hipster Mission district, which is filled with startups but fairly ordinary in appearance aside from the grafitti art and mexican styling of its architecture. It's somewhat mind-boggling to think that these streets that I'm walking around in are the same streets where so many million dollar ideas have been generated before.

From listening to Andrew's experiences with medtech in San Francisco, what I get a sense of is how working hard is part of the culture here in SF. Tech workers here work all day almost every day, but also genuinely believe in the work that they're doing and their impact on the world. One of the big reasons behind the success of this city is how hustling is essentially their way of life. To succeed here, a job is not seen as a means for making money but a purpose for living.

It's hard to say as an Australian whether I could ever get used to this type of lifestyle. What I can say though is that the Bay Area deserves applause for it's 'no problem is too difficult' mentality towards the world. It's definitely not the most comfortable way to live, but it's probably a good thing that at least some people try to take responsibility for figuring out the future of the world.

Hacker houses and hacker parties

To round off my first day, Andrew showed me a party hosted in one of the 'hacker houses' of San Francisco, a large hostel type living space housing 20-30 tech workers and college students struggling to keep up with the astronomical rent prices in SF. Walking into the party, we found ourselves in a room where disco lights strobed and flashed while a crowd of young software engineers and data scientists raved in front of some rapper that I didn't know. This was honestly quite the sight to see.

In another room groups of more people sat at a row of tables sharing drinks and a pack of cards. We join in and find ourselves amongst a group of not only software engineers but also experts in robotics and neuroscience in a heated debate about whether personal brain modification should be allowed to become cheap and ubiquitous. Exemplary of the culture in the Bay Area, each person is clear and outgoing, taking a clear approach on the matter and presenting their case with near arrogant confidence. The room it turns out is an incredible discussion forum among intellects and technologists about what they might be able to do for the future of humanity.

My takeaway from the party was this: to think that that was just what was happening inside one hacker house among the hundreds or thousands that there might be in the Bay Area, and with hacker houses only being one of many places where new ideas take shape, it isn't hard to see why Silicon Valley continues to be the place where new tech is born.