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Slumming in San Francisco

This blog is written for newbies, entertaining strong thoughts on Entrepreneurship, trying to pin point an idea and figuring out the various business models.

Let me start with “why”; Indian start-up scene is blooming with lot of money pouring into it from all across the world and there is immense focus on technology products; however, dig a little deeper, a clear distinction amongst the products that get funded and the ones that struggle emerges. The 3 broad classifications in the order of difficulty in getting funded in India are:

  • Pure tech products solving/addressing technology gaps (Ex cloud infrastructure, fundamental technologies such as compilers, libraries OS etc.).
  • Tech enabled products addressing the business needs (Ex Accounting software, HR, Customer Service, etc).
  • Consumer products (Mobile Apps, Web etc)

If you are in any of these and are globally focused there is not a reason for you start selling the product/idea from day 1 in US and valley in particular.

Even if you do not have a concrete idea, I would still recommend starting the exploration in here as lot of ideas simmer in the underground in domain specific meet-ups for a while before they get exposed to general public in SFO and then to the rest of the world.

Let us start with basics.

Accommodation:

San Francisco is extremely costly; a bed/bunker in a shared room costs about thousand dollars per month. One obvious option for most Indians is to draw on friends and family in bay area. But I would advice against this due to following.

  • Most events happen in SFO and commute from bay area can be quite taxing and costly especially during late evening when most meet-ups happen.
  • Most bay area folks live a sort of American dream life, which is the least desired environment for people in startup journey.

Airbnb is the real lifesaver in finding a reasonable accommodation. Plan for a budget around 50 USD per day. Try finding an apartment near SoMa (South of Market) area or at least an area where there is a direct access to one of the MUNI lines. This way access to Cal-train (to reach bay area where many VCs and big companies are located) becomes easier. Most start-up events tend to crowd around Market Street, which also has many accelerators and incubators at walk-able distances. Most of these host various domain meet-ups and startup experts. Notable ones among the accelerators that host many events are Impacthub, FounderSuite, Runway, FonderSpace, Startup foundry.

Start-up Community/Co-living Houses: This is an amazing concept started by some successful entrepreneurs. These are big houses which host early stage entrepreneurs who live and work out of the space. Some even have connects with startup eco system. So access to 24*7 start-up talk and getting the inside information from many sources. Flipside is many tend to be very dorm like environment with shared bathroom and kitchen with no privacy. But if you can deal with this, this may be an effective way of hitting the ground running. (More details here )

Be weary of some of the so-called community houses allegedly run by investors and listed on airbnb are not really startup houses but some kind of hostels catering to all sorts of folks. So do some background work before booking. Good ones tend to be taken very early on so plan well in advance before you land.

Commute:

San Francisco public transport is great a combination of MUNI trains, buses and BART trains. Great thing is an 80$ clipper card that would take one from anywhere to anywhere. Uber and Lyft also offer incredibly cheap rides of say 7 dollar to anywhere in San Francisco.

Caltrain is the access to bay area which is an hour commute (Mountain View, Palo Alto, SunnyVale) can be quite expensive with a day pass around 15$ so make sure you group meetings in bay area. Most meeting places in suburbs can also be reached by connecting buses from the caltrain stations.

Car (Renting) is inexpensive as well but finding parking and driving around in San Francisco where most startup events happen can be a tedious task.

Finally San Francisco is very walkable and extremely cycle friendly. One can buy a used cycle for 200 dollars, so if you fit into this mold you will have lot of fun.

Pitches, Meet-ups and Events

Pitch competitions with some prize money thrown in are regular occurrences each month. These are great avenues to get feedback on the ideas and catch fancy of some angels. Few regular ones are PitchForce, SharkTank, Soceity3, ElevatorPitch. There are special events organized by SFAngels as well.

Meetup.com, eventbrite.com, moonbar.com and techcocktail.com are some of the sites to subscribe to get notified of the quality events.

Most events cost around $15-$20 tend to be very practical, first hand knowledge based and one could immensely benefit from interacting with the folks. Majority of the events provide food as well.

Keep a lookout for demo days of various accelerators such as y-combinator, 500startups, techstars, S3 and various others. They should be great way to understand where things are headed.

Workspaces

Most cafes (Peet’s, Starbucks and numerous boutique ones) are good places to spend few hours but specific ones stand out. Workshop café near market and Montgomery offers workspace at $2 an hour. My personal favorite is a spacious, brightly lit by sun and luxurious place to work out of is the “under the dome” in Westfield mall. It is adjacent to “bespoke” a retail incubator and is free with easy access to lot of places in and around Market Street. SF State university library also has lot of public access workspace, which is a great alternative for café.

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Workspace at Westfield Mall

Some of the incubators and accelerators offer free workdays, which are great places to meet folks and get connected to the startup scenes. Please check the webpages to get specific details.

iSPIRT has recently opened this initiative called Athithi Silicon Valley helping to host (@workplace) Indian entrepreneurs coming to Valley and exploring product ideas. See if you are eligible to apply.

Finally, dealing with it all in a relaxed way

Pace of startup activities in San Francisco can be really overwhelming if you have not figured out a way to deal with this. San Francisco is a place for great hikes, cycle rides and numerous fitness activities. Many places offer free once a week classes. There are great many meditation centers (such as Yoga SFO, SRF, Zen Centers), which offer free group meditation in the evenings.

This is just based on my personal experiences, others who have done this and know better please feel free to add the tips in the comment and we can add them to back to the blog itself.

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Women Entrepreneurs and Professional Networking

Few months ago a Nicole Jackisch German exchange student doing her Master Thesis at IIMB contacted me and requested to take part in a survey of women entrepreneurs. I filled up the online questionnaire that was mostly about who I reach out to when I run into problems in tech, business and other aspects of entrepreneurship. I forgot about it but few weeks later she called me and asked for one more session as she found my answers were an aberration in her data samples. Curious I spent some time with her.

Her research was about comparison and pattern analyses of networking traits between Germany and India’s high potential women entrepreneurs (On a side note a comparison on the same lines with American counterparts would be hugely valuable).  She chose two contrasting industries, Fashion and Technology and surveyed equal number of Entrepreneurs in both fields.

Apparently I was one of the very few who contacted generic expert folks as opposed to male relatives that majority reached out to. She wanted to analyze why that is so. I was very surprised as, for me it is just plain common sense to reach out to folks who have been on the same path. Fortunately I am also blessed with quite a few phenomenal men and women ex-colleagues, mentors, and folks in the eco system who I can trust to give me appropriate (and sometimes blunt) suggestions, information and further contacts.  It has taken time, but I am thankful for these folks.

It would be unscientific to interpret this any further and I would encourage you to read the report which also doesn’t interpret but notes data patterns. However it may be relevant to note my personal experience (and opinion) while networking (strangely this term does have lot of negative connotation in India). There are three types of folks you meet in professional settings.

    1. A small percentage of socially reserved people who aren’t comfortable in talking to women.   – This affects one’s confidence when you go with lot of enthusiasm to discuss some bright ideas and reciprocated with silence.
    2. Another small percentage is of offensive people who make off color jokes, politically incorrect discriminatory statements (sometimes unwittingly) and sometime just plain innuendos in the name of being friendly.  – These are downright dangerous as they can completely derail ones esteem and make one defensive and bring a sense of disgust and despair.
    3. Thankfully majority folks are very professional and can be professional allies once a common professional ground is established.

The task for Entrepreneurs is to deal with type 1 and 2 in a tactful manner and not to let those experiences stopping one from reaching out to the large, sensible professional majority.  Would this limit the possibilities, probably, but everyone will have to deal with their own unique limitations, so just keep the focus on the goal and march on

(With Thanks to Nicole Jackisch who graciously shared her report)

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Internet’s Truth or Dare game of anonimisation

A while ago, I broke my self imposed “participate in only one social network policy” when I installed popular networking app Secret. It was out of sheer curiosity and an intention to experiment with its technology of anonymous social networking. The underlying premise is very interesting as the people participating are from your extended friend circles but are anonimised by a combination of encryption and oneway hashes, time lags. As expected both vigilantism and mud slinging are rampant and there are lot of scandalous topics and dirt being posted regarding obvious taboo subjects, about people and sometime very personal intimate information, which if traced back to a real person can cause huge legal trouble, embarrassment and pain in multiple spheres of life. But can one be really anonymous online even while assuming the technology and intent behind such apps to be secure and trusted ?

Let us look at the recent case of data share in NY city which released anonymized records of all the cab trips that included, types of cabs, number of passengers, routes, times, fare and other treasure trove of information which could be used for intelligent planning of traffic, roads, cab capacity, parking, public transport. However some of the information such as drivers license number, cab license plates could be sensitive information as they lend themselves to malicious uses apart from breach of privacy. So that information was masked by the use of oneway hash (for uninitiated, it is an encryption technology which can never be decoded back to original text even if the key and algorithm is known). However one intelligent researcher saw this data and realized that license numbers are fixed format and there is finite number of possible hash results. So he simply computed all possible hashes (173 million records) and matched that with the datasets that identify all the cab drivers, their incomes and whereabouts.

There is a considerable research happening in the space of re-identification with the fact that only 33 bits of unique information to be able to uniquely identify everyone on the internet. This along with slew of public data statistics such as census records, innocuous social network data could mean the task of re-identifying anonymized information is easier than ever. As in everything with the internet, many such technologies are becoming commoditized, due to cheap availability of processing power.

Now lets apply this concept back to secret; With the secrets utility that informs how far the person posting something is located, whether he/she is a friend and pandering to one’s inner sherlock Holmes aka deductive logic one can potentially figure out who the people participating in that discussion are. This is in spite of the integrity of the app and security technologies being intact. Obviously any malicious hack could lead more devastating circumstances.

While secret is somewhat frivolous albeit interesting use case, there are many valid, business and legal reasons for protecting people’s identity while sharing relevant data for both academic and business purposes. Strong anonymization is desired in many cases, but often leads to loss of intelligence. Next few years will see an interesting race between anonymization and re-identification both providing useful application in various contexts.