Thirty Six Hours in SF
October 13, 2026
Tags: san francisco, startups

Last week I did a whirlwind trip of San Francisco. I spent 36 hours there and it was very intense. I want to record what I did and what I felt. This will be my longest blog post ever, but I want to keep it as one post. Because it was one continuous experience for me.

Why did I go

As the readers of this blog might know, I have been on an entreprenuerial journey for the last two years. I have been hearing from everyone on a similar journey that San Francisco is the Mecca of tech startups. And the best place to raise money. I thought I should go and check it out first hand whether it was hype or reality. The short duration was due to my personal constraints - otherwise it makes no sense to show up in SF for 36 hours only.

Day 1 in SF

11:20 PDT

Landed at the SFO airport. Got on to the airtrain and looked at the familiar mountaineous scenery all around and felt a rush of travelmania.

14:00 PDT

After a quick bag drop off at my hotel, I took a Waymo to the Claude Founder House. This was happening in a two-story event venue called Terra. There were security guards outside checking everyone’s bags. Inside there were people working, networking, listening to the panel discussions, or clicking photos of themselves. I asked someone to click my photo too. I met a founder working in hospital care for elderly patients. I heard part of Shivani Poddar’s talk about her startup’s personal assistant Fo. I also bumped into Li Yin, the founder and CEO of a CLI coding agent I use a lot. We took a selfie together, she reminded me about an event they were organizing the following evening.

16:00 PDT

Checked into my hotel, and found out from X that Greg Isenberg was at an art gallery saying hi to people. I quickly decided to go. Even though if it meant I’d be slightly late to the evening event I had RSVP’ed to.

17:10 PDT

I found the art gallery, which was running a retro computer exhibition. I met a founder from Australia who was building a mindfulness app - we were talking about yoga and similar stuff. I told him that his app reminded me of the Mindful Makers group my friends run in Boston. I did get a chance to hear Greg and his business partner (didn’t get his name) talk about various topics, including how to grow on X. I even took a selfie with him before I left.

18:00 PDT

The evening event was at the AWS Builder Loft - a coworking space in FiDi. I mostly spent time at the booths put up by various startups. Zed was one of them. They explained how Zed looks today and their business model. I remember trying out Zed when it was very early, before it had any AI features. I’m glad they survived the last 18 months of constant disruption. There was also another new CLI coding agent, which seems to have been funded recently. I keep wondering how many more coding agents will get funded. I know they all sort of work, because I vibe coded one and it works fine till date. Then there was this interesting company called TinyFish who had an awesome explanatory presentation running in a loop on a computer. I think this could be the next category of ‘hot’ startups.

Before I left, I collected a lot of merch, including an amazing t-shirt from Nous Research.

21:00 PDT

Back at the hotel, I started RSVP’ing to some more early morning events for the next day. That was the only full day I was getting, and I didn’t want to lose a single moment.

Day 2 in SF

6:30 PDT

I woke up with a more peaceful brain. I figured out I should choose my engagements based on my core need - networking and learning about fundraising. I cancelled some events I had RSVP’ed to earlier, including a 4-hour workshop on open source inference.

8:00 PDT

Although people on X had advised against acting as a tourist in SF, I decided to go to the OpenAI office and click a picture in front of it. While I was heading there, I met two people on the subway who were talking about agents and tables. I joined the chat and learned that they were heading to Sculpt - Clay’s one-day event. They told me some innovative things people have done with Clay - I had no idea!

The OpenAI office was a bummer. There were no signboards anywhere. A guy who was around the place suggested I take a picture in front of a gigantic sculpture right outside the office. It didn’t make any sense but that was the only noticeable thing there, so I took one.

8:30 PDT

I had heard so much about the cafe scene in SF - where founders worked and networked with funders. The first cafe I tried was a Blue Bottle near the OpenAI office. It was almost empty and quite boring. The next one I tried was a Starbucks in the area, which was slightly better. Meanwhile I was about to meet a very old friend for a chat, so I had to get going.

9:00 PDT

I arrived at the Capital One Cafe near Union Square. And I was excited! This was the real deal. Last night I had asked a question on X ‘Spent 10 hours in SF and haven’t spotted a “cracked builder” yet. Where are they hiding?’. I had one answer now, right in front of me. Three floor of chairs and desks - almost completely filled with founders and operators. If you spend a few minutes here you can’t help opening up your laptop and starting to work. There’s a good discount at the cafe if you happen to have a Capital One or Discover credit card.

12:00 PDT

Headed back to Claude Founder House for a while. Got down to work a bit on my seed deck. Then we were all requested to empty the space for the next event. So out I went. I already knew where to go - a pop-up bookstore put up by Mercury.

15:00 PDT

The Mercury bookstore was a real bookstore. It had a ton of books, and there were some speakers as well. It seemed a very NYC-ish thing and yet here it was, right in SF! I picked up a book since they were allowing everyone to take one. While I was reading the book outside the store, I met a founder from Portland working on an open source decentralized AI infrastructure project called Morpheus.

16:00 PDT

I headed back to the Capital One Cafe, and sat down to work. I finished the first version of my seed deck, and created a skill for the design and structure. I did all of this using the CLI coding agent I built earlier this year. While on my way out of there, I met a succesful founder who had been building companies for a decade without taking any VC money. This was the first time I met a succesful bootstrapper. We chatted about various topics and I got some ideas from him.

18:00 PDT

This was the last event of my trip, the one which Li Yin had reminded me about. It had a rather fancy name (‘Fly your Agent to the Moon’) but it was a very chill and down-to-earth group. I met some people I knew from X like Annie and Zach. There were multiple presentations from the startups involved. Aria from the AdaL team talked about GTM, Zach described two or three generations of the architecture of DataExpert, Jay talked about HellYeah and what they were up to. The event was happening in the HellYeah office.

Here’s Zach’s post which has a picture of the group:

During the networking session before/after the talks, I met another bootstrapped founder who was building a desktop app for using local LLMs. It looked pretty much polished and I learned how far one could go today without taking VC money. I met a few more people too, including the founder of Axilio, a student from Germany and an engineer from YouTube.

21:00 PDT

And that was the end of the trip. Or so I thought! I wanted to eat a light meal and also have my first and last beer of the entire trip (that’s right - nobody drinks alcohol at SF events). I found a lively restaurant near Union Square where I sat down and ordered. My attention was drawn to the next table where there was a raging discussion about RL, pre-training and agent memory. I crashed into the discussion and ended up connecting with an engineer from Engram. We talked about Boston (where Engram started), SF and various applications of AI.

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