Why is San Francisco so great for startups?
Benefits of building tech/AI startup in Silicon Valley
Benefits of building tech/AI startup in Silicon Valley
Context
I am part of a team of 4 people, all of us from the Czech Republic. We are traveling from the heart of Europe to California frequently, spending months in Silicon Valley building our startup in the AI field.
The questions I have been asked many many times are
“Why do you need to be in San Francisco so badly?”
“Is it really that important?”
“What do you do there?”
Most people naturally assume we want to be there in person to meet investors. However, meeting a few investors was a byproduct of being there, not the purpose.
So what’s the secret? Are we only claiming San Francisco is important, so we can enjoy sitting there in expensive WeWork that costs over 50$ a day and closes at 5 PM? Not really.
How San Francisco helps you build something great
The following points are all based on my experience of living for a few months in Silicon Valley.
1. You are part of creating the future
This sounds cheesy, but let me explain what I mean.
If you are building something in a space that is evolving rapidly and is still having established even the most basic concepts, you often have trouble finding the information you need online or finding experts in your country. Nobody is really an expert in something that didn’t even exist a few weeks ago. However, you can be in touch with developers who build the new technology in real-time by experimenting with it and reflecting on each other’s work.
As an example, we started building a product for developers of AI agents in 2023, when AI agents didn’t even have a proper definition (okay, maybe they still don’t even a year later). I was doing a research on the common challenges of founders building AI agents. Of course, I could somehow find and contact them via Twitter or other online channels, but what helped me most was to actually meet some of the developers and founders in San Francisco or Palo Alto in person.
Online is good unless you don’t even know what you don’t know. When new things like autonomous AI agents appear, you don’t even know who the person to approach online or what keywords you should research. You learn these things from coffee talks in your AI coworking or on hackathons.
Here are some bad-quality screenshots from videos I took at some of the first meetups I attended in Silicon Valley. One is the birthday party of the founder of a very cool AI agent startup. The other is a prompting competition at Microsoft offices. Don’t ask me any details or what is that robotic hand.
2. Community motivates you
It’s difficult to present one big reason why San Francisco is better for you as an AI/tech startup team.
Rather, it’s hundreds of small things that you experience every day. It can be the super-smart founders that you follow on Twitter, suddenly sitting and building in the same coworking as you. It can be developers talking about wanting to change the world, traveling by self-driving vehicles, and people whose default program for Friday or Saturday night is a hackathon, not a party.
It’s the feeling of urgency, knowing that many great companies started here, and even the billboards on the road promoting products of tech startups, which always gets me so excited as the first thing I experience about San Francisco when I’m traveling from the airport.
3. You get closer as a team
When you aren’t local, staying in San Francisco is likely expensive, so you usually end up choosing one apartment together with more people, rather than separate accommodation each. (That way you can also order giant portions of food from Costco).
Also, it seems to me that all the cafeterias or even restaurants close quite early and are expensive, plus, to be honest, I haven’t seen much social life in that city (I don’t count coding together as social life). Hence you are left with just working, often in the same room with your team.
Which makes you ship faster. 🚀🧠
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Feb4f2b97-00f1-4620-905d-427d3ec4ce3a_800x1063.jpeg)
4. You get access to users and other startups
This point is close to the first point. These are examples of advantages that we have experienced many times:
First, in San Francisco, we can iterate our product and communications so quickly that even the time difference would be limiting. An early-stage startup doesn’t always have all the features and bugs 100% solved in the first few months, and when a user reports a bug, you want to fix it ASAP.
Second, a user might write us that they want to implement our product, and we simply reply, “Let’s meet for a coffee tomorrow and make it happen.”
Third, we can organize a hackathon and test our product that way, or we can attend existing events and show a demo of our product there.
And of course also investors, VCs, and people curious about new technology in general are there. I haven’t seen a comparison with other big cities, but we can probably agree there are a lot of tech events happening in San Francisco:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Feb9dfe89-ae00-438b-ba89-103244985a2b_722x1520.jpeg)
The dark side of San Francisco
Regardless of the above, I need to write something on the downsides of living in San Francisco from my personal experience and a lot of anecdotal evidence.
I am not posting this on my social media, because it feels inappropriate to take photos of the shady stuff happening in the city, but it’s there and I feel unsafe for at least a few minutes a day. I wasn’t attacked or anything like that, but each week at least a few weird people were randomly approaching me, stopping me on the street, on the bike, or in a supermarket, or following me —always during daylight, because I don’t go out at night.
If you want to live in San Francisco, you have to be prepared to see people stealing in grocery stores without anyone caring about it, stealing from cars, and encountering many many people on drugs who behave strangely. Of course, there are 2–3 neighborhoods that you just completely avoid. And even in some better neighborhoods, you will see a lot of people living on the street in tents, which has become just a normal part of the city already.
I don’t take photos of shady stuff, because it is more sad than interesting to share… So as an illustration, there is a funny screenshot of my Lyft ride that took one minute, because I don’t feel safe walking a few minutes from the gym to home after 6 PM.
As a disclaimer, this is still my own experience mostly and maybe other people feel much safer (or are more used to living in cities that face similar problems). But just be aware.
… See you! 🌉
To end on a positive note (and to motivate you to go and build something in San Francisco!), I am adding some of my favorite photos I took during 2023 and 2024 that honestly represent some of the many wonderful daily-life moments I had in SF with my team.
🤖 Hey, if you want to check content about AI agents, AI founders’ insights and coding guides, I also write a lot for the E2B blog. 🤖
I love how passionate you are! I live in SF and have struggled to experience the "breathing the startup air". Your post made me realize it's my mindset that limits me. All the best to you and your startup!