wednesday, oct 22, 8pm: i took a calculus midterm.

the next morning i was in sf. here's the story:

on 1 hour of sleep, zach and i left early the next morning for the yyz.

we bumped into remy, head of growth at typeos at the airport. considering that zach and i had literally zero idea how to go about things after landing, this random occurrence turned out to be quite serendipitous.

landed in sf, 12pm, thursday oct 23:

we were now connected with the startup scene. we got picked up by daniel martinez and musa aqeel from vibegrade / typeos and visited their office @ the landing in dogpatch.

there's something different about the air in sf, it was evident when we were walking around. not that it was clean—maybe authentic is the word. later, we visited visited dris & ben @ instinct, they cooking up a launch vid and kicked us out 😂.

then we took a quick ride to the spermracing hq and met the team. it really was an interesting perspective seeing a group of dropouts running a gen-z startup in the heart of sf.

in hindsight, the visit taught me that patience is a virtue. although clout is obviously part of the reason why the team dropped out and pursued this, they were all clearly passionate about what they do and have a clear end goal—getting sperm racing into the olympics. in waterloo, the culture of dropping out to build in sf is prominent, but it's not worth pursuing something merely for the story, passion has to be the driver.

loved the team, they treated us like family, nick & rishi invited us for dinner before we got on our way.

we then visited shane, alex & jay from polarity at their airbnb on top of a hill with this crazy viewpoint. had meaningful conversations about tech, building a startup, and life. these conversations definitely shaped my understanding of what i wanted to pursue at this stage of my journey, grateful for them.

adam and lira from vectus ai were also there and invited us to stay the night. i rode waymo for the first time, super cool.

sf at night is beautiful

friday oct 24:

we continued our adventure; we first met up with cole and elliot from locus (yc f25).

we then went to calhacks to check it out. we were originally planning on participating but sidequesting > making a project.

our uber driver was of japanese origin who was born & raised in brazil + went to college in sf area. we shared an interesting convo about life, learned alot about the niche history of japanese immigration to brazil in the 1900s and brazilian funk.

talk to your uber drivers, you never know what you will absorb.

held at the palace of fine arts, the venue itself was aesthetic, but the bottleneck was that this wasn't a location meant to host this many people coding—the wifi couldn't handle it.

we then decided to take a side quest to the browserbase hq for a canadian founder meetup hosted by toki and tyler. met cool people there, had many inspirational conversations.

meeting back up with daniel, musa, and remy, led us back to calhacks, where we helped distribute and market typeos with celcius (a daniel martinez classic).

zach and i got lost in the crowd and soon it was midnight and we lost the group. no ride, no place to stay, no plan, we had to make a spontaneous decision on the fly.

founders inc was nearby and we had the crazy idea to sneak in.

we saw a sidedoor open by a sliver and went inside.

the founders saw us and raised the obvious quesion "who are you, why are you here, its midnight, why are you holding cold cuts and a baguette" (we were hungry).

we went into desperation mode and pitched a random project idea out of our ass. they liked it and let us crash for the night. we met an australian named tom who was prototyping some really cool cameras and we had a great convo with him.

this experience shows how the people in sf all got that "fuck it" mentality. its been embedded into the culture. our night would've been totally different if we weren't like "lets do something crazy" and if the founders weren't like "these kids are weird as hell but we'll let them in".

saturday oct 25:

we mostly just chilled at adam's place. super grateful for him and lira, really nice people who welcomed us in and let us treat their place like home for 2 nights.

i took the opportunity to explore the mountainous neighbourhoods (free leg day). for dinner we doordashed panda express and popeyes, fully experienced the founder life. build, explore, and become fat from doordashing eats.

sunday oct 26:

we went to an yc afterparty, mostly just chilled, met some people, but nothing too crazy.

then we attended the typeos launch party back @ the landing, where we started 4 days ago. if y'all haven't seen it already, definitely give their launch video a watch. one of the best i've seen.

on a time crunch, we then rushed to the airport and headed home.

monday oct 27:

landed and took my cs midterm later that day, genuinely crammed all content in 8 hours but did fine.

moral of the story: go to sf.

my outlook on life was changed completely by the culture. this blog is pretty short because words can never capture the full essence of each and every moment, nor do i have the storytelling ability to document each and every event that occured (no, i did not help sort candy and condoms with daniel in his room).

although this sounds quite cliche, you never know the value of the moment until it becomes a memory:

be spontaneous, go explore, go sneak into founders inc for no reason, go couch surfing in founders' places, because why live comfortably, especially in sf? there's a whole world out there, i lived life for once.

before the trip, i only heard stories about the environment. but now i've lived it. can't wait to return after improving on myself.