Two weeks ago, I packed a suitcase and moved across the country to San Francisco. The move was spurred by a desire to shift away from the sadness that comes with shutting down a startup. As much as I miss NYC, my home for over a decade, I felt San Francisco's obsession with technology could get me out of my funk and building again.

Two weeks in, I'm feeling excited to build again. I've found that if you seek to connect with other technologists and their ideas, you can do so every day of the week in the Bay Area.

Already, I've taken part in a two-hour, non-invasive brain-computer interface computing user test with Conduit. It left me deeply excited about the future and a bit put off by the company recruiting low-income minorities to train on their literal thoughts.

Conduit’s participant consent and data authorization form displayed on a laptop.
At Conduit’s BCI user test.

I've sat in on some of the most paradigm-shifting conversations about the social contract and AI. At the One Way Summit's AI and the New Social Contract panel, Anna Makanju of the OpenAI Foundation painted an abundant vision of the future, supported by spreading the benefits of superintelligence broadly.

Anna shared a neurosurgery pilot in The Gambia where connectivity constraints meant using an older AI model instead of the more intelligent ones. Building tools that work for people no matter the conditions they live in is a concrete product challenge, and essential to spreading the benefits of superintelligence to the whole world.

Saturnin Pugnet reasoned about a potentially bleaker future, in which we attempt to control an entity that may have more thoughts than all humans combined by 2039.

Speakers onstage beneath the AI and the New Social Contract sign at One Way Summit 2026.
AI and the New Social Contract at One Way Summit.

The team at SF Compute shared ideas about how to prepare for the inevitable compute crunch, suggesting venture firms take responsibility for helping their portfolio companies secure compute.

The founders, Evan Conrad and Ethan Anderson, forewarned that lenders’ demands for large upfront payments will put compute out of reach even when GPUs are available. A startup can (and many will!) have customers excited to buy their product but be unable to finance the capacity to serve them.

An audience watching an SF Compute discussion, with SF Compute branding on the screens.
An evening with SF Compute.

I've had the pleasure of spending every day building Cosign alongside Erik and the New Media team. We have an incredible opportunity to turn the goodwill and opportunity of Silicon Valley into a network that serves the best builders globally.

Lastly, I bought the pen I'm writing this with from the delightful store manager at Top Drawer in the Mission. He left me with three pieces of advice I'd like to share with anyone moving to SF from NYC:

  • There is no Manhattan, but there are many Brooklyns.
  • You generally want to hang out in the hills and avoid the valley (!).
  • Almost everyone is down to get coffee and exchange ideas.

I've had so much coffee. Would you like to get coffee?