I’m now in London after a 6-week trip to New York and San Francisco.
It’s been almost 7 months since I started my sabbatical and I wanted to reflect a bit on technology, mindset, building products.
I want to write about San Francisco a bit and what makes it different. I will use San Francisco as the label for a specific mindset. That mindset can exist (and exists!) everywhere else, just with a different density.
I lived and worked in the city from 2014 to 2020. So it’s been 6 years since I moved out, and visiting my friends made me appreciate it even more after this break.
I will write some anecdotes from my own life, obviously your experience might vary.
In SF when you go to an interview and all is good, the CEO might call you 2 minutes after you leave the office with an offer and ask you to stop other interviews and start on Monday. In Europe I recently did an interview with a prominent company and interview number 3 was scheduled 3 weeks after interview number 2 because the VP was busy (not even vacation!).
In SF nowadays CEOs move back to the city after leaving it and personally launch new products. In Europe the executives I know took the biggest vacations of anyone in the company during 2025-2026. Taking long vacations was fine in 2014-2024. But the last two years are the biggest technology change in our industry, and leaders are the ones who should be the first to learn it, not the last.
In SF you can talk to anyone and most people are on the same page about the state of the industry and what direction we are heading in. In Europe executives, directors, VPs have no idea what agents are, never tried agentic programming and cannot imagine a different software development process.
In SF everyone (engineers, designers, CEOs) can pull out their laptop and show you demos of 30 of their personal products and ideas. In fact they can talk about those ideas with the CEO being in the room.
In SF each company has some amazing internal tooling - dashboards, CLIs, APIs - all looks polished and amazing. In Europe internal software looks the same way it looked 10-15 years ago. How you do one thing, you do all the things!
In SF all you talk about is products and better experiences - better user experience, better developer experience, better tools. It’s all about making something better for someone. In Europe you go and do interviews and the best startups keep talking about ARR and growth rate in terms of money. You can go through the whole interview process without discussing products and customers and what value you bring to them.
One executive told me his goal is to make everyone in the team own a house! While it’s a noble thing it’s also a cringe thing to say. Does everyone come to work and spend 10 hours per day to earn money for a house? There are other, easier ways to do that. Another executive told me she only cares about her job in the sense that she needs to pay her house loan. So is it all about money? America is criticized heavily for brutal capitalism. But in my experience you would be hard pressed to find people in SF who talk about earning money for a house. It’s all more about the excitement of building something better, changing the status quo and improving the experiences of other people. And the money and houses always come as a side effect of that, as a second-order thing.
In SF interviews are all about what you are building, what we can do better and what you are excited about. In Europe I had an interview in 2026 where a big part of the conversation was about work-life balance and how to do it. A work-life balance conversation is a waste of time, because first of all it’s not a hard thing, and second it’s an infantilization of everyone.
Again, I’ve used San Francisco as a label for a phenomenon and not as an absolutely unique place. E.g. many of the same things apply to New York. My favorite meetup is Side Project Saturday - every Saturday you come at 9am and work for 2.5 hours, and then everyone can do a 5-minute presentation about interesting things they worked on during this session or the past week. It’s always the most amazing group of people who are creative in so many different ways and do technology for the love of it.
Europe also has those people. This summer I attended The Sandbox program in Berlin. And people are very nice and have different interests - from robots to mobile apps. So it’s all very much the same. But the question is always density. In Berlin you need to go and find this group, and maybe the city has 200 people who love making things better. In SF you can walk into any existing office and find 10 people right there.
I’m going to spend the next 4 months in Europe, mostly London and Warsaw. Happy to be proven absolutely wrong and see that things have changed in the last couple of months.