a week (or so) in san francisco 🌁

what i’ve experienced in the last 3 days (and i’m still experience rn) in sf it’s incredibly inspiring. everyone in the city is building, innovating and creating stuff in tech. the city is built around that and full of ads or commodities that are typical of tech-savy people. uber drivers are entrepreneurs theirselves, we had a ride with a two time startup founder, while in rome the avg taxi driver is a normie/boomer.

the city also offers wonderful corners and landscapes (the golden gate is beautiful). people are a lot into nature (weird right? shouldn’t they be heads down coding?) they wake up early and live more in the day rather than the night.

i feel very lucky, and honestly special, to be here this week, for the buildspace event. the talent they’ve been able to gather is unbelivable. it’s always inspiring to meet people who are out there working on their own ideas, whatever field they are in (art, music, ai, web3, gaming). i really feel part of this community.

i feel like i’m missing something like this in rome: connections with like-minded people with an entrepreneurial mindset. most of my friends don’t have great ambitions, they are fine with their 9-18 job, and like to have fun and get drunk in the weekend. in this last year, a year in which i travelled a lot, i’ve been feeling more and more disconnected from their reality. i like spending my nights and weekends building stuff, not getting drunk in a club.

i’ve to say that urbe is helping me a lil bit because we managed to gather people with an open mindset, with great ambitions and willingness to work on their own idea. but after coming here and feeling this energy i’m not sure anymore that it is enough. i’m very tempted to drop everything and move here, it’s gotta be fun for sure, but hard as well.

the thing that i came to realize is that we are far away from creating an sf-like context in rome. we are not enough, and this means that it will take longer and longer. i see two options in our future: either invest more time educating students and launching the new generation of frontier builders, or trying to involve more our frens and community in the space and have them grow their skills.

the former will take long time but it’s probably the best option, as the latter implies people dramatically changing their life, quitting their current 9-18 job and start launching startups with us.

what then? well, i think that sf is really top of my list, even over lisbon at this point, about place where i’d be living in, ofc for the opportunities and the network that it offers. you are the average of the 5 people you hang out with, and in rome sometimes i don’t feel like i’m being surrounded by the right people… (no hard feelings!)

another inspiring topic that might need a dedicated essay is around mentoring. i’ve been following a chat between garza and fuurqan (founder thirdweb) and they made me realize how finding a person that is 1-2 steps ahead of you (not 5-7!) could be useful to grow up. i’ll definitely start thinking more about it and eventually find somebody with some more experience than me, and schedule weekly meetings just to catch up.