Do you really need to move to San Francisco?

On ambition, "networking", and San Francisco.

The height of your ceiling is set by the room you’re standing in.

The limit of what you can build is what you believe is possible.

In the earliest days, belief is borrowed.
Inherited from the people you spend time around.
You cannot inherit it through a screen.

This is why I believe everyone who’s able should live in San Francisco at some point in their journey.

How it actually transmits

The transmission of belief happens in physical, lowkey ways that compound over months. For example:

• Watching someone close a round at a valuation you would not have asked for. It rewires what you define as a reasonable ask.

• Sitting at dinner with another founder describing a revenue goal five times yours. Your bars shifts without you realizing.

• Seeing someone make a decision in 15 minutes that would have taken you a week. It rewires what counts as a reasonable cadence.

This information is dense. It doesn’t transfer through newsletters or podcasts. It gets metabolized by being adjacent to it long enough that you stop noticing it’s happening.

Henrik Karlsson wrote about scenes as technologies for transmitting taste. Ambition works the same way. Paul Graham made the same argument in Cities and Ambition.

The variance inside the scene is small.
The variance between the scene and everywhere else is enormous.

You can be the most ambitious founder in your city and still be below the median in SF. You won’t know it until you’re inside the room.

I see this in myself

I see this most clearly in the parts of my own work where I have a lopsided sense of the ceiling.

In the areas I’ve spent years close to people doing “the thing” well, I have a sharp picture of what good looks like. A permanent dissatisfaction in my own work, because I know the gap between my abilities and theirs.

In the areas where I had to figure out the ceiling on my own, I’m more easily impressed by my own progress. I’m almost always underestimating what’s possible.

Wherever I feel calmly proud, the ceiling is probably lower than it should be.

Wherever I feel restless, the ceiling is closer to reality.

The map is not the territory.

It’s hard to be great if you don’t know what great looks like.

The actual advice

It splits cleanly depending on where you are:

• Pre-traction, before your first believer and/or borrowed credibility: Come to SF. Increase your surface area until something compounds. The whole point of being here is to absorb what's possible by sitting next to people doing it.

• Post-traction, with a real company doing real things: Pull back. “Networking” is a massive waste of time. The same dinners that built your sense of the ceiling will start eating the time you need to actually build toward it. The game shifts from raising the ceiling to executing within it.

Most founders either stay home and wonder why their ambition feels small. Or they keep going to dinners long after the marginal dinner stopped paying for itself.

It’s important to know which mode you’re in.

Does it have to be IRL?

There are serious efforts, ours included, to build scenes that do some of this work without requiring everyone to relocate.

Alif Sessions, for example, is a remote program. I believe in it. But I’d be lying if I said we’ve fully closed the gap with SF.

So the honest answer to the question in the title is uncomfortable but clear.

You do not need to be in San Francisco to build a company. You probably do need to be there, at least for a stretch, if you want your sense of what’s possible to match the people setting the frontier.

Those are two different goals, though.

The ceiling you’re building under was set by the room you’re standing in.

If you want a higher one, sometimes you have to change the room.

~ Omar