On San Francisco
Breaking a guilty secret
For someone who spends most of their time thinking about what we can do to better unlock innovation and nurture dynamic startups, my biggest guilty secret is perhaps the fact that I haven’t visited the Bay Area in well over a decade.
For the past two years, I’ve been flying back and forth between London and Chicago, London and New York, London and D.C.; but never London and San Francisco. That changed this weekend – after celebrating 4 July in the Mid West, I headed on a long overdue pilgrimage for the actual, proper West.
Here are some scattered thoughts about what I made of it all:
Vibes: I’m inevitably overprojecting a bit – and this will certainly win no points for originality – but it is immediately apparent that San Francisco is an obviously interesting place, full of interesting people. I can’t think of anywhere else on Earth I’ve been to where you get the impression that no matter where you are – sitting at dinner, standing in line to order a coffee, waiting for your gate to open, wherever – you are surrounded by intelligent, creative, discerning and determined individuals.
Transport: Or, to be precise, Waymo. For years I’ve stared jealously at friends’ Instagram stories of them being whisked around by these miracles on wheels. I strongly suspect that I will never forget the feeling of experiencing autonomous driving first-hand, and I look forward to reminiscing about it in true senile-elderly-man-style by the time the 2060s roll around. Unfortunately, we also took a bunch of plain, old, normal Ubers during our stay – and in almost every trip there was a near miss or human-induced error of some kind. I cannot wait for AVs to write the obituary of the conventional car.
Architecture: San Francisco is not a particularly attractive place. While its ‘Painted Ladies’ are obviously the exception to this observation, more often than not, the city feels pretty ramshackle in my opinion. The constant tangle of telephone wires above your head doesn’t help, and I think more often than not that hills make a place feel shabby for some reason. Seeing the abject lack of housing density on the way into SFO would be laughable were it not so economically harmful.
Food and drink: We didn’t get to a tonne of spots but on our first night we ate at Katsuo + Kombu and it was fantastic – I ordered the sesame miso tofu with a tempura kakiage. On our second night we got drinks with friends at Barebottle Brewing and ordered in burritos from somewhere nearby. Nice beer, but as usual in the US, needlessly too alcoholic to enjoy anything more than a few pints.
Crime: Admittedly with the (possibly?) big proviso that we didn’t really get too close to where I’m told the true hotspots are, I did not see any of the widespread squalor and crime that trustworthy accounts on X warned me to prepare for. Per above, the most obvious rule-breaking I encountered was without doubt the flagrant speeding and other traffic violations. [Postscript: Oh, I’ve just remembered – seeing shelves of basic cosmetic products locked up in Perspex boxes in a Walgreens was pretty bleak. So inconvenient!]
Environment: The famous fog that blankets the city really is a special sight to behold. When we went on an impromptu stroll down the beach, we immediately saw at least a couple of humpback whales breaching – something I’d never witnessed before, and for sure one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. As an ornithologist, I appreciated the huge ravens and their eerie vocalisations in Golden Gate Park – not to mention the constant buzz of hummingbirds, the dramatic flashes of spotted towhee, and the bizarre flocks of brown pelicans. The abundance of wildflowers – especially the California Poppy – is notable, and really lifts the place.
While I wish I could have spent longer in San Francisco, I only needed 48 hours (less) to remind myself of why it plays a central role in all of our lives. I won’t be leaving it another decade before I go back again.