2 Crazy Months in SF
[mid - late november] getting to SF
i had already made 2 90-degree turns the last 2 years. One from my job in banking to a machine learning bootcamp to pursue startups. Then, an operations contractor gig at an effective altruism ai safety research organization eventually turned into a salary role and i went all-in for awhile there. now that time had passed and i found myself looking for a job for somewhere to apply a lot of my generalist tenacity after having spent 2 months traveling and decompressing. I was perusing AI startups but applying for roles in general tech industry jobs as a product manager.
in mid november I got intro’d to a couple of key folks who are running / organizing communities here in SF. This led me to a lot of tangential exposure to the community that’s been fostering here through well-rounded selection mechanisms for quite some time now.
found myself coming up from the south bay 3+ times a week and found it a logistical hassle many times. Especially since many cool things happen in the evening and I’m usually worn out from pursuits throughout the day (the job search grind and practicing on tryexponent.com to become a product mgr in tech).
I was offered to help be found a sublet from one of the community organizer. i was unsure of what to do. And then… ChatGPT came out.
all bets were off. this thing could code, write, help you think, ideate, and perform virtually any task I tested it with. Suddenly, my lack of time on task was the only bottleneck to every. single. idea. I could have.
I paused the job search. much to family’s dismay, I came up to sf without a job, to dive farther into the ai scene here.
[early to mid Dec] - starting to start up my time in SF
getting acclimated to the area. connecting with some builders, going to AI/ML meetups,
indie hacker + ml community starting to form, going to meetups and overcoming impostor syndrome.
spent time at f.inc on their public days. really appreciate the overwhelming amount of builder energy.
signed up for ai hackathon at lablab.ai.
played around with chatgpt a ton and lurked on the twitter web sphere a bunch. lots of time spent using AI to automate parts of my job search (customizing a pre written cover letter to a job description and company mission + personalized message to job poster on LinkedIn).
feeling like job searching is wasting a ton of time and there’s opportunity literally everywhere.
bounced back and forth between south bay to be around family and sf a lot.
[mid to end of Dec] - increasing velocity
actually pushed out / made the mvp for the ai hackathon worked. a bit stressful working with a junior dev and obscure hours remotely. but got first exposure / practice with react and experimented with the openai api myself.
visited someone i met off twitter DM’s - got invited over to have dinner at aihackweek.com. met dave fontenot and the team there, putting on what was the most electrifying buzz of energy and motivation I have had in a long time (and since, has raised my default / baseline level of energy)
became of member of thesfcommons.com
went to a ton of AI/ML meetups.
went snowboarding. what serendipity. .
first time snowboarding with a friend who had an extra spot (ride+lodging) for me if i just got my own equipment rentals. totally worth it.
hosted an AI/ML meetup with some builders on Christmas Eve weekend. dave fontenot sponsored some food from it after we had one meeting about it where helped me navigate some impostor syndrome with pragmatic encouragement.
spent a lot of time at f.inc
went through several attempts at cofounding. made me not want to do it anymore.
would meet and vibe with a technical person (typically at a bigger or known company that wanted to start their own thing), worked on an idea, but found the reliance and motivatoin for folks who werent coming from teh same place of urgency (albeit, scarcity) as i was created friction. slow to ship on several ideas was a it upsetting.
eg: you have na idea, you start working on it and doing product roadmapping and go to market strategy, then your technical cofounder communicates a lengthier timeline for research, experimentation, learning a new language then testing other projects and then building the thing for demo purposes.... and next week someone makes a much shittier version 1.0 gets upvoted on product hunt and gets virality on twitter.
happened 2+ times.
End of Dec: I declare that I want to continue this. I kick out my sublet for 1 more month because I had the option to.
I also want to find a longer term housing arrangement or lease in this part of SF. it’s so pleasant - I’m physically active here, making friends that are value aligned, and my entreprenurial ambitions are well received and supported here.
i want to continue this. but money and life. plus no job hits. indie hacking takes a lot of time and energy to make money from. don’t have a lot of experience in it for real bootstrapping from myself.
stability as a independent person running on savings, in student loan debt, and losing health benefits from turning 26 in 3.5 months gives me incredulous anxiety.
decide i have to get a job. feeling like i am throwing in some metaphorical towel.
miscellaneous / unguided anger within me ensued regarding my stature and lack of optionality to get anything going. Feeling like i am ridiculously codependent on a system and powerless to pave my own path; yet feel like i can.
i knew I wanted to stay in sf. but money kept freaking me out. spiraled for awhile on this.
circle back with existing friendships and relationships and get affirmation about my feelings and that a job isn’t that bad.
many hours of productivity lost on interruptions from things like searching for parking or having to my car every couple of hours totaled 2 parking tickets thus far. love street cleaning.
[January] Metamorphosis
towards the beginning of January i hit a ton of anxiety / freaking out.
I commit to the job search and begin to feel less bad about looking for a job. decide to stop being an internet lurker and get a role while being just me personality-wise as well.
i want more leverage in general to produce things. thus, i start engaging way more on the twitter sphere and interwebs. I get more vocal about things in general.
I finalize my energy-consuming thoughts and make the decision to stay. Moreover: starting a new group house for builders to coalesce and my access to an affinity of folks of the same wavelength. living here and having access to the energy of builders put me through a whole series of triumphing many challenges and racking up any small wins fast. suddenly, momentum is on my side and I want to make the last few months of my runway work.
Dealt with so many folks on some shared housing lists and many group chats / intros (60+) who wanted to find housing. Only a couple stuck around and we persevered on through.
No matter what got an interview from hf0.com - very unexpected. the caliber of folks interviewed / admitted is absurd.
Amidst straightforward thoughts on pursuing a job role or finding a technical cofounder to overcome some of my engineering implementation bottlenecks, he mentioned in passing that I could demonstrate my velocity for building by shipping something to product hunt that the team can play around with.
I dropped everything after our call on Saturday afternoon and have been working every minute possible since. Through a series of tradeoffs and rapid iterations, I made it to the point of launching an MVP demo on product hunt.
My idea was bring a dashboard/copilot interface into all major social media platforms to help generate personalized outreach (uses API’s to read in profile data from both sender/user). The current MVP is strictly: Twitter only, and sending it to someone you haven’t messaged before. There are some kinks here and there, with not all edge cases accounted for (hardcoded based on the string pattern in twitter which isn’t always consistent).
For four days straight I fought tooth and nail to make this work. Ignored all incoming distractions - including when they came from me. Hit up 25+ random engineering folks when stuck somewhere in my understanding. DM’ed folks on twitter about random things. even used the runway (i so anxiously was holding on to / conservative about) to purchase several hours of support on codementor.io. Accepted parking tickets for not moving my car on the street, ate random fast foods i’d have delivered, and abandoned all the things i spend time on each day to annotate or second brain everything. I just … did.
Post morteming with a good friend / housemate in a sauna … I described this incredible level of innate dissatisfaction for things. Before, I would feel good just Like I can do much more and don’t want to do anything but. He says something I really enjoyed:
“Aqeel… You’ve become a man in the arena. The life in the stands won’t ever be the same to you again, no matter how close you sit and observe the action.”"
I loved it. the stimulus and empowering feeling of building technologies or projects with my own hands. I wanted to go to battle more.
It wasn’t about getting in to the program (i didn’t) - it was holding onto what was elicited from within me from this cue. I am since ever grateful for the hf0.com team.
I get in / go to scale AI’s generative ai hackathon. make some friends. hack away with my collaborator on a better version of twitter DM’s.
My collaborator Michael Fekadu and I on our way to 48 hours of hacking on stuff! Went to HS + Undergrad together!
now totaling ~4 street parking tickets. Thanks Lower Haight for cutting into my runway. These are all street cleaning and I have my productive hours hit past 10pm sometimes. Also, just moving my car around every couple of hours is exhausting. I have the car since the 101 entrance is so close and its incredibly more efficient time-wise for me traveling roundtrip to the south bay weekly for family anyway.
getting way, way more into twitter. its crazy. whole bunch of people accessible for free, in a place that is more about meritocracy / value when engaging as opposed to other means of garnering attention (experienced on other social medias).
talk to some friends and get over my own concerns about falling into virtue signaling traps and build a check-in system around my intentions when using twitter.
navigating multiple bouts of friction with family, whose concerns are valid for me regarding having to get health insurance and income secured soon.
decided i want to Bet on myself. I’m seeing my agency as an individual continue to reinforce my ability to make things happen in the world consistently.
Dear Friends even signal boosted my tweet looking for a job at an AI startup!
NEXT STEPS FOR ME
I’ve decided my path. I just need to sustain myself.
i’d like to secure the means to continue my systems to stay healthy, creatively produce, and build genuine connectedness in my communities and circles.
Default back up plan for the end of my runway can be to Uber at 4AM for airport rides (avoiding 8am traffic shifts) and thurs-friday after 10pm for nightlife surge pricing rides. I can borrow a car from hertz for some amount of money. Driving for 25+ hours gets you a health insurance stipend in california. cool, can figure that out in ~2 months.
Otherwise, I can try to get a grant or contractor work somewhere to hit my necessity goal of between $4K~$5K a month.
Goal I am pushing for is venture studio funding.
I have some ambitions for a venture studio, where i work with the engineers and devise product roadmaps + go to market strategies all the time. However…. securing a baseline salary is top of mind. i want to hone in on my creative energy and belief in the the pathways i see to implementation and go to market strategies in my head reflexively / unconsciously.
i have found a good technical collaborator with someone i’ve known for awhile, and want to continue to hone my product development skills across a series of novice applications being developed. we’re working on our third mvp-ish app using GPT3 and I’m enjoying it a lot.
i am choosing to go all in on continuing to expand upon my growing list of independent AI builders in SF and surround myself with people putting pedal to the medal, also betting on themselves to make their ambitions happen.
It was a stressful final few days of January, but in the end, through a “hail mary” of a last minute housemate replacement, the new group house lease is secured. off i go. onwards to putting the venture into adventure. Tentative name right now is Luminance - right in the midst of Cerebral Valley’s memeplex.
[Today] Feb 1 - The Beginning of Everything
My last day in my sublet. what started out as a sublet has turned into yet another 90 degree turn on actualizing my drive unto something (3rd one in 3 years).
5 Parking tickets in 2 months.
Its 905 AM. I’m just starting to relax the pressure in my arms as I haul my last box of things down to the street. No flimsy receipt looking paper citation on my windshield wiper.
Whoo. Relief washes over me after the anxiety of trying to beat the the 9AM street cleaning cutoff. Instead, I am offered a serendipitous moment of a quiet, empty street, with no cars passing by on either direction. The subtle brown noise of San Francisco is around me as a threshold of the city sensation. Excitement passes over me as I’ve loaded my final box, eager to drive to my new place and start this adventure. prepare to get into the driver’s seat through the door facing the street, .
And there it is: SF’s welcome to the neighborhood for me. Wedged in the doorhandle is my 5th 87$ ticket in 2 months.
I breathe in, not envisioning the hit to the runway this is on purpose and just tell myself that money/time in my heard is artificial and things are projections, not unrealized outcomes. I can make the reality for the next couple of months.
