✨ This week I visited @OpenAI's office to finally meet @edwinarbus Edwin used to work at @Stripe for I think almost 10 years and we jokingly would call him the actual CEO of Stripe because he'd be responsible for so many things and was actually running a lot of it, and he helped me and my friends out so many times when he had issues with Stripe We brought him a 🥮 Pastel de Nata baking kit from Portugal. Which is funny, you have a Dutch guy here promoting Portugal :D Edwin recently joined OpenAI and it was interesting to visit. They said they doubled in size in employee size in just a year or less I think and just moved into a new office It's a beautiful glass office, I think 9 floors, open, amazing interior design and just super spacious. If anything it reminds me of modern university buildings in Netherlands but just a lot more beautiful It was also interesting to see startups at different sizes, this week we also visited @cursor_ai and it's a cute and cozy office, with a valuation of $9B. So you can see the difference between that and OpenAI at $300B. It's 30x bigger and it feels like that of course One thing that's hard to explain to people here is how crazy all of this is. You eat the free Stripe conference lunch box or the employee buffet at the OpenAI office and it's better than a lot of the food that you pay for in Europe (inb4 cancelled by Euros, it's just true, esp Southern Europe). There was people at the Stripe conference holding signs all day to show you where to go. Like imagine having so much money you can pay people to hold a sign, it's next level 😂 The abundance of resources and wealth here is just crazy. I'm not an SF noob, this isn't new to me, I lived here in 2012. I know how it works. But when you visit the startups and people here, you're just wow. The biggest and most important companies in the world are either here or in Asia, and they're in the most important industry of our time: AI. So it completely makes sense this is where the resources are. But you feel the people inside of Silicon Valley, working here, living here, are barely aware of the crazy and unique reality they're in compared to the rest of the world I've always enjoyed being one foot in Silicon Valley and one foot out. I'm connected to the people here via X, and I like to visit. Most of the stuff I use comes from here: the technology I use to built my websites/apps, where my sites are hosted, how I get my money (Stripe), most of the new AI tech I use was invented and commercialized here, many of my big customers are from here too, and maybe most important a lot of tech culture that has become part of my personality comes from here But personally I was never physically here a lot, I never raised VC money, instead I bootstrapped and lived and traveled around the world. Digital nomading mostly in Asia for a decade and then the last few years in Portugal in my quaint little beach town, and I think this gives me an interesting perspective on all of this, I'm in tech but also I'm not I asked Edwin "isn't all of this crazy, the abundance of everything here" when I visited OpenAI's beautiful office and he answered "well we need it to attract the best employees" so the beautiful office, the amazing food, it's all employee perks of course, and it's a rational answer to a more emotional question that is impossible to answer when you live here because how could you not start thinking all of this is anything other than normal? Silicon Valley sucks up all of the world's money, increasingly more with AI now, and of course that brings massive technological breakthroughs that benefit humanity for all of us, but I cannot even imagine being in the Silicon Valley bubble and traveling to the rest of the world and being shocked at the state of it compared to here Of course, you think, "with exception being the streets of San Francisco that are full of poverty" Well yes, but maybe not anymore I've been a massive critic of San Francisco for years esp 2019-2023 because it was such a shitshow here on the streets with homeless encampments and drugs, buglaries, car robberies, just super unsafe, and I remember you couldn't really talk about that on X, and people from SF just flat out lied and denied the reality (maybe because they owned homes here? :D). And even a year ago when I visited here it was still a complete shitshow This time San Francisco honestly looked completely different The new mayor @DanielLurie has actually cleaned up the city. You still see homeless, but not so much. They mostly stay under the radar. No crazy shouting and getting chased by them anymore (yes that was normal!). I didn't see any shooting up of drugs anymore There's a police presence on many blocks now, in front of the OpenAI office a motorbike police officer was stationed, so of course I walked up to him to tell him "so I drove your bike in GTA a lot", expecting to get arrested, instead he told me "you wanna get on?" so I did haha San Francisco is actually getting beautiful again. And it feels like how it looked when I was living here in 2012 with my friend Jim when we both worked on our master's thesis from here, which I have to talk about in another blog post (it involved paying $1000/mo to live in a basement in Portrero Hills with a German landlord that had a 🪿 goose in the house that wore diapers) w/ @Erwin_AI @yasser_elsaid_ @loaibassam

questa palestra casuale a SF sta bloccando l'accesso a Stripe!????? che diavolo