There have been a couple blog posts floating around lately that talk about what people wish they knew before they moved to SF. I thought they were great, had some good points about neighborhoods defining people and the fog line being Divisidero, but missed some of the key points, some of the most important things, if you are going to be integrated seamlessly into SF social life.

1) A disproportionate number of people grew up and/or went to college in California, which gives them a huge network.

I was talking to a middle aged lady sitting next to me at Tacolicious a few weeks ago. She was from the South and commented on how difficult it was to meet new people since she had moved here 2 years ago, and how she didn’t have very many friends, as she ran her own one-woman dog-walking business. She asked me if I felt that way.

I grew up in Santa Monica, went to UC Berkeley, where my HS sends around 40 kids per year. 50% of my fraternity moved straight into the city, and another 25% of them trickled in over the next two years. There is a house in the Richmond nicknamed the “ATO retirement home,” where everyone congregates. I can think of one good friend who I genuinely miss who moved out of California, and another couple who are out of SF.  Everyone else is here.

It isn’t uncommon to meet someone, realize that they went to USC, UCLA, Stanford, or Berkeley and were in the same fraternity as a guy you went to elementary school with, etc.

California’s great weather and domination of some of the world’s most glamorous industries (Tech and Movies and Music) means there isn’t much reason to leave in search of someplace that can provide you adequate career opportunities.

That means that a lot of people stick around after graduation, and …

2) This makes it hard for a true outsider to break in.

My mom always said that you don’t meet anyone of worth at a bar. Not that good people don’t go to bars, I go to bars, just that it’s not where friendships or relationships are formed.

That generally happens at the house parties, the brunches, where you meet friends of friends.

Now this is the case in every city, personal connections and mutual friends always trump random drunken bar conversations, but the point I’m making is that it’s worse in SF.

I think because many people are only separated by one to two degrees of connection in SF, it makes them less social in other situations: you don’t have to strike up a conversation in a bar, because you came with 4 friends and are meeting more friends of friends. I can go to McTeagues and be fairly certain that between me and my 3 friends, there are at least 5-10 people who we went to college, high school etc. with.

This kind of “old boys & girls” network leads to a lot of house parties and pregames and bottomless mimosa invites.

3) ProTip: If you didn’t grow up here or go to school here, you should find an in with a network of some sort.

All this doesn’t mean that if you don’t have an SF connection, don’t move here. It does mean though that you need to be more methodical about how you go about meeting people.

We have some friends who went to Brown, Harvard, etc. and didn’t grow up in California either. But they work for a big tech company or a big consulting company, so they are immediately plugged into a network of people who do activities together.

Triage is the most reknowned for this: they are a healthcare consulting company that is known as essentially one big grownup party, playing sloshball on Fridays as a company, and all the coworkers throw “Triage Parties” at their houses, many of which I’ve been to. They recruit heavily from the Greek system, if not on purpose, it definitely ends up that way.

If you are in your early twenties and went to a good school and are social, it’s probably enough if you know a few friends who can plug you in, invite you to the house parties, etc.

It’s cases like the Tacolicious woman that are dangerous: if you know literally no one, and will be self-employed, you need to figure out something to join that gives you a chance at forming real friendships. Maybe it’s a sports team, maybe you join a coworking space just to have interaction with other people, maybe you work for Google for a year before branching out on your own. Or maybe you just have to be more of a social butterfly, but the fact that many SF residents are lifelong California natives is a double edged sword: it makes the city a smaller place if you are one of them, but one that is a bit harder to break into if you aren’t.

No company has really succeeded in doing true ridesharing.

Now I’m not talking about “rideshare” as defined by Sidecar/Lyft etc.: that isn’t really rideshare, that is on demand cab service where the drivers happen to be normal people who own a car. Those drivers wouldn’t be picking you up or driving that route otherwise, so it isn’t really rideshare at all. Their innovation is democratizing the ability to drive for profit and make money of yet another asset we own that is sitting idle. That isn’t to insult either of those companies: they are awesome and I think they have done the world a huge service by helping people who might be struggling make some money on the side by driving for a living.

But it isn’t ridesharing. I think there are two huge problems that speak to why we don’t have a great ridesharing system despite all the attempts. YC has apparently said that the most typical application they get is one trying to do rideshare (no citation on that, heard it through the grapevine through a YC company, so could be wrong).

One problem is the fact that true rideshare, the kind that Zimride first tried out before it focused all its attention on Lyft, or RideJoy attempted, is often Serendipity Based. 

As an airport ground transportation search engine we have seen a healthy number of cabshare companies. I don’t have the confidence that many of them will succeed, because they are counting on serendipity to bring two people together at the same time, they both happen to log on and have similar leave times and similar start destinations and end destinations. This requires massive volume.

Shared ride shuttles realized this, that’s why they guarantee pickups between certain hours. Mozio’s only cabshare partner also realizes this and guarantees shared cabs at certain times.

The best way of doing something like this is to build upon an existing platform of normal users, not try to create your own. One goal at Mozio is to eventually let users determine whether they are willing to share the cab they book through us, and then the next time someone searches for a cab to the airport through us, we can include the shared cab as an option. I don’t care enough about sharing a cab to go searching for a ride on a cabshare site, but click a box and have someone who lives a couple blocks away meet me in front of my house to save 20 bucks? Sure, why not.

The second reason is that Costs go up Exponentially when you add different pickup and dropoff points.

How much is a typical public transit ride to the airport in the United States? $5-8 probably. A shared ride shuttle is $15-24. A Cab is $45-65. Notice anything? Something that has 0 variable stops, public transit, it picks up and drops off everyone from the same two destinations, is the cheapest. You pay 3x the cost to change one of those points with a shared shuttle, and to dictate both points of interest, pickup and dropoff, multiply by 3 again.

With those economics its hard to figure out how to share transportation when both the pickup and dropoff points are different.

There has got to be some happy medium, a sort of shared-ride shuttle for normal transportation. I suppose this is supposed to be the function of public transit, but in pretty much the rest of the U.S. other than New York we all know that isn’t the case.

If someone can solve this problem, and I know a couple startups that are trying, it will be a lot of fun to watch. I don’t think Uber, Lyft or Sidecar are the least bit interested in it: why try to match up riders when they can launch another city, and there are always more cities to launch and they have already hit on an extremely lucrative business model. However, part of me thinks an existing platform with a lot of existing inventory getting behind this idea is the only way it will ever happen.

Thoughts?

“I don’t think that I would consider myself a feminist. I certainly believe in equal rights.”

-Marissa Mayer

If you look up the dictionary definition, both Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg probably are feminists: they believe women are equally capable and should have equal rights etc., but unfortunately, there seem to be a contingent of women who believe that a feminist is a person with a “militant drive and sort of the chip on the shoulder.” Those are Mayer’s words, not mine.

Is that the fault of males too eager to discredit the movement, or a news media too eager to give coverage to the fringe and stoke the fires they create? Probably both, but females like Adria Richards aren’t helping, when she publicly shamed via twitter two employees of PlayHaven, one of whom was eventually fired for the “misconduct,” all for making a harmless joke about “big dongles.” Adria was eventually fired as well.

Are you kidding me?!! A penis joke? Have we completely lost it, so much so that we actually think “the future of programming is on the line” because of a fucking dongle joke?

Let’s stop for a moment and forget the fact that Adria Richards made a penis joke, publicly on twitter for all her followers to see, only hours earlier while at the same conference, PyCon. Let’s also forget that it was a conversation she overheard and wasn’t meant for her, that she didn’t even ask them to stop, and two males making fun of their own anatomy, while that might make people feel uncomfortable and could be inappropriate, is not sexist towards women. Could this have been a publicity ploy, an effort on the part of Richards to increase her twitter followers with a sanctimonious tweet that made her out as a crusader for women’s rights. Would an equal firestorm have ensued if two women had made a vagina joke behind me in a conference? Would people even entertain the idea that I could feel like it was “sexist”?

Let me clarify something up front: I believe in women’s rights. I’m frankly farther to the left on this than probably many women: I think there should be Daddy leave like there is in much of Scandinavia, because the entire idea that child rearing is solely the woman’s responsibility, and therefore that this is even only a women’s rights issue, is kind of sexist. I think that there should be a welcoming environment for women in tech companies, etc. I also believe there is still plenty of sexism in tech, but usually in ways that don’t manifest themselves so obviously.

However, instances like this only aggravate the vast majority of rational males. It’s like crying wolf, you cry sexist too often when someone makes a dongle joke or has a “brogrammer” poster, instances where the vast majority of women would laugh or just roll their eyes (because let’s face it, the dongle joke was kind of lame) and eventually, people just start tuning you out when things actually happen.

To those of you who think that Richards was not responsible for the firestorm that ensued, you are partly right. But the reason it got so much attention is that accusations of sexism in the tech industry go very far, and can be very damaging to a company if they are perceived as being a hostile work environment to women, so Playhaven overreacted and fired the employee. Playhaven could have taken a more measured approach, instead of firing a parent with three children. At most this deserved a slap on the wrist, since it was against the conference policies, not a firing.

And Richards was definitely not responsible for the death threats, etc., that ensued, and those are despicable, and have been universally decried. 

However that does not excuse her original behavior. Adria Richards, through her overreaction, has now caused a parent to lose a job, and added to a work environment where companies are so intimidated by charges of sexism that they fire an employee over a penis joke.

If you want male allies in the fight for equal rights, maybe give us the benefit of the doubt sometimes. We make the occasional penis joke.

If enough people cry wolf too many times, we’ll be too tired for the real fight, for things like nurseries in the workplace, flextime, maternity leave, etc. More of us are on your side than you realize. Even if we tell lousy jokes.

This post was also on Huffington Post. Check out Mozio to book your airport shuttles, taxis, limos and airporters.

I just spent 3 weeks in Berlin, working out of coworking spaces and WayMate’s office space, meeting VCs, angels and other entrepreneurs, and gaining an appreciation of Silicon Allee and how they do business.

I was there with a purpose: for ITB Berlin, the world’s largest travel trade show, but I decided to stay an extra two weeks. I knew several of the companies who were pursuing a “point-to-point multimodal search engine,” Mozio’s original goal, were located there, and I figured why not check out the scene after paying so much to get over there. Plus, Berlin is dirt cheap (10 euro a night hostels).

Here are my major takeaways from 3 weeks immersion into the tech scene.

1) The Germans like order and certainty

Standing at a street corner I was shocked that no one jaywalked. There wasn’t a car in sight, yet Germans young and old stood there obediently, waiting for the green walk signal.

I found this to be an interesting reflection on the state of their psyche: I was continuously told that the companies that get financing were often the ones that were uncreative and had big revenue streams. German investors did not think big enough, weren’t wiling to break convention.

I really doubt an Uber, SideCar or Airbnb could originate in a culture like this: all of those startups flouted the law at first (and some still are in certain cities).

This evaluation isn’t revolutionary I know: the German startup scene is perhaps most famous for the Samwer brothers, who have successfully copied profitable U.S. startups and sold them back to the companies for massive paydays, including EBay and Groupon.

And this is fairly true for anywhere outside silicon valley to be honest, the risk tolerance that exists here is hard to find wherever you go, but I found the insistence on obeying probably the most commonly broken law a bit puzzling.

2) This is starting to change, but very very slowly: they need a big exit first

Investors who understand the ups and downs of startups are rare. While gossiping about several European companies that had raised large rounds, friends of mine confided that in all likelihood that multimillion dollar round was not given in one big check: a 2 million dollar “raise” was probably really only 500k with a commitment for more if milestones were reached.

This was foreign to me, and they were shocked that I was shocked: I have lots of friends who have raised money, when a round is announced that means that is the check they got, there are usually no strings attached to the majority of the money.

Pretty much everyone agreed that there would have to be a big exit before things truly changed: A billion dollar exit would have to create enough millionaires who were interested in angel investing for their to truly be a risk tolerant “investing community,” and not just isolated exceptions.

3) Business fundamentals mean more.

One of the things that excites me about what we are doing at Mozio (to grossly oversimplify the short-term goal: airport transfers) is that we fit very nicely into a lot of different parts of the travel industry. Airport transfers fit perfectly into the booking process for OTAs, airlines, hotels, meta-search, hotel search engines, travel content, and tours and activities. The distribution potential is huge, and it was one of the reasons we decided to focus the company initially on this: in travel, distribution is the toughest part.

However, investors in Silicon Valley rarely recognize this. They are too obsessed with other flashier things, the next social sharing startup, etc.

The few investor meetings we had in Germany, usually just friends of friends, they showed a lot of excitement about how were were a “piece of the puzzle” that fit into so many other travel sites. One marched us across the street to meet his venture capital friend right away.

We thought this was a reflection on #1, their sense of order. We fit nicely into a lot of other travel sites, and they liked that.

4) Germany, but Europe in general, still have an outdated sense of who owns data.

Most all cities in America are a part of Google Maps and have GTFS feeds. They expose their data in the hope that programmers will create free apps that encourage more use. That’s how you get iBart and the 30 variations on it.

That isn’t the case in Europe. Germany is probably by far the best, but the prevailing attitude around Europe is that they own the data, and they don’t share it liberally, or realize why that would be to their advantage.

Berlin is part of Google Maps, but it’s pretty crappy data, and no locals use it to get around.

Overall it was an interesting few weeks diving into the Berlin tech ecosystem. WayMate, the european travel startup that shares some of our goals of an integrated travel solution, was courteous to let me use their office for a week, for which I am very grateful.

The Germans seem very eager to facilitate the tech scene in Berlin, and there were multiple discussions about policies that were in the process of being implemented to better imitate Silicon Valley, from labor laws (being able to easily hire and fire people) to investment by the government.

That’s all folks.

“It’s a lot different from a sorority invite,” Litwak said.

That was the quote that was taken from an offhand comment I made to a reporter from the DailyCal, the student newspaper at my Alma Mater, UC Berkeley.

During the interview she asked me how my life had changed since I graduated. I joked that, well, I definitely wasn’t taking sorority invite buses to the city on Thursday nights anymore, that’s for sure, because I was working too hard, a far cry from my second-semester senior year laziness where every weekend was a 3 day weekend. I went on to give a lot more detail about the differences in my lifestyle, our work, etc. but she, for some reason, chose that quote.

I’ve come to respect PR professionals a lot since I started pitching Mozio to reporters. There are all kinds of pitfalls a newbie founder can fall into, but this was by far the most shocking: that reporters would pick and choose random quotes like that, either consciously or subconsciously making you look bad, when the comment really had nothing to do with what the article is about.

Its led me to treat interviews with reporters as if they were a press conference from now on. This was personally difficult for me, since I usually automatically try to establish camaraderie and a rapport with everyone I meet. It’s been probably my biggest asset, I’m naturally good at interacting with people, and it’s led to a lot of good introductions and been great for our business.

But now I channel my inner C.J. Cregg, and my joking personality takes a backseat as I’ve come to learn that, while many reporters are great, some of them will try to make you look like an idiot.

If you are going to do PR yourself, which if you are a founder of a small startup with limited funding you should be, then you need to be conscious of the fact that anything you say is fair game, and don’t give them any information you don’t want published verbatim.