I’ve lived in San Francisco for 18 years. I’ve spent far too little time in other interesting cities. The past couple weeks I’ve hung out in Phoenix, Scottsdale, Chicago, Boulder, and Denver with friends and family. I head to LA this week (I’ve been there plenty). I love all these places. (Don’t you have school classes? Yes, but between spring break and "sick days," I get by.)
Wednesday morning I saw Dick Costolo in Chicago, CEO of FeedBurner, who’s a nice and sharp guy. The FeedBurner physical office reflects their market (RSS and blogs): it’s totally open, transparent, and equal. In other words, no offices, no cubes, just desks. After our chat Eric Olson of VentureWeek and new FeedBurner employee introduced himself to me — it’s always great to put faces to voices! Chicago is an awesome city, especially the people who were all super friendly.
I spent the rest of the afternoon, night, and morning taking care of some personal business which I will write about later.
Next I flew to Denver and taxi’d to Boulder where I caught a panel on how screwed up the patent system is, especially for start-ups. My pal Brad Feld was on it and afterwards I had sushi with him and his wife Amy. I pondered rolling out my sleeping bag on a Boulder sidewalk, but decided instead to follow my gracious hosts home and crashed in their guest room. Good call. The bed was 100x better than a busted futon I slept on a night earlier, and I got to wake up to an amazing sight:
The next morning I hung out at the Mobius VC office, got briefed on global warming, neuroscience, applied psych in business, and libertarianism by Dave Jilk, and cried myself 14 tissues in the bathroom since Seth Levine rejected me in favor of frozen rain. (It’s ok Seth, I still love you, but no outbound link for you this time.)
My last stop was Denver, where I visited an old friend who I have done a poor job of keeping up with. He’s had a tough four years of high school (three different schools, three different cities). It was good to see him, check out his public school, and hear what he’s thinking for college.
I returned home happy, grateful for the mentors in my life, energized, and with much work.
I haven’t been to that half of California since I was but a wee lad, and am heading down to the nearby city of Irvine to see the UC campus next week. How is Los Angeles? Does it have any of the romanticism of San Francisco to it? (The prospect of spending four years there has me nervous and I’m not sure if I’ll get to spend much time in L.A.)
Orange County is nice. I also like LA a lot, but it’s much different than SF. It’s not as “charming” but there’s more of everything….especially if you like the media / cartoon / Hollywood scene.
More of everything? I live in a town of less than 70,000. I’ll be happy if the place has a Starbucks.
Is there any sort of tech scene? L.A. isn’t exactly the Silicon Valley. (My other prospect is UC Davis, which is much closer.)
Probably. Not sure. The tech companies I know of are usually tied into the music / movie / media world.
Thanks for the info, Ben.
Ben, The next time you find yourself in Boulder/Denver I would love the opportunity to meet you. If you are interested in biopharma I could show you around Fitzsimons (www.colobio.com) the new square-mile life science city in Denver, it is impressive.