San Francisco

“Richard Florida, about a year ago, did this wonderful bit of research where he basically found the center of Silicon Valley by geo-coordinating current investments, and, you know, once upon a time, the center of Silicon Valley was in Santa Clara, and now it's …”

“And you don't get that sitting in a cube in, you know, San Francisco or Silicon Valley. You get that from walking the halls Of these big organizations and really understanding, you know, what their initiatives are and how you're to be able to map up what your …”

“And so in OpenTable, the entirety of my diligence on the company was, show me San Francisco. You've been in San Francisco the longest. Show me how the key metrics are going in San Francisco.”

“By the way, that was city by city, so the fact that you had sufficient Restaurants in San Francisco meant nothing in Miami, so you started again in Miami, and in Tokyo, and in, you know, in Munich, and it's a slow roll-up.”

“And so the sales rep that initially in San Francisco and New York sold three restaurants a month, The same reps, in most cases, seven, eight years later, were selling 20.”

“Where Putin annexes Crimea, part of the sanctions that the United States government passed to kind of penalize Putin is to say that transactions can no longer happen in Crimea that are centrally routed in San Francisco or New York.”

“My diligence at OpenTable was I looked at San Francisco, which was their first market, and sales rep productivity grew over time. Restaurant churn decreased over time. The number of diners per restaurant increased over time. The percentage that booked through …”

“You know, our cities and the state have such dramatic issues, and yet you pull out the high tech sector. I mean, the state and the city of San Francisco will collapse.”

“We actually even refused to open an office in San Francisco for 10 years because we were just, we wanted like critical mass in the office.”

“This year we haven't made a single American dynamism investment in San Francisco.”

“San Francisco last year, like, authorized, I think, 6000 new housing units, right, which is just like an absurdly low number relative to the demand for people who want to move there.”

“So, we are in that level four with a certain scope, So right now, if we were to begin heavily snowing in SF, which it has, believe it or not last season, there was a little bit of snow we wouldn't operate it.”

“Pretty much every good weather city is like a linear combination of those two things, right? So in Los Angeles, Exactly. So you go to West Hollywood, you're much more like a SF style driving. Lots of pedestrians, cyclists, and so on. You go to the LA's you kno…”

“And now, you know, the, at least, you know, the kind of poorest people in America, the homeless in San Francisco have better access to information and knowledge than the president of the United States did in, you know, 1980”

“We spend, you know, like a billion plus dollars to these you know, quote unquote homelessness nonprofits in San Francisco every year. And homelessness keeps getting worse.”

“And then imagine that instead of paying four or five million dollars for a mediocre home in Palo Alto or San Francisco, your employees would be able to buy a nice house for a million dollars.”

“There may be more talent in Poland that's available to you than talent in San Francisco.”

“In terms of where we are today, you know, we are up, you know, driving in all kinds of conditions. We're driving, you know 24 seven in San Francisco, in Phoenix, you know, a little bit those are the most mature markets, but also in L.A. And in Austin, and, you…”

“If you're a violent, you know, drug addict, you have free reign. On the streets, and if you're going to open up an ice cream parlor, like God help you know, they're going to regulate you.”

“Whether it's me literally every day going into a room, closing the door and picking up a Yelp page, like hairdressers in San Francisco, and then closing the door, looking at the clock, I have one hour and I'm not going to leave this room until I call for a who…”

“I think San Francisco, like everyone's, you know, talking about like different pricing strategies for AI agents, and I'm like, you know, outside of San Francisco, no one knows what an agent is at this point in time, so.”

“Yeah. I mean, there's just so much development happening here and like we learn so much from our peers. Right. Everyone is facing similar problems. Right. And then the rate at which we can accelerate by kind of being in this Mecca, having you know, this collec…”

“Las Vegas Was interesting, first, because, ah, it had the highest murder solve rate in the country, with 94% of murders get cleared in Las Vegas, and if you compare that, like, San Francisco's like 70, 75%, ah, Chicago's in the thirties.”

“The homeless industrial complex, so that shows that the NGOs, as their budget rises, the homeless population rises with it. They're basically paid to get people addicted to drugs.”

“SF vacancy rate is at about three and a half percent today”

“Not far away is the California High Speed Rail Project meant to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles. It's been more than 15 years since voters approved this referendum to build this train. How many people have taken this train? Precisely zero.”

“Van Ness Avenue has tried to add a bus line onto the avenue for something like 20 years. It took about 20 years, more or less, to add a bus lane.”

“You had the You had the Quora, like the top Quora post for living on like, 14,000 a year in San Francisco.”

“We did a thousand and, about a thousand and a hundred monthly promissory note that the company would give us, and we would have to live in three with a thousand dollars a month.”

“Daniel had a good conversation with the president and asked him to hold back, and you know, the president agreed and is giving him time to implement his solutions”

“Daniel Lurie is the best mayor we've had in decades. So I think he's doing a very good job within the constraints that San Francisco presents.”

“I think we're in an era of Silicon Valley where it's like very very get rich driven. And that makes me a little sad. And that's partly why I moved the company out of SF.”

“In San Francisco, right, like, the whole political movement was, people are hungry, you can't arrest them for shoplifting and so forth, so as soon as we did that, what happened was massive gangs took everything out of the stores. They ended up, right, shutting…”

“So if you look at all of the latest innovations in San Francisco, a hundred percent private funded.”

“When I was at both at Google and at OIC, I was always surprised at how kind of almost myopic. The companies are just always looking at the market that's just like within the 30, you know, between San Jose and San Francisco.”

“The reality is you don't always have to do that. Like you don't always have to sell to the same companies in San Francisco. And so what I wanted to try to do is tell founders like, Hey, here's the framework for evaluating which playbook should you be following…”