San Francisco

“And so I ended up, one by one, selling off the apartments, and it's kind of like when in Monopoly, when you buy a hotel or houses, and then you have to sell them, but you lose money on the sale.”

“And then San Francisco wasn't so much a cultural backwater. It was just provincial. You know, it was out on the coast. It was off of the mainstream. It wasn't putting out this big, unique culture thing and music anymore.”

“Well, after about three years, we went through a real brush with running out of money, which lasted a couple of months, because we had moved offices in San Francisco from rent-free loft in a printer's place to a big, you know, expensive new, too expansive offi…”

“Like, I think it would have been really hard to do what we did anywhere else because we have many, many data scientists and many, many engineers and, you It was not just about me being comfortable, but if we wanted to fulfill on the vision of using technology …”

“We had friends who are raising forty million dollars on forty-page business plans and bragging about a million dollar per page for a raise or doing these lavish launch parties, which seems so ridiculous now to spend funds on a launch party.”

“I paid 600 dollars a month in rent.”

“Both of my sisters had MBAs, like my dad did, and earning power and one's achievements were emphasized, and I took a turn to the extreme left when I went to art school and I rejected the pursuit of material comforts.”

“Most cities don't have a neighborhood that is an obvious fit. And I know that probably sounds strange. Think of so many wonderful places to be. But they have to have that morning to nighttime, you know, possibility for business. And then they have to have affo…”

“So I was very lucky. I had this staff of Indian people who found this It's a restaurant in San Francisco. They had the cooking space available. So I sent off a whole bunch of people over there to start doing the samosas and the naan. And now I found another on…”

“I think the culture of Bostonians is a very do-it-yourself mentality. And so that was some friction for this type of service, and I felt like if we could just get to San Francisco, where, you know, it's the tech company capital of the world, like, this is the …”

“They're only eight inches in diameter, so absolutely you can. Yeah, I don't think you can do it with anything else, but you're right. It's 12 wells for that amount of energy to run San Francisco.”

“Honestly, the first little hint of anything food related did not come from any of my doctors in San Francisco. It came from the doctor who treated me in Kampala.”

“We went from, you know, nothing to a working prototype that could drive from San Francisco to Palo Alto, you know, the highway stretch of that in about three months, you know, just with a scrappy team working in a garage.”

“Our first time doing that was about two years ago. So I guess I'd, that'd be I think around the end of twenty-twenty... We did our first driverless drive around, you know, a quiet part of San Francisco at night with no one behind the wheel.”

“It's on the order of a hundred cars, and in the evening, they all start off in parking lots, powered off.”

“At the beginning of the pandemic, we had, I think, three buildings in San Francisco. And today, you look at those offices, they're about, you know, low single digit percent utilization.”

“We have a fleet in San Francisco of about 250 vehicles. You know, they're not all out at the same time, but it gives you an approximate order of magnitude.”

“We were this tiny company in Boston for, you know, almost two years before we even opened the San Francisco market.”

“And we started this effort a decade ago when we launched Rise of the Rest, started doing, you know, bus tours around the country, then launched investment fund, which made now 200 investments in a hundred different, different cities in what we call Rise of the…”

“And bullpen capital, Who, you know, co-led our round, you know, their view was, you're not raising a Series B, and you're not going to be taken seriously if you're not in, in San Francisco.”

“Ultimately we had advantages there. Drew is from Chicago, I am as well. We had some relationships with real estate owners Drew specifically did that would help us get some early wins, but this was a hard business. And as we thought about who to hire, who we co…”

“A lot of people go into a kitchen and then move away to San Francisco, LA, Denver, Miami, and we had such roots in the kitchen with supply that people ended up taking us with them when they moved. So we did move from kitchen to kitchen, you know, and it went, …”

“We only started selling it to San Francisco families, and we would personally go and deliver it. Remember, I remember very, we would have 93 customers.”