My trip to California

Yes, I'm alive :)

I've been meaning to write, but it's hard to find a spare moment. Images of ugly code and piano chords and Jazz and cats dance in my head.

This entry has been sitting in draft state for three weeks and is now belated, but what can ya do? I'm publishing it.

California was amazing.

Startup School

Startup School was great, as expected.

This time around with real founders such Joe Kraus (Excite/Jotspot), Mark Fletcher (Bloglines), Caterina Fake (Flickr), and Joshua Schachter (del.icio.us) speaking we got an excellent "view from the trenches". Lots of great tips.

I'll skip the details as they've been covered extensively elsewhere.

How did it compare to last fall? Favorably. In fact, I liked this year's conference better.

The speakers last fall were great, but the lineup included more finance, VC, journalist, economist, and inspirational types, giving the conference a somewhat "meta" feel. This time around there were more founders with more battle stories and I liked that.

A side effect of raving about a previous conference is that a large number of your friends find their way to the next one :) It was great to see Vinnie, Martin, Didier, Quinnie, Pratik, Rich, and Jason at the conference.

And as expected, I met many great people. That's what happens when you throw a bunch of young, smart, entrepreneurial types in a room together. Too many great conversations to mention, but if we talked, I really enjoyed it, so thank you!

Super Happy Dev House

After the conference I was really feeling the effects of jet-lag and wanted nothing more than to go home and collapse on the couch -- but that was not to be.

Vinnie mentioned he was going to a party later that night that he assured me I would really enjoy. The name of the party? Super Happy Dev House. Yeah... Super Happy Dev House.

So I had Jason drop me off at Vinnie's apartment in Palo Alto afterward and this gave me a chance to tour the famous Meetro World Headquarters (picture1, picture2).

That was fun :)

Afterwards Vinnie, Didier, Zak, and I headed out to the party.

So, the Super Happy Dev House. What is the Super Happy Dev House?

This is the Super Happy Dev House:

The Super Happy Dev House is a party just south of San Francisco hosted by David Weekly of PB Wiki fame. It's half hackfest, half party, and it's amazing. I've never seen anything like this. I had no idea that things like this existed.

About SuperHappyDevHouse (according to the SuperHappyDevHouse Wiki)

The party runs from 7pm in the evening until 7am the next day, and the idea is you bring your laptop and hack... or not. It's freeform. You can sit around and work on a project amongst other smart people doing the same, or you can walk around and get to know those smart people.

But whatever it is, it's cool. I met some amazing people including David Weekly, himself, Gabe Rivera of Memeorandum, some of the Technorati folks, and countless others.

Everyone is really smart. Everyone has an idea. And everyone wants to talk about it.

It's an incredible atmosphere, and it made me realize what's special about Silicon Valley... and why I need to move there... soon...

The Flat

We left the Super Happy Dev house 4am - ish and everyone was really tired. But the night wasn't over as it turns out.

During the drive home, at the last exit before we hit San Jose:

We blew a flat in the darkest stretch of Highway 280...

... and we had no flashlight ...

... so we had to use our cellphones as light ...

... Oh we have laptops! Laptops give off more light! ...

... Somebody take pictures of this, I need to blog about this! ...

I'm a nerd :)

Thanks to Zak, who had the most experience of the four of us with changing a tire.

"Old" Friends

After sleeping half the next day I called my "old" college friend Anders (college buddy presently working on PhD in Chemical Engineering at Stanford) to see if he and Vinay (other college buddy presently working on PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford) if they would like to meet for dinner. Why yes! So we met at a Mexican restaurant (with ridiculously cheap margaritas) just off campus.

Afterwards I got a tour of the Anders and Vinay pad. Foosball was played (apparently I'm past the prime of my foosball career, which is a bad thing), and much good conversation was had. It was great to catch up.

By the way for those who know him, Anders is still the same old Anders - he still doesn't sleep.

The next day Anders gave me a brief tour of Stanford, which is incredibly beautiful if you've never been.

Then he dropped me off at the Caltrain station where I took the train into San Francisco for the rest of the day.

San Francisco

This was my first time in San Francisco, and I spent most of the day doing unashamedly touristy things - Pier 39, Fisherman's Wharf, Ghirardelli Square, Trollies, Golden Gate Bridge (which is *massive* in person).

There's not much to say, really, except I love this city and hope it won't be long before I return.

Summary

Tons of other Photos in my California Photoset.

In short, I'm going to have to move west to the Bay Area, I don't see any way around it. So that's that.

---

© Josh Staiger, joshstaiger@gmail.com