SF Lacks Quality Late-Night Cafes For Startup Builders Compared To Seoul

At 3pm today I was in Menlo Park and debating heading to SF to work out of a cafe. Then I remembered that there's literally no great cafes to work out of in SF that are open past 5pm. Maybe some meh ones open until 6pm, but def nothing worth the drive. Ironic given that SF is supposed to be the place for building startups.

If you like working out of cafes, SF is surprisingly bad for it. Most cafes are cute little spots that close 3-5pm and barely have seating. I haven't found a single great cafe that combines modern design, ample seating, and remains open past 5pm. Actually I have yet to find a single cafe that even just checks those first two boxes.

The #1 city in the world for working out of cafes is Seoul, and its surrounding suburbs. You could be in a random suburb of Seoul, and within 15 minutes walking distance there will be a quality work cafe with tasteful modern design, ample seating, thriving co-working space vibes, and open 24/7. There are even 24/7 cafes with zero employees - something that could never exist in the U.S.

I was in Tokyo last week and saw the most beautiful and aesthetic co-working space I've ever seen where you can rent by the hour or day, attached to one of the nicest bookstores I've ever seen, two more hip and stylish cafes, all in a beautiful building and beautiful area. A 15 minute walk away was the nicest Starbucks Reserve I've ever seen, with 4 floors. These kind of places don't exist in the U.S, and definitely don't exist in SF.

Ironically, Tokyo and Seoul are probably better places to build a startup if you're just working from your laptop, don't have an office and prefer working out of cafes to holing up in your apartment all day in your pajamas, don't need to beg rich people for funding, and don't care about networking.

Anyways I ended up driving 10 mins to Mountain View to work out of the only cafe I know here with ample seating, modern design, and open till 6pm. Of course it has nothing on what I saw in Asia though (attached photos are from Tokyo)

✨ After asking where to work in San Francisco because the cafes were so unworkable the very friendly @hoopcutter + @DesignWithAllie contacted us to invite us to work at @AngelList's @founders_cafe so we got a Waymo (yes!) and went there

There we also met the very nice and smart @luisgnet @flotemer @quasa0

We worked a bit and then of course we went out for steak after at a restaurant called Lillie Coit's, and it was really good steak

It's fun you can drop into SF and meet people so fast (of course with a little help from X) and also you really observe the level of conversations here are very high IQ, it's like you feel you were starved off high IQ convos and when you finally have it, it feels like ice water in your brain, just what a joy to meet people who actually know their stuff

Obviously this will sound super pretentious, but in the rest of the world you spent 50% of the conversations just informing people on the latest developments in tech and health and then after that you can finally talk about what's actually going on

In SF you skip all that because everybody already knows what you're talking about and you go straight to what it's about, similar to being in big cities in China btw

People talk about biohacking, dissolvable peptides, retatrutide (of course), recursive self-improvement and world models

But to be honest I think you can get that by just being on @X too, you don't have to be in SF for that, but it is nice sometimes to have those conversations not in a X thread but actually in a room with real people IRL!

The complete lack of workable cafes in SF also made me think, like I know why it is, it's the natural tension between the more lefty locals and the techies, and the locals don't necessarily want to serve techies, they want to serve locals and improve local SF culture, which is the ironic tension of SF because all the money comes from tech of course

But that also made me think in seeing the rest of the world try emulate Silicon Valley with their super cheesy incubators and coworking spaces and startup ecosystem bs that never ever has worked out for any country. SF doesn't even have cafes to work yet they have trillion dollar companies created here in the last few years

Like it's obviously not about having a coworking space, or cafes to work from, because SF doesn't really have any good ones, it's all about regulation and how easy you make it to start a business, raise money, hire people and giving those people stock options, and then grow the company and hopefully make it big (0.1% to 1% odds) and then everyone early gets rich too

Another thing I saw which was rather ironic that a lot of the people we met are bootstrapping in SF. I thought if you live in SF it makes most sense to raise money because it's 1) expensive to live here, 2) the whole value is the connections to raise or invest? But they say they're here for getting connections and customers, interesting for sure and you wouldn't see that 10 years ago, so bootstrapping has definitely entered the modern startup founder's mind, which is great to see!