SF is so back

Currently writing this 35k feet in the air on my way back from SF to NYC (with shitty WiFi, when we getting Starlink, United??).

Part exhausted, part overwhelmed from a busy week.

But mainly, I'm just so appreciative of being able to co-write GTMBA (~1,500 strong) and the community Julian and I are creating.

And one thing is apparent from spending a week in the Bay Area:

There is no better place to be building something AI-native than SF right now.

I always said that I would have FOMO if I left NYC to go somewhere else. I always thought it was the center of everything (and yes, a big part of that is me being a native New Yorker).

And yes, some awesome AI-first startups are being built in NYC (Basis, Clay, Profound, Hebbia, Outtake, to name a bunch, some of which are past VibeScaling clients).

But for the first time, I feel a deep sense of FOMO for not witnessing this first-hand day-to-day as a resident of SF.

Jason Lemkin puts it well in his long post, which he wrote in the fall:

This past week, we hosted our first inaugural event for GTMBA. It went as well as we could have hoped.

Something Julian and I have been wanting to do since we first started the blog earlier this year. Wanting to get the smartest people in GTM and AI in one room to curate a network we wanted to have but didn't.

We had ~100 of the best GTM operators come from top AI companies, including Decagon, Windsurf, Harvey, OpenAI, Anthropic, Cognition, LangChain, and others.

It was great to have internet-friends-turned-real-friends (shoutout to guys like Blaise & Nick) show up, and hearing stories of others who are working deals left and right, flooded with inbound (or at least executives who want to talk to them) & looking at $500k-$1M W2s this year.

And others who are so energized by their work, as well as a sense of building in the early innings of the biggest technology shift since the iPhone and mobile.

It's this energy that I have come to love about the Bay Area that flat out doesn't exist to this extent (yet) in NYC. It's growing to exist in NYC, we're getting there, but it's not there yet.

NYC is about lineage, pedigree, dogma, and old-school thinking at times.

“My grandfather was in banking, my dad was in banking, so I just did banking. I kind of hate it but what else is there to do.”

"That's just how we do things."

There's a lot of good in the Northeast tradition, but old-school thinking about ways of working is just so archaic.

Compare this to SF. Innovation. Silicon Valley. Heart of AI. Build and break shit. Let's think of a new way to do it.

Complete opposite - and part of why I started GTMBA is to bring this West Coast thinking to my life in the Northeast.

This quote from Colin Cowherd sums it best:

For a while, I was getting pretty bored/stale with SaaS.

This whole new AI wave has me so rejuvenated. To build GTMBA & VibeScaling.

It’s all I can consume.

And I have the Bay Area to thank for that.

🫡 Cheers,

Chris