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Comment by sudhirj | Hacker News Reader

I was in SF for the last WWDC, mostly to see and visit these people I keep hearing about. But I couldn’t for the life of me figure out where they were or how to talk to them. I went to WWDC, a couple of meetups, the Computer History Museum, walked through Stanford, ate hummus in Palo Alto, took only public transport or shared Lyft rides. But other than a chance meeting with the CEO of Mode Analytics in one can ride that lasted three minutes, basically zero interaction with the type of people mentioned.

Granted, I am an introvert and don’t strike up conversations as much as I should, but it seems like saying visit SF is useless. Is there a club or some secret society or library or bar that everyone hangs out in? I’ll come back and visit if I have an address to go to. SF is way too broad.

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If you want to do this, then decide who you want to meet, make a list and email them all to ask to buy them coffee. Maybe 5% will say yes, so email some more...

Note the advice about making friends over the internet. Do that and then ask to say hi.

Reply to the person on this thread who suggested places to go and ask to buy them a coffee.

Don’t go to places, go to people.

Yes. The secret is to find a few well-networked people and then get invited to gatherings/parties in the homes of said people. You'd be shocked at both how connected all of the important and wealthy people in SF are and how much business gets conducted at intimate gatherings.

What's nice is it's somewhat less insular than other status-oriented hierarchies in that you can break into these circles by being reasonably good at generating value (particularly as an engineer/technologist) and even vaguely charismatic.

That said, in my opinion the primary focus should always be on figuring out how to create value. These days the upper echelons of the Bay Area are alarmingly saturated with talkers and bloviators, as opposed to doers.

> The secret is to find a few well-networked people and then get invited to gatherings/parties in the homes of said people.

Well, then, I'll get right on that! Sounds simple... I'm surprised I'm not already on Marc Andreessen's dinner list.

You don't need to get on pmarca's radar. The point is that there are tertiary personalities, who are much more accessible, that can bootstrap you to the higher social tiers. If you're serious about it, it just takes concerted effort and the right attitude (i.e. not sarcastic defeatism).

I think just visiting for a couple of days doesn't work. You need to spend considerable time in SF, at least to build a base for your network.

- You can meet people by emailing them and asking for coffee. A cool thing about SV culture is that people are pretty open for that. - The favorite way I like meeting new people is through friends (friends of friends) at non-work related parties - You can meet people at networking events, but I find that there's a self-selection bias (i.e. interesting people usually don't go there, at least in my experience) - You can just meet people randomly at bars, etc. but that takes some time :-)

I've basically done the exact same thing as you (though I was there for a different conference) and pre-organizing meetups online is essential, you just don't run into people, as you noticed. Even if you go to somewhere like Red Rock Coffee it's jam packed with people busy working on their thing, so you'd need to be pretty forward to strike up good conversations.

nl's advice seems to be broadly on the money. Get in touch with people online first, and also spend more time there so you don't have to pack the schedule too hard.

I would scout specific meetups of interest on Meetup.com before you go next time. You can definitely find several good ones in the same week in SF.

Besides that it helps to be around other similar people, but I wouldn't necessarily spend my day in Philz / Ritual / Sightglass / Four Barrel / a co-working space if the trip was for vacation. I came to SF for a pre-accelerator once that brought a similar crowd.

Staying in the HI hostel helps too.

Do the interesting people really come to meetups? Almost all the tech ones seem like glorified networking or recruitment watering holes.

I'd love to hang out with chill tech folks à la Homebrew Computer Club, but I get the feeling that kind of thing doesn't really exist anymore. Everyone is too busy peddling their wares.

I've had good luck at niche meetups like for one particular language or framework.

And then less good specific but decently good networking at interesting side projects meetups.

I think the general purpose tech meetups can be hit/miss. It takes some work to find the best big one in a city. The best one in my city asks that only startup employees attend and not third party recruiters unless they're sponsoring.

It also helps if the meetup is hosted at an incubator or accelerator type space — one signal of quality vs a random place.

Hang out in front of google or attend the local 2600 meeting.

Best way to meet CEOs is to become one yourself.

What’s a 2600 meeting? This? https://www.2600.com/meetings/mtg.html

I’ll keep trying to search, but could someone post a note on what’s it’s about?

That's correct. 2600 is a hacker quarterly. The 'zine has all sorts of interesting writeups, including hacker politics, 0-day discussions, free software talks, notes from people (including fuckyous as well). And the back is a picture of payphones from around the world.

And the name is a throwback to the 2600Hz tone that was used to gain operator rights on pre-digital trunking phone lines.

https://www.2600.london/

Sorry, but this is real bad advice. Stalking people in front of Google is not going to work.

Sorry, but that's just not true. Silicon Valley is filled with stories of successful stalkings.

For example, in 2007, I loitered outside Facebook HQ on university ave until I had a chance encounter with someone who also attended my alma mater (!) and was starting his first day of work, so he took me inside with him[1]. I tried to meet with Zuck but they sicced Dave Morin on me. I ended up getting incredible access to the FB engineering team and my app was ultimately acquired, and I partially attribute that to unfair advantage.

[1] I think he's now successfully retired.

I think you need to pick your targets. 2007 FB isn’t the same as 2018 Google.

Also it seems like you might be good at talking to people (based on the story above). The OP says they are an introvert and might find that more difficult.

It's terrible that friendship these days is based on superficial/selfish character features like confidence instead of more socially beneficial features like altruism.

If evolution keeps going in this direction then there will be a point where capitalism won't be able to support it anymore. Capitalism was designed for a certain kind of species and we are no longer it.

First, as the other commenter said, FB had something between 150 and 450 employees in 2007 (depending on when in 2007 you did that). You can still do that with "smaller" startups today, of course. But you can also just email the CEO of a 150 person startup and they'll reply if you're not full of shit.

Second, just because it worked for you doesn't mean it works in general. I'm sure if 1,000 people did it, a couple of them would be successful. But that's definitely not the best way to get peoples attention. Some YC partner says in one of their Investor Startup School lecture that they hate it when people stalk investors at their favorite coffee shop or whatever and that it leads to an adverse effect.

TIL— 2600 is blocked by my workplace.

I wouldn’t be where I am today without 2600. Hacking (real hacking, not pg’s definition) is what lead me to learn to code when I was a teenager back in the 90s. Many of the folks I met via 2600 may not be CEOs but are extremely successful. Sage advice.

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