Escaping the Posers in San Francisco

I'm originally from Seattle and now live in SF. I agree there are a lot of people in SF building silly "toys" and there are investors foolish or desperate enough to give them money. I know it can be annoying but I just try to ignore that noise because it has no real impact on my projects.

I don't think the poser situation is necessarily much better in Seattle. There are definitely a lot of posers as well who are working on a startup because it's a cool thing to do. They go around talking about it without much to show. They just aren't successful in raising millions because there is not an abundance of VC money up there.

You run into posers more often in SF simply because a huge portion of the population is in tech. If there majority are posers, it's likely you'll run into a poser. In Seattle, a small portion of the population is in tech, and usually they'll be someone who works at Microsoft or Amazon. The portion who are in tech startups is super small. Despite SF having this culture of applauding people building silly things on product hunt, there definitely are a lot of people building real things of value and their numbers dwarf those in Seattle simply because again, the population in tech in SF is way larger.

From the article... "You’ve just got a lot of young people raising $1 and $2 million seed rounds for dumb products. How are they going to make money off another photo or text messaging app? It’s like, c’mon guys, let’s challenge ourselves and do something better."

Also, from the article... "Sherbert — a Twitter-like app for four-minute instructional videos"