Utkarsh's Notes

To lock in or LARP, that is the question

San Francisco is an interesting city in the way that way that how people talk about it is half true.

Sam Altman telling you to lock tf in in a tweet

What I read after feeling guilty and going to 3 VC-funded company launch parties in a row

If you go on Luma and Partiful, you will see tens of tech events, mixers, and parties going on throughout the week. These events don't restrict themselves to after-work hours either. They're held 9am-9pm, which makes me wonder exactly who the intended demographic is for these sorts of events.

In a way, it is true that SF is in a tech bubble because nowhere else will you be inundated with the next-gen AI code-review agent, or AI BDR( Business Development Representative, yeah, I had to look that one up too).

Soon enough, you may realize that the people going to these events aren't quite the anthropic or Nvidia employees you were hoping to meet and convince them to quit to join your pre-seed B2B startup on building prediction markets for KPI'S. No, those guys are in their own in-group that may or may not be a polycule. How to join those groups, you may ask? Well, I can only speculate as someone who's not an MTS @ frontier lab, but from what I've seen:

You can even see if I'm right by signing up for some of these parties, where you'll notice many ask for your Twitter handle. If you have enough clout, you'll be let in. If not, better luck next time!

Now I could go into some of my experiences of being invited to some of these in-group parties, but that's not why I wanted to write this essay. Rather, I wanted to think about how much time you should engage in playing these social games versus locking in.

A lot of times, there are events where the people you meet are, in fact, really interesting, curious, thoughtful people who will introduce you to ideas and things you didn't think about before. These are probably worth it, and it's a great way to meet people working on cool things who are, more often than not, happy to connect you with others and opportunities.

Then there are the striver parties, where I'm not sure what goes on because I haven't tried to go to many, and for the ones I did apply to, I didn't quite fit the criteria lol, so I can't really comment there, but from what I've seen, it's mostly just filtering on status.

Lastly, there are the open-to-all events. It's hard to meet anyone interesting because the signal-to-noise ratio is quite low. If you're new to the city and don't have anything to do, it's better than nothing; otherwise, I wouldn't really recommend it.

But yeah, I think at least sometimes I feel the urge to go to more of these things for fear of missing out. Twitter kinda sucks for this because it feels like everyone is grinding/raising/partying and you feel a desire to be doing the same, but there probably isn't a great correlation between tweets and startup founders, so make of that what you will.

"So then why tf would you move to SF if you're not going to all of these events"

To meet people at the interesting events that aren't being advertised anywhere! I do believe that if you stay curious and thoughtful, and keep sharing your work out in the open, people notice and invite you to things. You are probably more likely to get along better with these people, and it's much more relaxing than trying to climb the striver ladder.