February 2026
I've been thinking about San Francisco for the better part of my life.
When I was studying at LBS, when I was building from Bangalore, when I was grinding through EF in London — every serious founder I respected kept saying the same thing: "If you're going to go all-in, you have to be in SF."
It was one of those things I filed away as aspirational. Someday. Maybe.
Then someday became late January 2026. I flew from London to SFO, moved into a flat in the Mission with my cofounder, and started our first week at EF's SF Launch program.
I've now been here about three weeks. Here's what I've seen so far.
I've built from a lot of cities. Each one has something. Bangalore has raw intensity — every coffee shop is a pitch meeting, people grinding in coworking spaces until 10pm. Berlin has serious technical talent, but most people leave the office by six. London has world-class ambition, but the cost structure eats startups alive.
SF is different. The density of people who are genuinely trying to build something massive is unmatched.
Within my first week, I had more high-quality conversations than I'd had in two months in Berlin. Everyone here is building, fundraising, or hiring. There's no small talk. You walk into a coffee shop and the person next to you is raising a seed round for something that could change an industry.
It's not that other cities lack talent. It's that SF concentrates ambition in a way that compounds. Your peer group recalibrates overnight.
The EF SF Launch program started immediately. Firesides with top VCs, sessions with founders who'd built at our stage, fundraising prep.
In the first week alone, we had a fireside at Sequoia with one of their partners, a session with a founder who happened to be one of our own clients (surreal to see him present from the founder side after managing his campaigns), and a talk from the founder of Shazam.
This kind of access simply doesn't exist elsewhere. In London, you'd spend months trying to get a warm intro to one of these people. In SF, they're in the room with you on a Tuesday afternoon.
I don't want to romanticise it — not every event is gold. But the hit rate is significantly higher than anywhere else I've been.
Everything moves faster here. Meetings happen same day. Investors want coffee, not Zoom. Decisions get made in hours, not weeks.
We're in the office practically 24/7. I signed up for a gym near our office and searched for martial arts gyms in the area — barely had time to go. I saw Alcatraz from the waterfront and someone told me you can swim there. One hour, two kilometres plus current. I was fascinated. I wanted to try kite surfing in the bay.
But the reality: there's no time yet. And honestly, that's fine. That's what this phase is for.
The company is at a stage where speed is everything. We're closing clients, building internal tooling, scaling creator operations across ten-plus countries, and actively fundraising — all simultaneously. SF doesn't just tolerate that intensity. It expects it.
Nothing about the move was smooth.
We arrived right around Super Bowl weekend. Hotels were completely booked out, prices were insane. A friend from LBS wanted to visit and I had to tell him: forget hotels, you're sleeping on our couch. He needed an invitation letter for the border and joked it was harder to get into the US than China.
The flat search, the eSIM setup, the immigration prep — none of it was glamorous. You prepare documents, rehearse what to say at the border, and hope you don't get pulled aside for secondary screening.
But that's the thing about SF. Nobody here had a clean arrival story. Everyone scrambled. Everyone figured it out. The city selects for people who just deal with it and keep moving.
We moved to SF at around $500K ARR, with an 80% close rate, a hundred-plus active creators, and operations running across ten-plus countries.
But externally impressive numbers don't tell you what's actually happening inside the company.
The week I wrote this, I spent half a day untangling our internal databases. We had three different tracking systems per client, overlapping creator records across campaigns, and spreadsheets that contradicted each other. I sent very long messages to the team telling everyone to consolidate into one system immediately.
That's the real startup experience. You're pitching half-a-million ARR to investors in the morning and fixing broken spreadsheets at midnight. Both are equally important. Neither is optional.
We're also deep in building internal tooling — the systems that turn creator operations from a service into a platform. My cofounder and I had an honest debate about the right approach: I wanted to ship features fast in a lightweight tool, he wanted to build robust infrastructure. We landed on both — rapid prototyping for testing, then promoting validated features into the production platform.
It's messy. It's supposed to be.
Before leaving for SF, I went to a startup meetup in Ljubljana. The people were smart. Genuinely talented. But the conversations were bounded by local reference points — local revenue targets, local competition, local definitions of success. Not because they lacked potential, but because they hadn't had the exposure to think bigger.
That's the part that hit me hardest. Slovenia has incredible people. What it lacks is proximity to the kind of ambition that recalibrates what you think is possible. When your reference point is a local market, you optimise for local outcomes. When your reference point is global, everything shifts.
That's something I want to actively change. Paving a path from a small country to places like SF matters — not because Slovenia isn't enough, but because the people there deserve to see what's possible when the ceiling is removed. If even one person back home sees this trajectory and thinks "maybe I can do that too" — that's worth it.
Every city taught me something. Ljubljana taught me to start. London taught me what world-class ambition looks like. Bangalore taught me that intensity isn't a Western monopoly. Berlin taught me that talent alone isn't enough without urgency.
SF is teaching me that when you concentrate ambition, speed, and capital in one place, the compounding effect is unlike anything else.
We're fundraising for a seed round. We're scaling creator ops. We're building the internal platform that turns this from a service business into infrastructure.
Demo day is in a few months. By then, the goal is to have significantly more customers, no single client representing more than 20% of revenue, and clear proof that our model scales.
I don't know exactly how it'll play out. But I know this: I've been thinking about being here for years, and now that I'm here, it's everything I expected and nothing like I imagined.
It's harder. It's faster. It's more chaotic. And it's exactly where I need to be.