A fortnight lost in America

I’ve had the lyrics of “Fortnight” in my head for months, it felt good finally dumping it in a blog post. 😆

Even though it’s only been a week since I got back from San Francisco, I’m already looking for opportunities to return. This may be funny, especially after I was rather vocal about not being fond of the city in the past. I was pretty set on making sure I made the most of my time for my second take on San Francisco, as my first rodeo wasn’t fun at all.

My reason for travel was for a GTM (go-to-market) offsite, which I was looking forward to since I first heard about it when I first started at Vercel 3~ months ago. While I’m a big advocate for async, remote teams, I deeply value in-person interactions, especially when there’s a clear focus on building strong relationships. After all, the best teams are ones that can collaborate well and trust each other. Offsites are perfect for this.

Seeing as I was travelling from the other side of the world, I decided to extend my stay on either side of the offsite to make the most of being in the tech capital.

Here are some of the standout moments from my time in San Francisco!

---

Visiting the Vercel Office

I first discovered Vercel circa 2016-18 when I was busy taking part in and organising student hackathons with MLH. I’d been a fan of Next.js, exclusively using it for side projects as well as deploying on Vercel. I’d been following the developer relations team since 2020 and even received community swag from the team in 2021. About a year ago, I gave a virtual talk at Next.js Conf 2023, three months ago started the new gig and visited the San Francisco HQ two weeks ago.

What a wild ride! You could say that me joining Vercel was bound to happen at some point 🤪

The vibes in the office were so energetic and inspiring, and was exactly the “welcome to Vercel” that I’m glad that I experienced in the first three months of onboarding to the company.

As I said, I’ll always be bullish on fully distributed async remote teams, but I got a glimpse of what life would be like working at the office in San Francisco and… I loved it. 😻

The GTM offsite in Sonoma

Meeting around 200~ Vercelians was quite the experience because I’ve never met such a group where literally every single person was so locked in.

During the offsite, I had the chance to share the community team’s vision with the wider success org. Although I’ve spent the last 7 years doing public talks, it was still scary to go up to colleagues I just met for the first time. As usual though, I was so pumped I could’ve done it again. 😆

Finishing off the offsite trying out different wine at wineries in Wine Country (had better in Italy though) and exploring what it was like outside of the city was a lot of fun!

Meeting tech folks

In the most San Francisco style possible, I accidentally ran into a couple of tech friends on my first night.

Elvis and I met during the conference I organised last year in San Francisco, and we randomly bumped into each other during a random dinner outside. He brought YK with him, a mutual Twitter friend I’d known for a couple years online.

Next thing we knew, we had a group of incredible talent just hanging out over dinner, completely randomly.

Aside from the ad-hoc encounters, I also managed to catch up with folks like Rhiannon, Shannon, Dani, David and Julia during my stay. All of who I deeply look up to for inspiration in my work and beyond.

It was also cool just hanging out at cafés, and listening into conversations about tech (mostly AI, because of course.) For once, it felt like I wasn’t the one in my friendship groups bringing up conversations about the latest thing happening in the tech world. Because it was happening around me. My real world quite literally turned into my curated tech Twitter feed, with less random arguments. 🤭

Connecting online first, then building on top of those touchpoints and creating concrete long-lasting relationships moving forward. Super powerful stuff and all the more reason I care so much about in-person community meet-ups.

Exploring Silicon Valley

The weekend before the end of my trip, I was keen to squeeze in a quick trip to Silicon Valley.

During my time here, I visited the Computer History Museum (CHM), GooglePlex, Apple Park Visitor Centre, Steve Jobs’ garage and drove around pointing out tech logos I could see. Yes, I was extremely annoying.

At CHM, I spent a hours nerding out.

My favourite section of the museum was definitely the growth of the internet, there were some cool nostalgic screenshots of the old internet. Do they call that Web 2? Or was it Web 1? What Web are we in again? 🤪

I also walked around the GooglePlex. I’ve never been a huge fan of Google consumer products, but I appreciated the effort they put into creating a very fun visitor centre where they brought the whole brand to life. I even picked up some swag to give to my Google-obsessed friends!

I think the biggest highlight was visiting Cuppertino to see Apple Park.

I didn’t realise until the day before that they didn’t allow visitors to the park itself. Even though the visitor centre was just a café and Apple store—and this year’s Apple Event didn’t blow me away—it was still amazing to know this is where they create their magic.

Naturally, I couldn’t leave without grabbing some overpriced swag.

I’ll be rocking a top that reads “Macintosh” in all my calls from now on, hoping someone says “cool shirt” so I can link them to this blog post about where I got it from. 🤣

Silicon Valley itself wasn’t extraordinary—just a suburb with expensive homes, big tech offices, and a few visitor centers for tourists like me who care too much. Regardless, it was still cool and yes, I really did feel like I had been dropped into an episode of HBO’s Silicon Valley.

---

Unfortunately, I loved San Francisco

It’s unfortunate in the best possible way: once I start falling for a place, I can’t help but find reasons to return, sometimes bending the universe to make it happen.

There’s just something about the energy in San Francisco that pulls you in and this time, it really pulled me in. Next thing you know, I’d be packing my bags yet again onto a new exciting adventure. Historically, my relentless personality usually takes me there.

Although I don’t think that will happen immediately, on the flight back home, I pulled up my “places to live” list and moved San Francisco right to the top.

It suddenly wasn’t just another city I’d visited, it was another potential home.

See you again soon, SF! 🫶