San Francisco

I think one of the strangest effects of the internet is that certain places stop feeling physical long before you ever visit them yourself. Over time they slowly transform into abstractions constructed from timelines, podcasts, startup clips, conference videos, product launches, founder mythology, and screenshots of people announcing funding rounds online. You consume these places so many times digitally that they stop existing as normal cities in your head and instead become symbolic representations of something larger. San Francisco felt exactly like that to me for years.

The Internet City

Before visiting, SF mostly existed in my mind as a compressed symbol for several things at once:

• Ambition
• AI and startups
• Autonomy and builders
• The future itself

It was the city where people moved impossibly fast, where founders raised millions at twenty-two, where engineers worked on frontier models changing the structure of the world, where startups became trillion dollar companies, and where the internet itself increasingly seemed to originate from. At some point I realized I no longer thought about San Francisco geographically at all. I thought about it psychologically.

One of the main reasons I wanted to come to the US in the first place was because I wanted to build a startup seriously, and some part of me needed to physically verify whether the world I had spent years consuming online was actually real. I think when you spend enough time on the internet, especially inside startup and AI circles, your brain quietly begins categorizing these people as fundamentally different from you. Founders, researchers, cracked engineers, and people building massive companies start feeling almost fictional because your entire exposure to them happens through highly compressed internet moments where you only see outputs instead of process. You see launches, valuations, tweets, demos, and success stories, but you never really see the ordinary physical reality surrounding them.

That illusion started collapsing almost immediately once I arrived.

The Real City

The first thing that genuinely surprised me was how physically close everything felt. Anthropic was basically a minute away from me at one point. Companies I had seen online for years suddenly became normal buildings sitting on ordinary streets next to cafés, apartments, random intersections, and people walking dogs. Startup logos that previously only existed on my Twitter feed were now physically surrounding me on billboards everywhere:

• Vercel
• PostHog
• AI companies
• Infrastructure startups
• Developer tools

All constantly visible throughout the city in a way that made the internet suddenly feel material instead of digital.

The psychological effect of that proximity is hard to explain properly because ambition changes once the thing you want stops feeling abstract. The future feels fundamentally different when you realize it is being built by actual humans inside ordinary rooms rather than by some unreachable class of mythical geniuses your brain invents online.

The Divide

At the same time, San Francisco also forced me to confront something much darker than the internet version of the city ever really communicates honestly. The strongest realization of the trip happened at night downtown when I realized I would probably never live there, at least not in those areas. The divide inside the city is genuinely shocking in person because the contrast feels almost too extreme to process coherently at first. Half the city feels like the technological frontier of human civilization while the other half feels deeply broken in ways that are difficult to emotionally reconcile with the first half.

You walk outside and see AI startup billboards everywhere while simultaneously walking past people completely destroyed by fentanyl only a few blocks away. There are founders trying to build AGI near people who barely look conscious anymore. Autonomous vehicles silently move through streets filled with human decay. The entire city creates this strange emotional dissonance where the future simultaneously feels inspiring, dystopian, ambitious, and deeply unstable all at once.

The Autonomous City

The Waymos intensified that feeling more than I expected. I knew they existed before going there obviously, but physically seeing them everywhere changed the emotional experience entirely. Probably 80% of the cars downtown were Waymos, and after a while your brain starts adapting to the idea that empty cars driving themselves through cities is simply normal now. The emotional arc goes through distinct phases:

• At first it feels magical
• Then uncanny
• Then slightly horrifying
• Then weirdly mundane

I increasingly realized that the future rarely arrives in dramatic cinematic moments. Most of the time it arrives quietly through background systems replacing small pieces of reality one by one until the old world disappears gradually enough that people stop noticing the transition while it happens.

That realization connected very strongly to the thing I built during Google I/O.

Building at Google I/O

The atmosphere at Google I/O was honestly intimidating at first because almost everyone there seemed unbelievably smart. A lot of the engineers I talked to had:

• PhDs
• Years of experience
• Millions raised
• Deep technical backgrounds
• Incredibly impressive projects

The entire environment felt intensely nerdy in a way I actually loved because everyone there genuinely cared about building things at a very deep level. People were obsessed with their craft in a way that becomes increasingly rare outside highly concentrated technical environments.

But after spending more time there, something interesting started happening psychologically. I realized most of these people were not actually operating on some incomprehensible intellectual level beyond everyone else. The real difference was usually consistency, obsession, and time spent building rather than raw unattainable genius. Honestly, after seeing many of the projects there, I realized my app was better than probably 90% of them, which surprised me because the internet creates this illusion that everyone operating in SF is automatically extraordinary beyond comprehension.

The app I built was called Talon, and the core idea behind it was creating an actual contextual memory layer for companies combined with something I have wanted to exist for a very long time: a truly autonomous agent system. Not a simple automation, not a trigger-response workflow, but something capable of continuously operating on its own, maintaining context, reasoning over long periods of time, updating memory, executing tasks, and functioning without constantly waiting for human prompts.

async function executeRunbook(
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  loopId: string,
  runbookId: string,
  args: Record<string, string>,
) {
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Building that project inside San Francisco felt strangely symbolic because the city itself already feels partially autonomous. Waymos everywhere, AI labs everywhere, startups building agents everywhere, infrastructure systems quietly replacing human operational layers one by one. The city almost feels like a giant evolving prototype for what highly automated societies might eventually become.

The Culture of Ambition

One thing I noticed very quickly is that San Francisco has an unusual relationship with ambition because people constantly reinforce each other’s belief that they are building something important even when the ideas themselves are questionable. Part of it definitely feels fake in the stereotypical “Tech Twitter” way people online joke about constantly, but another part of it genuinely creates momentum because being surrounded by highly ambitious people quietly changes your own standards without you fully realizing it. Most cities optimize psychologically for stability and predictability. San Francisco optimizes for momentum.

Seeing Apple Park affected me emotionally in a completely different way. I wanted to see it since I was seven years old, and standing there forced me to confront a realization that stayed with me for the rest of the trip: I could actually build something large enough to physically exist in the world one day too. Not literally another Apple obviously, but something meaningful enough, ambitious enough, and real enough that it leaves evidence behind physically instead of existing only digitally. I think that was one of the first moments where the entire founder path I want for my life stopped feeling theoretical and started feeling inevitable in some deeper psychological sense.

Stanford, Alcatraz, and the Digital Uncanny

Stanford probably affected me the most emotionally out of anywhere I visited because it did not feel unfamiliar at all. It felt strangely recognizable, almost like my brain had already constructed a version of myself existing there long before physically arriving. The emotion was not envy exactly. It was obsession mixed with belonging. Some environments immediately communicate to you that you are outside them, while others create this strange internal certainty that you are supposed to return eventually. Stanford felt exactly like that to me.

One of the weirdest moments of the entire trip happened at Alcatraz because my brain kept recognizing parts of it from Call of Duty Mobile. Years ago I used to play the Alcatraz map constantly as an esports player, and somehow I still remembered huge parts of the layout almost perfectly. Walking through the prison while unconsciously recognizing rooms from a mobile game created this bizarre feeling where nostalgia itself became partially digital. It made me realize how much modern life now happens virtually before it ever becomes physical. People can literally become nostalgic for places they technically have never visited in reality before.

Another thing that surprised me was how Mediterranean parts of San Francisco felt. Certain areas genuinely reminded me of Istanbul because of the hills, weather, density, wind, and atmosphere. The internet version of SF always felt cold and hyper-technological to me, but physically the city has warmth and texture that disappears online. The weather especially felt almost perfect to me in a way that constantly made the city feel cinematic without trying too hard.

The Contradiction

I think the biggest thing San Francisco changed for me was making the future feel materially achievable instead of intellectually interesting. The internet compresses everything into content. Founders become tweets. AI companies become logos. Researchers become podcasts. Startups become launch announcements. Then you physically enter the environment where those things are actually being built and realize the future is ultimately constructed by groups of obsessed people sitting inside buildings arguing about products, writing code, drinking coffee, and staying consistent long enough for compounding to become visible.

At the same time, San Francisco also made me realize that the future itself will probably be much stranger, more uneven, and more dystopian than the internet version people romanticize constantly. The city feels simultaneously inspiring and broken in ways that almost perfectly mirror the broader trajectory of technology itself right now. AI will likely unlock extraordinary things while also creating entirely new forms of instability, inequality, automation, and psychological fragmentation that we do not fully understand yet.

San Francisco feels like living inside that contradiction physically.

I left the city realizing two things at the same time:

• I probably would not live downtown because parts of it genuinely felt dangerous and psychologically exhausting in a way I did not expect beforehand.
• I know with complete certainty that I want to come back because once you physically touch the future, it becomes very difficult to convince yourself afterward that you are not supposed to help build it too.