March 27, 2026
Why SF is not just a city
It changed how I think, what I attempt, and what I consider normal.
There's a version of my life where I stayed. Kept studying, followed the path that was laid out, stayed close to home. LatAm is a beautiful part of the world — I mean that sincerely. But somewhere along the way I understood that I needed a different kind of friction. A different ceiling. Different people around me.
So I left.
What happened next wasn't dramatic. There was no single moment. It was gradual — more like a slow recalibration than a revelation. The more I exposed myself to new environments, new challenges, new people operating at a different level, the more my sense of what was possible started to shift. I got more comfortable being uncomfortable. I started attempting things I would have talked myself out of before.
San Francisco accelerated all of that.
It's easy to describe SF as a tech hub, an ecosystem, a density of capital and talent. All of that is true — but it misses the point. What makes SF unusual isn't the companies or the money. It's the people, and specifically their relationship to the word "impossible."
They don't use it. Not dismissively, not performatively. It just doesn't register as a real constraint. The default assumption is that hard things are worth trying, that the first attempt not working isn't failure, and that the gap between where you are and where you want to be is mostly a question of time and effort — not permission.
That's not optimism. It's a different operating system.
When you spend enough time around people running that operating system, it starts to overwrite yours. Your reference point shifts. What you're willing to try shifts. The internal voice that used to say "that's not realistic" starts to lose its authority.
Be delusional — in the right direction. Compete with the best people you can find. Put yourself in environments where the stimulus forces you to grow, not environments where you're comfortable but stagnant.
That's what SF gave me. Not a network, not a resume line — a different sense of what's normal.
That's why I think it's irreplaceable.