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🌱 Transplant from Missouri

Getting Around & Into the Scene

Two kinds of getting around matter here. The first is physical — how you move across fifty miles of bay without a car payment. The second is social — how you get into the rooms where the actual magic happens. Missouri taught you neither, because Missouri needed neither. Here is both.

Buses, trains, and the thing under the bay

Caltrain is the spine, but it is not the whole nervous system. Muni runs the buses and metro inside San Francisco. BART is the train that runs under the bay — you can be in the East Bay and in downtown San Francisco in about twenty minutes, which is why the East Bay is such a cheat code. AC Transit covers the East Bay buses, VTA the South Bay, SamTrans the Peninsula, and Golden Gate Transit plus the ferries handle the North Bay. Every one of them takes the same Clipper card, one tap, no thinking. R-011 Plan any trip across any of them at 511.org. Coming from a place where the only way anywhere was a car and a full tank, this is a small daily miracle you will start to take for granted embarrassingly fast.

The bikes and scooters have apps

The little electric scooters and bikes stacked on the sidewalks are not decoration — they are a transit system you unlock with your phone. Bay Wheels (the Lyft bike-share, red bikes everywhere in SF and the East Bay), Lime, and Spin all work the same way: download the app, scan the QR code on the handlebars, ride, park it at your destination, walk away. For the last mile from the train to the office, or for just seeing the city on a clear afternoon, they are the cheapest fun you can have moving.

Uber, Lyft, and the cars with nobody in them

Uber and Lyft work here exactly like they work everywhere, and they are your friend late at night. But San Francisco has one more thing that will genuinely bend your mind the first time: Waymo — fully driverless robotaxis, available to the public with no waitlist, that pull up with nobody in the front seat and drive you across the city while the steering wheel turns itself. R-096 You will take your first one and text everyone you have ever met. It is the single most "you are living in the future now" thing you can do for the price of a normal cab ride. Deer camp does not have this.

A word about the 101

U.S. 101 is the freeway that stitches San Francisco to Silicon Valley, and at rush hour it is a parking lot with a view. This is the practical case for everything above: living near the train and letting Caltrain do the driving is not just cheaper, it is saner. Nobody's best years should be spent sitting on the 101 at 5:45 p.m. Let the machine drive so you can read, or sleep, or build something on your laptop while it does.

The events are the real front door

Here is the thing nobody back home can teach you, because back home the events are the county fair and the church potluck and they are wonderful and they are not this. In the Bay, the way you get in — into jobs, into friendships, into the actual work — is by showing up to events.

They live in a few places. Luma (lu.ma) is where the tech and startup and AI events increasingly live — browse it for your city and you will find something every single night. Eventbrite and Meetup cover everything else — meetups for every language, every framework, every obsession you were the only person in your high school to have.

Here is the part that will break your brain if you grew up gatekept: most of these events are absurdly, almost comically open. Sold out? Say you are on the waitlist and walk in — that is not a hack, it is just how it works. I know because I did exactly that at the Antler VC office: told them I was on the waitlist, walked in, and minutes later had a microphone in my hand and twenty nerds drifting over while somebody wheeled out a sixty-inch TV so I could put my idea up on the screen and walk them through it. Last minute. No introduction. Nobody asked my permission or my last name.

I had tried the same kind of thing in Missouri — show up somewhere last-minute, buzzing about something I wanted to build — and gotten gatekept. Turned away, told it was not the time, made to feel like a nuisance, in my own hometown, on ground my family has had roots in for generations. Same me, same idea, same fire. One place handed me a microphone. The other showed me the door.

And it is not that people out here are simply nicer. It is that the entire economy runs on last-minute, hair-brained ideas from a manic founder and a few people who believe them before there is any reason to. That is not a flaw the Bay tolerates — it is the engine. A wild idea walking in at the wrong moment is not an interruption to the business; out here it is the business. So the door stays open, because the next person through it might be the reason the whole room exists.

Two more things to know once you are inside:

You can bump into the people who built all of this. It is a small world and an unusually open door — the home of the nerds, and you are one of them. Just, before you go — read the short reality check on Things I Wish I Knew about not turning any of these people into gods. They are not. That matters more than it sounds.