I’ve been here for nearly two weeks now - and it’s been really unbelievable how well things work around here!
I’ve bought a car, shoes, groceries, electronics and just about anything else you can imagine online. With my car, I selected the vehicle through Edmunds - received 4 quotes, selected one and the dealer delivered my car to my front door (literally!), without me even meeting him - within 48 hours - complete with insurance. And I bought it on a Sunday!
Shopping online also resulted in the most savings for products that I’ve been purchasing. I’ve been using FatWallet to take advantage of affiliate discounts and coupons, without having to go through the hassle of applying to each merchant program, etc.
I met with a recruiter on Friday to start getting resumes in for the positions that we have to fill in San Fran - and this morning I received 8 resumes for highly technical positions as well - it’s amazing how large the skills pool here is!
We’ve met with about 3 PR agencies here, and all 3 were impressive - some very tough choices ahead in this category. I’ve also had the time to mingle with a couple of valley CEO’s - and the network effect is already starting to happen as I get introductions to new people.
That’s probably the single biggest value that you get out of living and working in San Francisco - the tech circle is humongous and the ability to network with fellow tech startups is probably second to none. I’m also struggling to keep track of all the various activities around here, but it seems that Yelp is very popular!
My apartment is across the road from our offices, and down the road from AT&T park - in South Beach - it’s really a great place to be and I even get to walk to work for like 2 whole minutes :-).
We have a total of 8 people now working out of San Francisco and trying to hire aggressively, so check out the SynthaSite Careers page. We also recently made the following local San Francisco hires:
Chief Financial Officer: Trevor Harries-Jones (Joining us from OpenTV, previously PWC)
Vice President of Marketing: Randy Almond (Joining us from Walmart.com, previously Accenture)
Vice President of Product Development: Sean Crotty (Joining us from Mpire, previously eBay)
And here is a pic of our new offices (yup - looks like a startup office!)
Things are really beginning to move over here - we just got Internet access installed at the office - that was probably the most frustrating thing - AT&T have proved to be utterly useless - it’s taken 3 weeks and we don’t have a T1 line installed yet - and we are using a DSL. Comcast took me one phone call and 48 hours to have it installed - 16mb line - blistering!
One of the nicest services I discovered by OpenDNS - which doesn’t really work well outside the USA or Europe. OpenDNS basically gives the public a very quick DNS lookup server (the server that allows you to find a website on the Internet) - and anyone can use it - it’s very easy to setup. I HIGHLY recommend it for people living in EU & North America.
All in all, living here has been great so far and aside from missing family & friends, I’m loving it!
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Comments On This Post
May 13, 2008 at 11:20 am
Wow, Looks like you are off to a great start. Good luck with your biz.
I came across Synthasite this morning and tried for an hour or so. The features and ease of creation are simply superb. You guys made an awesome job to create Web2.0 sites with few clicks.
June 20, 2008 at 8:40 am
It has been a good experience to be a part of this blog and you guys are doing some good stuff.Post more articles on keyword snipping.
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