South of Market, San Francisco

pages: 518 words: 170,126

City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco by Chester W. Hartman, Sarah Carnochan

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bay Area Rapid Transit, benefit corporation, big-box store, business climate, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, John Markoff, Loma Prieta earthquake, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Peoples Temple, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, young professional

Jean Fuller Anderson, “New Wave of Entrepreneurs Is Rejuvenating South of Market Showplace Square Area,” San Francisco Business, 26 July 1982; Jack Miller, “New Owners Plan for Big Showplace,” San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, 22 May 1983. 13. See Gayle S. Rubin, “The Miracle Mile: South of Market and Gay Male Leather,” in Reclaiming San Francisco, ed. James Brook, Chris Carlsson, and Nancy J. Peters (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998), 247 – 72. 14. See John McCloud, “Builders Bet on San Francisco High-Rises,” New York Times, 29 August 1999. chapter 11 . city hall 1. Eugene C. Lee and Jonathan S. Rothman, “San Francisco’s District System Alters Electoral Politics,” National Civic Review 67 (April 1978): 173–78. 2.

…

., 43 Simon, Paul, 315n Sister Boom Boom, 247 “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” 247 Sixth Street, 78, 86, 219, 220, 221 Sixth Street Merchants and Residents Association, 223 60 Minutes, 247 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 45, 156, 160, 163, 302 Skid Row, 34, 39, 54, 60–62, 68, 70, 82, 116, 220, 412n24 Sklar, Richard, 144, 252, 281, 283, 314 SKS Investments, 269, 331 Smith, Arlo, 303 Smith, Charles, 418n27 Social Science Research, Bureau of, 78 Social Services, Department of, 67, 138 Social Services Building, 146 “soft money,” 270n, 273, 315n Solnit, Rebecca, 397 Solomon, Emmett, 405n35 Solvin, Francis, 25 Sony Corporation, 214 Sorro, Rick, 139 Southern Paciﬁc (SP), 5, 6, 61, 182–87, 230, 231, 245, 262, 291, 295, 302, 316, 394, 395, 405n35 South of Market, 8, 11–14, 17, 19, 32, 34, 37, 38, 44, 46, 48, 54–76, 91, 95, 96, 115, 122, 125, 136, 138, 141, 155, 165, 173, 178, 182, 184, 220, 223, 225–26, 272, 297, 298, 301, 302, 305–7, 326, 334, 345, 365, 370, 391, 397, 412n24 South of Market Advisory Committee, 52 South of Market Business Association, 223 South of Market Health Center, 217 South of Market Problem Solving Council, 223 South Park, 58, 72 Spectacor Management Group, 174 sports arena, 12, 14, 31, 32, 45, 50, 51, 52, 108, 110, 118, 129–33, 171–78, 396 SPUR. See San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal (Research) Association Stadium, Inc., 171, 172 Index / 485 stadium, downtown, 171 –78, 183, 226, 256, 336 Standard Oil of California, 44, 230, 245, 301, 405n35.

…

Burton H. Wolfe, “Must San Francisco Choke Itself to Death?” San Francisco Bay Guardian, 18 June 1968. 31. San Francisco Examiner, 28 November 1962, quoting a committee report of the Board of Supervisors. The story continues, “The South of Market Advisory Committee thus outlined yesterday one of the biggest problems it faces in trying to restore economic life South of Market.” 32. Frederick M. Wirt, Power in the City: Decision Making in San Francisco (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 190. 33. “Financiers Set on Redevelopment,” San Francisco Examiner, 18 January 1957. 34.

pages: 255 words: 90,456

Frommer's Irreverent Guide to San Francisco by Matthew Richard Poole

Bay Area Rapid Transit, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Day of the Dead, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, game design, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Loma Prieta earthquake, Maui Hawaii, old-boy network, pez dispenser, San Francisco homelessness, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Torches of Freedom, upwardly mobile

A neighborhood map will show clearly, for example, that Haight-Ashbury is right next to Golden Gate Park, which stretches from the middle of the city all the way to the Pacific Ocean (at Ocean Beach, near the Cliff House). You’ll see that the Castro and the Mission District—right next to each other, and not too far east of Haight-Ashbury—are both south of Market Street, but the neighborhood officially known as South of Market is quite a distance farther east, in the downtown area. You’ll also see that San Francisco—a city and county unto itself—is at the northern tip of a peninsula flanked by the San Francisco Bay on the east and the Pacific Ocean on the west. The Financial District sits on the eastern shore of the city, which curves northward as the Embarcadero passes North Beach and Fisherman’s Wharf, eventually turning almost due west to the Golden Gate, where the Pacific Ocean meets the bay.

…

Other cafes I mention are in three areas where you’d expect to find the city’s cafe culture well represented: Hayes Valley, a small, sunny neighborhood perfect for strolling because it comprises only a few blocks along Hayes Street (between Franklin and Buchanan sts.) with an occasional side-street detour; South of Market (SoMa), an industrial neighborhood where artists, architects, multimedia gurus, filmmakers, and musicians live and work in warehouse lofts (below Market St., between Second and Tenth sts.); and the Castro district, San Francisco’s famous gay mecca (mostly south of Market to about 20th St., between Castro and Sanchez sts.). Finally, there are the refuges—cafes that provide escapes from neighborhoods that are often overrun by tourists or other consumption-crazed breeds.

…

If sunsets aren’t your thing, and you’d sooner toss back a pint at a rowdy tavern full of live music and boisterous baby boomers, try the No Name Bar, but don’t drink too many happy-hour specials unless you intend to spend the night—the last ferry departs for San Francisco just after 7pm. 106 DIVERSIONS Museum meccas outside Golden Gate Park... From a half block away, the huge circular skylight atop Swiss architect Mario Botta’s San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (South of Market) looks like some sort of signaling device for extraterrestrial art collectors. Inside, earthlings have been known to be dazzled by the West Coast’s most extensive collection of 20th-century art, which fills 50,000 square feet of gallery space.

Hollow City by Rebecca Solnit, Susan Schwartzenberg

blue-collar work, Brownian motion, dematerialisation, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Loma Prieta earthquake, low skilled workers, new economy, New Urbanism, Peoples Temple, pets.com, rent control, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, wage slave

Bohemian Territories bohemia caught on The idea of Ada Clare, the via New "Queen of Bohemia," arrived in San Francisco Civil War, from Paris magazine The Golden Era}^ In 1872, San Francisco's Bohe- mian Club was founded by in end of the York and stayed to become a local luminary and a contributor to the literary included quickly. Before the artists and writers. Mark Twain, those years: and journalists for the rest of the century San Francisco had a Ambrose Bret Flarte, lot of resident writers Bierce, Joaquin Miller, Gertrude Atherton, Frank Norris, Ina Coolbrith, Jack London (born south of Market Street), and, peripherally, John Muir.

…

meatpacking in the is facilities The moment of toward a more peripheralized working This is "The dominated by middle-class residential areas, a concentration of professional, administrative, agerial cities. class, the context behind multimedia replacing South of Market, Fly arriving as the Coltrane church SAN FRANCISCO, CAPITAL OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY departs in my own Western Addition neighborhood, and 21 valet parking suddenly appearing where lowriders once cruised Mission Street. As for the effects of this gentrification, what is happening in San Francisco pening everywhere, which precisely the term is gentrification traditionally describes the borhood rather than term altogether a whole hap- problem (and because the transformation of a neigh- city or region, may be an it What for this awful upgrading).

…

to discredit the residents of the claiming that no decent people would the city to take . . . Photograph by ' Connii " ^ u Connie Hatch: live South of Market neighborhood —therefore it was okay for "... And even without around 5,000 people here. It's happening the only people the fire, who were all people are being forced out because of changes being displaced. over San Francisco and who can afford to live here, single white people, which is It's It's the area. Figures crop up going to be too expensive for the working-class people to in this in taking San Francisco away in the coming years, will be professional the identity of our city."

pages: 188 words: 57,229

Frommer's Memorable Walks in San Francisco by Erika Lenkert

Albert Einstein, Bay Area Rapid Transit, car-free, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Day of the Dead, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, retail therapy, South of Market, San Francisco, three-masted sailing ship

Manufactured in the United States of America 5 4 3 2 1 Contents List of Maps iv Introducing San Francisco 1 The Walking Tours 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Union Square Past & Present The Culture & Cuisine of Chinatown Noshing Through North Beach The Storied Steps of Telegraph Hill The Haughty Hotels of Nob Hill The Ghosts of Russian Hill The Majestic Homes of Pacific Heights South of Market: A Civilized Afternoon of Arts & Leisure The Culture & Color of the Mission District A Historical Flashback Through Haight-Ashbury Golden Gate Park: Museums, Blooms & Trees from Dunes The Golden Gate 7 21 36 54 68 83 94 106 115 127 136 146 Essentials 158 Guided Walking Tours of San Francisco 169 Index 174 LIST OF MAPS The Tours at a Glance 4 The Walking Tours Union Square Chinatown North Beach Telegraph Hill Nob Hill Russian Hill Pacific Heights South of Market Mission District Haight-Ashbury Golden Gate Park Northern San Francisco 11 23 37 55 69 85 95 109 117 129 139 149 About the Author A native San Franciscan, Erika Lenkert writes food, travel, and lifestyle articles for San Francisco Magazine, Wine Country Living, and Four Seasons. She is also the author of The Last Minute Party Girl, Frommer’s San Francisco, and Frommer’s Wine Country, and the co-author of dozens of guides about California, including Frommer’s California.

…

Seriously, though, the tall tales of who lived where and who killed whom in this neighborhood are just as compelling as the over-the-top architecture. And if you like to shop, you’ll love the finale. Walk 8: South of Market: A Civilized Afternoon of Arts & Leisure Only recently has South of Market become the area of choice for a civilized and culturally stimulating afternoon. But with the Museum of Modern Art and the Yerba Buena Gardens within a few blocks of one another, you can’t but walk away feeling inspired. The Tours at a Glance Golden Gate Bridge NORTHERN SAN FRANCISCO San Francisco Bay Marina 101 Bl vd 101 . d. v. Lyon St. Presidio A HAIGHTASHBURY Ashbury sus nas Par Av. on 1 Twin Peaks Blvd.

…

Better yet, catch either the no. 41 or 45 bus heading due east on Union Street, get off at Columbus Avenue, and continue your exploration of San Francisco with a tour of North Beach. • Walking Tour 8 • South of Market: A Civilized Afternoon of Arts & Leisure Start: Mission Street, between Fourth and Fifth streets. Public Transportation: Bus: 15, 30, or 45; Muni Metro: J, K, L, or M to Montgomery Station. Finish: New Montgomery and Market streets. Time: Half an hour to 5 hours, depending on how many museums you visit. Best Times: Tuesday and Thursday through Saturday from 11am to 5pm. 106 South of Market • 107 Worst Times: Monday, when many of the museums are closed; Wednesday, when the Museum of Modern Art is closed; Sunday; nighttime.

Frommer's San Francisco 2012 by Matthew Poole, Erika Lenkert, Kristin Luna

airport security, Albert Einstein, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Blue Bottle Coffee, California gold rush, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, El Camino Real, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, off-the-grid, place-making, Port of Oakland, post-work, San Francisco homelessness, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Torches of Freedom, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Nob Hill is worth a visit if only to stroll around delightful Huntington Park with its cherubic fountain (a copy of the Tartarughe fountain in Rome), attend a Sunday service at the cathedral, or ooh and aah your way around the Fairmont’s spectacular lobby. We’re Number One! It’s the kind of old news that we never get tired of hearing: San Francisco was voted the number-one city in the United States to visit in the latest Condé Nast Traveler Readers’ Choice Survey. This is the 18th time San Francisco has topped the annual poll’s “Top Cities—United States” category since it debuted in 1990. It is the 17th consecutive year that San Francisco has scored the highest (Santa Fe won in 1992). Huntington Park. South of Market (SoMa) From Market Street to Townsend Street and the Embarcadero to Division Street, SoMa has become the city’s cultural and multimedia center.

…

SoMa, the once industrial neighborhood south of Market Street, has exploded with new development, including the beautiful Yerba Buena arts district, the sleek lofts of Mission Bay, and a slew of hip new clubs and cafes. South Beach is the new darling of young professionals living the condo-in-the-city life, and the spectacular new California Academy of Sciences and de Young Museum have given even the locals two new reasons to visit Golden Gate Park. The San Francisco Giants celebrate their 2010 World Series win. All that glitters is not the Golden Gate, however. At the end of World War II, San Francisco was the largest and wealthiest city on the West Coast.

…

Numerical avenues (Third Ave. and so on) are in the Richmond and Sunset districts in the western part of the city. Numerical streets (Third St. and so on) are south of Market Street in the east and south parts of town. Neighborhoods in Brief For further discussion of some of the neighborhoods below, see the “Neighborhoods Worth a Visit” section of chapter 6, beginning. Also see the “San Francisco Neighborhoods” map. Union Square Union Square is the commercial hub of San Francisco. Most major hotels and department stores are crammed into the area surrounding the actual square, which was named for a series of violent pro-union rallies staged here on the eve of the Civil War.

Rough Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area by Nick Edwards, Mark Ellwood

1960s counterculture, airport security, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, Day of the Dead, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, period drama, pez dispenser, Port of Oakland, rent control, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, transcontinental railway, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Environmentally conscious buses, powered by overhead electric cables rather than gas, cover all the areas not served by streetcars. There are three historic cable-car lines (wwww.sfcablecar.com; see p.27 for further details), which are more for The streets of San Francisco 26 San Francisco’s street system can seem maddeningly idiosyncratic at first, since, unlike many American cities, Downtown streets have names rather than numbers (the only grid of numbered streets is that radiating into the dock area south of Market.) Throughout this guide, we’ve provided the street address, its cross street, and the city neighborhood to make it as easy as possible to locate any listings. If you need to find another address, there’s a basic formula that will help pinpoint your destination.

…

The Bohemian Club, 624 Taylor St, is best known for its Bohemian Grove retreat on the Russian River, where ex-presidents and corporate giants assemble for Masonic rituals and schoolboy larks; the San Francisco chapter is housed in a Lewis Hobart Moderne-style building. The Financial District The boundaries of San Francisco’s FINANCIAL DISTRICT have increasingly blurred in recent years, particularly with the spate of new office high-rises that continue to go up south of Market Street. Its western edge abuts Chinatown at Kearny Street, while to the north it quietly fades into the residential towers and inviting parks of the Northeast Waterfront beyond Clay Street.

…

High above, on the hills just to the south, the ornate mansions and Victorians of Pacific Heights make for splendid views; from this perch you’ll spot too the Presidio, a vast expanse of green stretching west to the Golden Gate Bridge. ˘ | INTRODUCTION | WHAT TO S E E | W HE N TO GO g Children enjoying San Francisco’s outdoors ˘ Back near Downtown and west of Union Square, the gritty Tenderloin, a rundown section of cheap hotels and sleazy porn shops, will snap you back to reality. It rests uneasily next to the Civic Center, where the painstakingly restored City Hall is the imposing focus of a concentrated few blocks of public buildings and cultural venues. Cross Market Street and you’ll hit SoMa (South of Market), once the city’s major industrial enclave The city’s hills serve as handy and, in the Nineties, home to the markers between its shifting offices of a myriad since-defunct moods and characters.

San Francisco by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, G4S, game design, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, retail therapy, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, Zipcar

He won 5600 votes. Undaunted, he declared himself Absolute Empress of San Francisco, the widow and true heir of Emperor Norton. When local media echoed the Empress’ criticism of the continuing raids, the crackdown stopped – a feat not achieved for years elsewhere, until New York’s 1969 Stonewall protests. By the mid-1970s, the rainbow flag was flying high over gay businesses and homes in the out-and-proud Castro, and the sexual revolution was in full swing at gay clubs and bathhouses on Polk St and South of Market (SoMa). Gay San Francisco had arrived; now all it needed was an elected representative. The Castro was triumphant when Castro camera-store owner Harvey Milk was elected city Supervisor, becoming the nation’s first openly gay elected official – but as Milk himself predicted, his time in office would be cut short by an act of extremist violence.

…

BusSamTrans (www.samtrans.com; one-way $5) Express bus KX takes about 30 minutes to reach Temporary Transbay Terminal in the South of Market (SoMa) area. Airport Shuttles (one-way $14-17) Depart from baggage-claim areas, taking 45 minutes to most SF locations. For service to the airport, call to reserve a pickup from any San Francisco location at least 4 hours in advance of departure time. Companies include SuperShuttle ( 800-258-3826; www.supershuttle.com), Quake City ( 415-255-4899; www.quakecityshuttle.com), Lorrie’s ( 415-334-9000; www.gosfovan.com) and American Airporter Shuttle ( 415-202-0733; www.americanairporter.com). Taxi Taxis to downtown San Francisco cost $35 to $50, departing from the yellow zone on the lower level of SFO.

…

Contents Plan Your Trip Welcome to San Francisco San Francisco’s Top 10 What’s New Need to Know Top Itineraries If You Like… Month by Month With Kids Eating Drinking & Nightlife Entertainment GLBT Shopping Sports & Activities Cable Cars Explore San Francisco The Marina, Fisherman’s Wharf & the Piers Downtown & Civic Center North Beach & Chinatown The Hills & Japantown The Mission, SoMa & Potrero Hill The Castro & Noe Valley The Haight & Hayes Valley Golden Gate Park & the Avenues Day Trips from San Francisco Sleeping Understand San Francisco San Francisco Today History Local Cuisine & Drinks Literary San Francisco Visual Arts San Francisco Music San Francisco Architecture Hills & Fog Survival Guide Transportation Directory A–Z Welcome to San Francisco Grab your coat and a handful of glitter, and enter the land of fog and fabulousness.

San Francisco by Lonely Planet

…

pages: 314 words: 106,575

Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer--And of the Mysterious Fires That Baptized Gold Rush-Era San Francisco by Robert Graysmith

California gold rush, Cornelius Vanderbilt, profit motive, South of Market, San Francisco, white picket fence

One landfill consisted of two shiploads of Spanish brandy dumped over two acres of waterfront ground. South of Market, bounded by Folsom and Mission and Fourth and Tenth streets, was a quicksand bog that sucked anyone crossing out of sight. Each spring the city did maintenance on the single road to the cemetery that cost $15 per square inch. Because the city was flat busted, all the roads remained quagmires and a hazard for the volunteers and their torch boys. Here and there nestled a small refuge, but immense dunes still covered much of San Francisco. The town’s hills had always presented a predicament. No level ground existed beyond the narrow crescent rim forming the beach.

…

Since these children had grown up in the atmosphere of their parents’ depravity, they began to rob and pillage on their own as soon as they left the nest. Known as the Tarflat Hoodlums, they roved south of Market and over most of unhappy Happy Valley, waylaying, beating, and robbing anyone they met. In their black coats, blue spring-bottom trousers, and buff-colored felt hats, they treated mothers and their little girls no better than men and boys. When an officer intervened, the Tarflatters beat him nearly to death. The call of gold had drawn the most reckless young men to San Francisco: the best artists, intellectuals, farmers, merchants, and clerks. It also attracted the worst: cutthroats, ex-convicts, profiteers, pirates, traders, deserters, renegades, crooked politicians, and the Lightkeeper.

…

A blaze had broken out on the deck of the Tennessee on their way up the California coast and had terrified Lillie. That night she awoke screaming of fire. As San Francisco rebuilt, the little girl rode horseback along the muddied streets, went “fishing for rats” under the raised sidewalks, trotted her donkey cart around Mac-Condray’s grounds, or watched the many daylight fires that volunteers promptly extinguished. One day a bullet whizzed by her head while she was walking in the dunes south of Market. Instead of turning and running, she rushed up the hill to locate the origin of the shot. The Hitchcocks swiftly adopted the role of well-to-do aristocrats and Martha became her old grand-mannered self.

pages: 373 words: 112,822

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Boris Johnson, Burning Man, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collaborative consumption, data science, Didi Chuxing, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, East Village, fake it until you make it, fixed income, gentrification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, inflight wifi, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Necker cube, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, race to the bottom, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

The founders pitched the carpooling service to new universities and to some companies, such as Walmart—take Zimride every day to work!—and then opened the website to regular folks. The startup ran buses between major cities, like Los Angeles and San Francisco, and from cities to the Coachella and Bonnaroo music festivals. Sometimes Zimmer and Green would even drive. They raised another six million dollars in funding from venture capitalists in 2011 and moved up to San Francisco, to the fashionable South of Market District, where an uprising of startups was starting to shift Silicon Valley’s center of gravity north. But when they were being honest with each other, Green and Zimmer had to admit that Zimride wasn’t going to get big enough to change the world.

…

That March he bought a house in Los Altos Hills, an eighteenth-century French château–style mansion with panoramic views of the golden San Francisco Bay. In Silicon Valley, this is what passes for getting the last laugh. To the casual observer, the home-rental site Airbnb didn’t seem like it could ride this wave, let alone come to embody it. At the start of the year, its employees were still crowded into the office on Tenth Street in SoMa (the South of Market area in San Francisco), with bad cell phone reception inside and the homeless camping on the street outside. The startup was run almost entirely by its triumvirate of co-founders, who had two college degrees in design and one in computer science among them.

…

—Brian Chesky The first guest to use Airbedandbreakfast.com was Amol Surve, a recent graduate of the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University.1 He arrived at his rental late in the afternoon on Tuesday, October 16, 2007, fifteen months before Barack Obama’s historic inauguration, and was greeted at the door by the site’s twenty-six-year-old co-creator Joe Gebbia, who politely asked him to remove his shoes. Gebbia gave him a tour of unit C on the top floor of 19 Rausch Street, a narrow, side-street row house in San Francisco’s chaotic South of Market neighborhood. It was spacious, with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a comfortable living room, and, up the main flight of stairs, a roof terrace overlooking the golden city, which was undergoing its own momentous reinvention. At the time, the two men had no way of knowing that over the next few years, this apartment would be ground zero for a worldwide social movement and global business phenomenon called the sharing economy.

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, compensation consultant, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, eternal september, fake news, game design, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, Hacker News, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Lean Startup, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Palm Treo, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QR code, r/findbostonbombers, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, uber lyft, Wayback Machine, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

Do you have time for a phone call? Also, are you based in Boston? You Are Making Us Sound Stupid After repeatedly Googling “Condé Nast,” Huffman, Ohanian, Slowe, and Swartz boarded a flight in early March 2006 to San Francisco to meet with Karimkhany. They rented a car and stayed with friends in the South Bay. None of them had spent much time in San Francisco, and they got turned around on one-way streets around Wired’s South of Market office. They found parking with just minutes to spare. The Wired office was just as awesome as they’d anticipated. Karimkhany showed them the “beer robot” (basically a small kegerator) and “The Berlin Hall,” which separated magazine staff from all the tech and online folks, and they were invited to try the arcade-style machines in the game room.

…

One was the crazy-long commute, from Burlingame to South of Market in San Francisco, and parking there every day. Altman suggested that instead of spending hours a day in his Tesla, perhaps Wong should expense an Uber every time and be able to open up his laptop, get through emails, start chipping away at his day instead of having idle time. Wong couldn’t. His carsickness was too severe. Wong fixated on the logistics of his commute as the root of all of his problems. Reddit needed a new office; why not make the office come to him? Commercial real estate in San Francisco was pushing $100 per square foot, which seemed unsustainable.

…

They’d have to live with the dark gray endurance carpeting, but the rest of the space was nice; finally they had their own little kitchen, a café area with communal seating, and a television with multiple video-game systems. And it was not in nowheresville Daly City but rather in the heart of San Francisco’s startup-saturated South of Market neighborhood. Y Combinator’s own San Francisco office was within walking distance. Pao had also negated the possibility that she’d ever get burnt out by commuting, as Wong had. Ellen Pao’s own home, in the St. Regis, was a single city block away. 10 On June 23, 2015, Reddit celebrated its ten-year anniversary.

pages: 428 words: 138,235

The Billionaire and the Mechanic: How Larry Ellison and a Car Mechanic Teamed Up to Win Sailing's Greatest Race, the Americas Cup, Twice by Julian Guthrie

AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Benchmark Capital, Boeing 747, cloud computing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, fear of failure, Ford paid five dollars a day, independent contractor, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Benioﬀ, market bubble, Maui Hawaii, new economy, pets.com, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, warehouse automation, white picket fence, Yogi Berra

Published simultaneously in Canada Printed in the United States of America ISBN: 978-0-8021-2136-3 eISBN: 978-0-8021-9331-5 Grove Press an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. 154 West 14th Street New York, NY 10011 Distributed by Publishers Group West www.groveatlantic.com Dedicated to Larry and Norbert Contents PART I 1. The Southern Ocean 2. Radiator Repair Shop in San Francisco 3. The Island of Antigua 4. San Francisco Marina 5. Woodside, California 6. St. Francis Yacht Club 7. The Golden Gate Yacht Club 8. The Golden Gate Yacht Club PART II 9. The Hills of Santa Barbara 10. Atherton, California 11. San Francisco to New Zealand 12. Oracle Base Camp 13. Redwood Shores, California 14. San Francisco Bay 15. Newport, Rhode Island 16. Valencia, Spain 17. South of Market, San Francisco 18. Valencia, Spain PART III 19. Woodside, California 20. Woodside, California 21.

…

AUTHOR’S NOTE AUTHOR’S NOTE Table of Contents Cover Praise for The Billionaire and the Mechanic THE BILLIONAIRE AND THE MECHANIC Also by Julian Guthrie Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents PART I 1 The Southern Ocean 2 Radiator Repair Shop in San Francisco 3 The Island of Antigua 4 San Francisco Marina 5 Woodside, California 6 St. Francis Yacht Club 7 The Golden Gate Yacht Club 8 The Golden Gate Yacht Club PART II 9 The Hills of Santa Barbara 10 Atherton, California 11 San Francisco to New Zealand 12 Oracle Base Camp 13 Redwood Shores, California 14 San Francisco Bay 15 Newport, Rhode Island 16 Valencia, Spain 17 South of Market, San Francisco PHOTO INSERT 18 Valencia, Spain PART III 19 Woodside, California 20 Woodside, California 21 Bangkok, Thailand, to Cagliari, Italy 22 Anacortes, Washington 23 San Diego, California 24 Valencia, Spain 25 Valencia to San Francisco 26 Rancho Mirage, California 27Moscone Center, San Francisco 28 Alouis Radiators, San Francisco 29 Stanford University, California PART IV 30 San Francisco Bay 31 The 34th America's Cup-A Very Rough Start 32 The Comeback Epilogue The 35th America's Cup Appendix The America's Cup Races Authors Note Acknowledgments Back Cover

…

The teams represented a dazzling array of talent and countries, from Italy, South Africa, New Zealand, France, Sweden, and Spain to Germany and China. 17 South of Market, San Francisco Spring 2006 IN THE SPRING of 2006 Norbert received a call out of the blue from Terry Anderlini, a friend and former commodore of the St. Francis. “Hey, Norbert, can we talk?” Anderlini asked. “What’s it about?” Norbert said, on his way home from work. “Let’s talk when we meet,” Anderlini said cryptically. “And let’s go somewhere besides our yacht clubs.” The next day, Norbert headed to the South of Market area to meet Anderlini and Terry Klaus, another former St. Francis commodore.

pages: 331 words: 95,582

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty

Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, commoditize, death of newspapers, desegregation, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Trump, edge city, Edward Glaeser, El Camino Real, emotional labour, fixed income, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joan Didion, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, passive income, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Dorms, shift sleep, converted garages, streets of campers, live-in cars: all the totems of a housing shortage were there, and the surge of welcome-back peace babies, which followed the surge in goodbye war babies, would only make things worse. In 1947, two years after the war ended, San Francisco’s district attorney, Edmund G. Brown, whom everyone called Pat, commissioned a report on the city’s living conditions. The report cited rats in South of Market rooming houses and the sight of Chinatown families huddled into “dark cubicles.” Nearby in North Beach, a sick-looking family of seven occupied a damp and crowded apartment whose rigged-up wiring seemed destined to be the origin of a future and tragic fire.

…

Sonja was running to represent District Six, which was the unofficial repository of San Francisco’s biggest problems and a symbol of the third-world-grade inequality the American economy had become. On one side was the Tenderloin, a neighborhood that had the country’s largest concentration of single-room occupancy hotels and was the site of open-air heroin use and blocks of people with tattered clothes and shredded shoes sleeping on sidewalks smeared with human shit and orange needle caps. On the other side was South of Market, which had towering glass condos and the headquarters of Salesforce and Airbnb.

…

Francis Square, 72 salaries, see incomes, salaries and wages Salesforce, 187, 201 Sanders, Bernie, 129 San Francisco, 129 San Francisco Bay Area, xiv–xv San Francisco Board of Supervisors, 78, 79, 117, 119, 123, 131, 136 SB 827 and, 194 Trauss’s campaign for, 186–88, 194, 195–202, 216–26 San Francisco Call Bulletin, 65 San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, 120 San Francisco Chronicle, 35, 79, 218 San Francisco Ethics Commission, 105–6 San Francisco Planning Commission, 1, 12, 26 San Francisco politics, 123, 125, 201 election structure and, 119 moderates in, 118–20 progressives in, 119–20, 122, 127, 129 San Francisco Tenants Union, 31, 33, 104, 120 San Jose, Calif., 40 San Leandro, Calif., 23–24, 77 San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, 181 Saturday Evening Post, 68 Save Lafayette, 101–2, 107, 113–14 Saver, Daniel, 48–50, 54, 56–58, 180, 181, 204 Save the Bay, 79 Schumacher, E.

Coastal California by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, electricity market, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, Mason jar, McMansion, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Wozniak, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Fast Facts »Population 805,235 »Area 7 square miles »Telephone area code 415 Planning Your Trip »Three weeks before Book Alcatraz trips and dinner at Coi or Frances. »Two weeks before Build stamina for downtown hills, South of Market (SoMa) galleries and Mission bars. »One week before Score tickets to San Francisco Symphony or Opera, and assemble your costume – SF throws parades whenever. Resources »SF Bay Guardian (www.sfbg.com) Hot tips on local entertainment, arts, politics. »SFGate (www.sfgate.com) News and event listings. San Francisco Highlights Make yourself at home where the buffalo roam in Golden Gate Park (Click here) Reach new artistic heights at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Click here) rooftop sculpture garden Watch fog dance atop the deco towers of the Golden Gate Bridge (Click here) Graze the Ferry Building (Click here), SF’s local, sustainable foodie destination Plot your escape from Alcatraz (Click here), SF’s notorious island prison Discover unlikely urban marine life along Fisherman’s Wharf (Click here): sea lions, sharks, and a WWII submarine Unwind in Japanese baths and catch film screenings in Japantown (Click here) Get breathless from the climb, murals and panoramic views at Coit Tower (Click here) Wander through 150 years of California history in pagoda-topped Chinatown (Click here) History Oysters and acorn bread were prime dinner options in the Mexico-run Ohlone settlement of San Francisco circa 1848 – but a year and some gold nuggets later, Champagne and chow mein were served by the bucket.

…

CHINATOWN Li Po BAR (916 Grant Ave; 2pm-2am) Enter the grotto doorway and get the once-over by the dusty Buddha as you slide into red vinyl booths beloved of Beats for beer or Chinese Mai Tai, made with baiju (rice liquor). GAY/LESBIAN/BI/TRANS SAN FRANCISCO Singling out the best places to be queer in San Francisco is almost redundant. Though the Castro is a gay hub and the Mission is a magnet for lesbians, the entire city is gay-friendly – hence the number of out elected representatives in City Hall at any given time. New York Marys may label SF the retirement home of the young – indeed, the sidewalks roll up early – but for sexual outlaws and underground weirdness, SF trounces New York. Dancing queens and slutty boys head South of Market (SoMa), the location of most thump-thump clubs.

…

Fort Point HISTORIC BUILDING ( 415-561-4395; www.nps.gov/fopo; Marine Dr; 10am-5pm Thu-Mon) Despite its impressive guns, this Civil War fort saw no action – at least until Alfred Hitchcock shot scenes from Vertigo here, with stunning views of the Golden Gate Bridge from below. Baker Beach BEACH The city’s best beach, with windswept pines uphill, craggy cliffs and a whole lot of exposed goosebumps on the breezy, clothing-optional north end. SOUTH OF MARKET (SOMA) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art MUSEUM (SFMOMA; Click here ; 415-357-4000; www.sfmoma.org; 151 3rd St; adult/student/child $18/11/free, first Tue of month free; 11am-6pm Fri-Tue, to 9pm Thu) Swiss architect Mario Botta’s light-filled brick box leans full-tilt toward the horizon, with curators similarly inclined to take forward-thinking risks on Matthew Barney’s poetic videos involving industrial quantities of Vaseline and Olafur Eliasson’s outer-space light installations.

pages: 190 words: 62,941

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Benchmark Capital, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google X / Alphabet X, hustle culture, independent contractor, information retrieval, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, new economy, pattern recognition, price mechanism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, young professional

The entire “seed” round for UberCab’s first investment, led by First Round and also including Chris Sacca’s fund, Lowercase Capital, and a smattering of San Francisco angel investors, was $1.25 million and valued Uber at $4 million, not including the new money. Just a few years later such an amount would prove to be less than a rounding error for Uber. First Round, a firm that invests only in seed rounds, wrote a check for $450,000. The bet would net the firm billions in return. Money in hand, Kalanick had finally concluded that it was time to go to work for UberCab, which had moved into the offices of First Round Capital, in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. There was only one job that interested Kalanick, however, and Ryan Graves was doing it.

…

Holidays would prove to be significant inflection points for Uber, for both good and ill, during that first year of operations. Rob Hayes, the seed-round investor from First Round Capital, had a bird’s-eye view of Uber’s early development. For several months in late 2010 the company had moved into his firm’s offices in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. Kalanick’s desk was nearby, and the two spoke frequently. “Growth was just torrid those first few months,” says Hayes. “And then Thanksgiving happened, and growth fell off a cliff. Travis had this chart that showed growth in rides. And there was this huge dip for the whole week of Thanksgiving.

…

A large handful of smaller Internet companies, most with some connection to media or advertising technology, had formed in San Francisco during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. Most vanished just as quickly. Then, in the depth of one of the tech industry’s periodic down cycles, something changed. One new software company, Salesforce.com, grew rapidly in San Francisco, primarily because of its founder’s preference for urban living. Then, as Google and other tech giants began offering free, Wi-Fi-enabled shuttle buses to the suburbs in order to appeal to younger city dwellers, San Francisco enjoyed a resurgence. Once that happened, more companies sprang up there.

pages: 573 words: 142,376

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

At the time, Kirkland was living in San Francisco’s seedy South of Market neighborhood while attending the San Francisco Art Institute. She was also heavily into the burgeoning Bay Area punk rock scene. Her hair was pink; she wore combat boots; and her skirt ended substantially above her thigh. She started telling him about the concerts she’d attended, and Brand asked if she would take him. Soon thereafter he accompanied Kirkland and another Quarterly staffer to hear the Dead Kennedys at Temple Beautiful, an abandoned synagogue that had been adopted by the punk scene. Brand had helped create the original San Francisco acid rock scene in the sixties.

…

After several newspaper accounts appeared, Moore was besieged with financial requests by both phone and mail. And like Frodo’s ring, the money wouldn’t stay in the ground. Moore was soon forcibly turned into a “people’s banker” when a small group of San Francisco activists who were engaged in building a collective in a warehouse in a tattered neighborhood south of Market Street heard about the windfall. Project One encompassed a diverse set of community political projects, ranging from education to organizing to the theater to one of the first community time-sharing computer efforts, which was called Resource One and had become the final resting place for Doug Engelbart’s original SDS-940 mainframe computer, on which he had developed his oNLine System—as luck would have it, ultimately paid for with a grant from a foundation created from money generated by the Catalog.

…

., 7, 8–9 SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), 83, 146, 147–48, 211–12 sailing, SB’s interest in, 69–70, 242 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 119 Salisbury, Harrison, 200 Saltonstall, William Gurdon, 17 Sampson, Donald, 12, 37, 60, 67 Sandberg-Diment, Erik, 259 Sand County Almanac (Leopold), 349 San Francisco, Calif.: Summer of Love in, 2, 75, 128 see also Haight-Ashbury; North Beach San Francisco Art Institute, 68, 69, 70, 90, 118, 323 San Francisco Chronicle, 48, 94–95, 119, 135, 258, 303, 318 San Francisco Mime Troupe, 124, 125, 127, 206 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 93–95 San Francisco State University, 68, 69, 70, 141, 142, 145, 149, 174 San Francisco Tape Music Center, 94 San Francisco Zen Center, 203, 208, 210, 247–48, 250, 313 Santa Fe, N.Mex., 110, 116 Santa Fe Institute, 304, 321, 324 Sausalito, Calif., 299 SB’s homes and offices in, 69, 221, 234, 242, 243–45, 276, 302, 329 see also Mirene waterfront community of, 69, 244–45, 246, 280, 294, 299, 307 Savage, Charles, 78, 103 Savage, Melissa, 203, 205–6, 207, 210 Save the Whales, 204, 206, 227 scenario planning, 273, 277, 285, 295, 296, 297–98 Schell, Orville, 225, 226, 299 Schneider, Stephen, 339 Schumacher, E.

pages: 371 words: 93,570

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

As I divest myself of my wet outer layers, they look up cheerily from their conversation. They’ve been catching up. Only recently have they reconnected with one another, but forty years ago, alongside a hundred other dreamers, hippies, and iconoclasts, they all lived together in a technological commune in San Francisco called Project One. They’ll explain to me that Project One was a mustard-yellow warehouse South of Market. Inside its eighty-four thousand square feet of interlinked habitations, they slept in hand-built bays one hundred feet wide and gathered for community meetings on the fifth floor that often ended in shouting matches and tears, or music and laughter, depending on the day.

…

Since its interface was a three-ring binder rather than a Teletype terminal, its true nature as a digital object remained invisible to all but those who maintained it, although the database was printed out only for the benefit of those without “access to tools.” Today, in the former warehouse district South of Market, buildings are still full of young people, hard at work on their vision of tomorrow. They call it SoMa now. Nobody’s bumming rides—these days, the cars drive themselves. Instead of one computer, its tonnage rivaling the rooftop boiler whose installation most Project One graduates remember with equal clarity, there are computers in every pocket and on every desk. There are light bulbs South of Market smarter than the Resource One computer. The brightest minds in computer science are still here—or the most privileged, anyway—but now they’re refining algorithms to sell goods and services on a network their hippie forebears could only have imagined, long haired and pointing to the box (it’s an electronic bulletin board, they said; it’ll help us with the revolution, they said).

…

The Berkeley Barb ran back-page ads for resistance organizations, and a group called the Haight-Ashbury Switchboard had even built a sophisticated phone tree in the late 1960s, linking human “switchboards” to one another to help distraught families track down their wandering hippie kids. This grew into an informal network of interest-specific Switchboards in the Bay Area, one of which, the San Francisco Switchboard, had offices at Project One. With a couple of phones and boxes of index cards, it coordinated extensive group action for quick-response incidents like the 1971 San Francisco Bay oil spill—an early version of the kind of organizing that happens so easily today on social media. Resource One took up where these efforts left off, even inheriting the San Francisco Switchboard’s corporate shell. When Pam and the Chrises moved into the warehouse, their plan was to design a common information retrieval system for all the existing Switchboards in the city, interlinking their various resources into a database running on borrowed computer time.

California by Sara Benson

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Columbine, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, planetary scale, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the new new thing, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Return to beginning of chapter ORIENTATION San Francisco may loom large in the imagination, but it’s just the tip of a 30-mile-long peninsula with the Pacific Ocean on one side and San Francisco Bay on the other. True to the spirit of the city, San Francisco’s main Market St thoroughfare is a contrarian streak that runs diagonally across the otherwise tidy grid of east–west city streets. North of this dividing line past Van Ness Ave is Civic Center and the Tenderloin, Union Sq, the Financial District, Chinatown, North Beach, Nob Hill, Russian Hill and Fisherman’s Wharf. SoMa (South of Market) fades around Van Ness into the Mission, which blends into the Castro around Church St. The scenery gets weirder and wilder north of Market from Van Ness on out to the Pacific Ocean.

…

* * * GAY/LESBIAN/BI/TRANS SAN FRANCISCO Singling out the best places to be queer in San Francisco (SF) is almost redundant. Though the Castro is a major gay center and the Mission is a magnet for lesbians, the entire city is known for being gay-friendly – hence the number of out elected representatives in City Hall at any given time. Nightlife is fabulous here. New York Marys may label SF the retirement home of the young – indeed, the sidewalks roll up early – but when it comes to sexual outlaws and underground weirdness, SF kicks New York’s ass. Dancing queens and slutty boys head South of Market (SoMa), the location of most thump-thump clubs and sex venues.

…

Further along the ocean side of the peninsula is Baker Beach (Map), the city’s best beach with windswept pines uphill, craggy good looks along the cliffs and a whole lot of exposed goosebumps on the breezy, clothing-optional north end of the beach. South of Market (SoMa) Don’t let the tony high-rises and poker-faced warehouses fool you: SoMa is scattered with outrageous art venues, adventurous dining and anything-goes after-hours clubs. The city is buzzing over the ever-expanding collection of museums and galleries around Yerba Buena Gardens and anchored by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA; Map; 415-357-4000; www.sfmoma.org; 151 3rd St; adult/child/student/senior $12.50/free/7/8; 11am-5:45pm Mon, Tue & Fri-Sun, to 8:45pm Thu Sep-Apr, 10am-5:45pm Mon, Tue & Fri, to 9:45pm Thu, to 7:45pm Sat & Sun May-Aug).

pages: 611 words: 188,732

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

The joke used to be at the time, this being ’97 through 2000—the golden era—was basically all you had to do was stand at the corner with a cocktail napkin, and VCs would throw money at you from a passing car. I loved it. The dot-com scene was clustered around South Park, a seedy neighborhood park in San Francisco’s industrial South of Market district. Wired magazine had its headquarters on the park, as did many of the most notable dot-com companies. Steve Perlman: South Park is this small little oval-shaped park that’s largely grassy except for a few swings and a couple of picnic tables. Yves Béhar: I had either lived or worked on South Park since 1993.

…

That’s the point where it shifted: when the engineers were treated as valuable as they really are. Ev Williams: One of the interesting shifts that has happened is the move to San Francisco. Silicon Valley until the dot-com boom wasn’t in San Francisco. It was in Palo Alto and Mountain View, because tech companies weren’t built in the City. Steve Wozniak: The hardware industry has sort of settled down and all the new things that catch our attention—the apps and Ubers—they’ve kind of chosen to move up to San Francisco. Silicon Valley includes San Francisco now. Biz Stone: San Francisco is the cool place to be. Ev Williams: My theory is that as these tech companies have become more culture makers, then they gravitate toward the City, because that is who makes culture—people who live in cities.

…

It was so far beyond… Mark Pauline: In 1989 I had a bigger crew than usual: forty or fifty people, plus I had gotten a grant from the Fleishhacker Foundation, so I had their name to throw around, so I was able to talk the people who ran this parking lot South of Market into renting me the space. Jane Metcalfe: South Park was full of winos and drug addicts and homeless people. They had oil drums filled with garbage that they burned. It was a really sketchy neighborhood. Louis Rossetto: All of South of Market was like that. Mark Pauline: There’s this beautiful part under the freeway between Third and Fourth Street and between Bryant and Harrison. There the freeways are very high—fifty feet—and it’s almost like a cathedral under there.

pages: 290 words: 87,549

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy by Leigh Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Blitzscaling, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, don't be evil, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, gentrification, geopolitical risk, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Justin.tv, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, Network effects, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, RFID, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the payments system, Tony Hsieh, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Y Combinator, yield management

“I felt my life was, like, I was in a car, and I could see the road disappearing into the horizon in front of me, and I could see the same view in the rearview mirror,” he later told Sarah Lacy, the technology journalist and founder of PandoDaily, in a fireside chat in 2013. “It was, like, ‘Oh, this is all I’ll end up doing. I guess it wasn’t like they said it would be at RISD.’” Meanwhile, Gebbia had finished up at RISD and eventually moved to San Francisco, where he was working as a graphic designer for Chronicle Books and living in a three-bedroom apartment on Rausch Street in the city’s South of Market district. He’d also tried his hand at entrepreneurialism, attempting to launch a line of seat cushions he’d designed at RISD. Conceived for art school students as a comfortable seat when sitting through famously lengthy critiques, or “crits,” they were cheekily called CritBuns and designed in the shape of rear ends.

…

There was some irony in the fact that we were at a hotel, and not just any hotel: this was the exact venue that hosted the international design conference in 2007 that had maxed out San Francisco’s hotel supply and had given Chesky and his cofounder Joe Gebbia their goofy idea to rent out air mattresses on the floor of their three-bedroom apartment in the South of Market district. Indeed, it was fewer than thirty feet from where we were sitting where Chesky had walked up to one of the designers he’d most revered to tell him about this new business idea, only to have him immediately dismiss it as ridiculous (“I hope that’s not the only idea you’re working on” were his words). That comment would mark the start of a long stretch of painful rejection and ridicule. But it also marked the start of Airbnb, the company that Chesky now commands, a juggernaut today with a $30 billion private-market valuation, some one hundred forty million “guest arrivals,” to use the company’s term for tracking the travelers who book on its platform, and an inventory that is three million listings strong.

…

ISBN 978-0-544-95266-9 Cover design by Michaela Sullivan Cover illustrations © Getty Images Author photograph © Christos Karantzolas eISBN 978-0-544-95387-1 v1.0117 For Gil, Zeb, Anna, Noa, and Ava, the ultimate home sharers Introduction * * * * * * BRIAN CHESKY AND I were sitting across from each other in the velvet, high-backed, regal-feeling chairs of the lobby bar of the Fairmont San Francisco hotel. It was early November 2015, and we were there so that I could talk to him about the idea of writing a book about his company, the “home-sharing” platform Airbnb, to use the phrase the company has been so successful at popularizing. There was some irony in the fact that we were at a hotel, and not just any hotel: this was the exact venue that hosted the international design conference in 2007 that had maxed out San Francisco’s hotel supply and had given Chesky and his cofounder Joe Gebbia their goofy idea to rent out air mattresses on the floor of their three-bedroom apartment in the South of Market district.

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

The Menlo partners were starting a new fund—Fund XI—which was often a time of transition, when younger partners moved up and were given more equity, and older partners sometimes pulled back and reduced their percentage of the profits. Sonja needed to make her health her top priority. She proposed to the Menlo partners that she work part-time. From her viewpoint, the timing was ideal: Venture firms and tech start-ups were opening offices in San Francisco almost every day, turning areas like South Park, in the bustling South of Market neighborhood, into mini Sand Hill Roads. Sonja also thought she could save time on the commute—more than two hours a day—by working remotely. She had been with Menlo Ventures for nearly seventeen years. Her investments had brought hundreds of millions of dollars to the firm and created a number of legacy companies.

…

Combined, the two women had created $10 billion in public market value, helped lead fifteen merger and acquisition transactions, and raised more than three hundred rounds in follow-on capital for their portfolio companies. Trulia, one of the more recent companies Theresia had invested in, was in the news as it was being acquired by Zillow for $3.5 billion. Theresia and Jennifer planned to start by investing their own money, then raise funds from limited partners. They opened offices in San Francisco’s South of Market district and in Menlo Park. When the story on the founding of Aspect broke, Theresia told a reporter she wanted to invest in great companies, regardless of whether they were founded by men or by women. But she also said she wanted to be a part of creating more stories of successful women who raised capital and built companies.

…

SONJA On a beautiful weekend in April 2003, Sonja went sailing on San Francisco Bay in a thirty-five-foot J/105 one-design keelboat, Good Timin’, owned by Jon’s brothers Chris and Phil. Sonja and Jon were joined by Phil as they sailed from the St. Francis Yacht Club in San Francisco past Alcatraz Island and toward the majestic Golden Gate Bridge. Jon and Phil were accomplished sailors who had won major races with Good Timin’, and Sonja had done her own share of sailing in college. The wind picked up, the spinnaker was hoisted, and Good Timin’ sliced through the choppy gray waters. Later that morning, they headed to lunch at the San Francisco Yacht Club in Tiburon, where the Perkins boys had spent almost every day of every summer learning to sail, competing for who was king.

pages: 268 words: 35,416

San Francisco Like a Local by DK Eyewitness

back-to-the-land, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bottomless brunch, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, Kickstarter, Lyft, messenger bag, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, tech bro, tech worker, uber lyft, young professional

Whether you’re a San Franciscan keen to rediscover your home, or a visitor looking for the bits that don’t make it into guidebooks, we’ll show you the real city. So strap in, and see SF like a local. San Francisco | Welcome To The City Liked by the locals “The great joy of San Francisco is its contrasts: where ancient forest sits side by side with a city forging the future, and the excitement of a world-class capital meets the convenience and quirkiness of a small town.” LAURA CHUBB, JOURNALIST AND COPYWRITER g Contents San Francisco THROUGH THE YEAR From joyful parades in the summer to festive fun in the winter, there’s a cause for celebration with the dawn of each new season in San Francisco. SPRING STREET FOOD MARKETS As the winter rain eases in March, locals start to brave the outdoors.

…

Simply download the free what3words app, type a what3words address into the search bar, and you’ll know exactly where to go. TRANSIT Your local transit advice San Francisco mightn’t have a cohesive public transportation system, but it does have a cohesive public transportation app. Transit predicts all bus and train arrivals, and calculates time and cost comparisons between Lyft’s rideshares and bikeshares (provided there are Bay Wheels docks in your area). g Contents San Francisco NEIGHBORHOODS San Francisco is a patchwork of mini-neighborhoods, each with its own distinct look and personality. Here we look at some of our favorites.

…

g Contents MAPS MAP 1 MAP 2 MAP 3 MAP 4 MAP 5 MAP 6 g Maps g Contents ← MAP 1 → n Double-tap image to read the labels EAT Angler Bini’s Kitchen The Flying Falafel House of Nanking Humphry Slocombe The Italian Homemade Company Mister Jiu’s Rooster & Rice DRINK 620 Jones Amelie Blue Bottle Coffee Bourbon & Branch Buena Vista Cafe Comstock Saloon Contraband Coffee Bar Li Po Cocktail Lounge Pacific Cocktail Haven Resolute Tonga Room & Hurricane Bar Top of the Mark Union Larder SHOP City Lights Booksellers & Publishers Jay Jeffers – The Studio Molte Cose & Belle Cose Out of the Closet ReLove ARTS & CULTURE American Conservatory Theater The Beat Museum Chinese Historical Society of America Museum Curran Et Al. Exploratorium Good Vibrations Grace Cathedral Musée Méchanique Language of the Birds Rincon Center Murals San Francisco Cable Car Museum San Francisco Playhouse SF Masonic NIGHTLIFE Best of San Francisco Stand-Up Comedy Cheaper Than Therapy Cobb’s Comedy Club Punch Line Secret Improv Society OUTDOORS Embarcadero Center Steps Filbert Street Stairs Greenwich Stairs Rooftop Tai Chi g Maps g Contents ← MAP 2 → n Double-tap image to read the labels EAT Miyako’s Old-Fashioned Ice Cream Shop Nari Nightbird Rich Table State Bird Provisions The Progress Zuni Cafe DRINK Magnolia Brewing Last Rites Twin Peaks Tavern Smuggler’s Cove SHOP Amoeba Music Booksmith Bound Together Anarchist Collective Bookstore Grooves Inspiralled Vinyl Kenneth Wingard Local Take Marine Layer Originals Vinyl Relic Vintage Rooky Ricardo’s Records Vinyl Dreams The Wasteland ARTS & CULTURE African American Art & Culture Complex GLBT Historical Society Museum Haight-Ashbury Clock Lorraine Hansberry Theater Rainbow Honor Walk NIGHTLIFE Beaux Boom Boom Room Castro Theatre The Fillmore Hi Tops The Independent Lookout Madrone Art Bar The Mix New People Cinema Open Mic at Cafe International Poetry at the Sacred Grounds Sheba Piano Lounge OUTDOORS The Castro to Twin Peaks Corona Heights Park Mission Dolores Park Vulcan Steps g Maps g Contents ← MAP 3 → n Double-tap image to read the labels EAT Benu Brenda’s French Soul Food In Situ Kin Khao Niku Steakhouse Rintaro STEM Kitchen & Garden DRINK 21st Amendment Brewery & Restaurant Anchor Public Taps B Restaurant & Bar Black Hammer Brewing Charmaine’s Rooftop Bar & Lounge Dirty Habit Press Club Sightglass Coffee Terroir Whitechapel SHOP BaBoo McGuire Furniture Zozi’s Loft ARTS & CULTURE Catharine Clark Gallery Luggage Store Gallery Museum of the African Diaspora New Conservatory Theatre Center Sea Change Kinetic Sculpture SOMArts Cultural Center SFMOMA Tenderloin Museum Nightlife AMC Metreon 16 Asia SF Audio Black Cat Bawdy Storytelling Butter Cat Club The EndUp Great American Music Hall Moad Open Mic Mortified Live OASIS PianoFight Raven Bar Rickshaw Stop The Setup SF Eagle Temple OUTDOORS Kayaking Tours Sailing Trips g Maps g Contents ← MAP 4 → n Double-tap image to read the labels EAT AL’s Place Blue Plate Californios Craftsman and Wolves Eterna Primavera Flour + Water Foreign Cinema Gracias Madre Lazy Bear Liholiho Yacht Club Peaches Patties Taqueria Cancun Tartine Bakery DRINK Barebottle Brewing The Beehive El Techo de Lolinda Fort Point Valenica The Monk’s Kettle Philz Coffee The Sycamore Trick Dog True Laurel Wild Side West SHOP Betabrand Community Thrift Dog Eared Books Gravel & Gold Heath Ceramics Nooworks Omnivore Books On Food Stranded Thrillhouse Records Tigerlily Perfumery Timbuk2 Factory Store ARTS & CULTURE Creativity Explored The Marsh Mission Murals Peephole Cinema Theatre of Yugen Nightlife Alamo Drafthouse The Chapel The Knockout Manny’s Other Cinema Roxie Theater Stage Werx UHAUL SF Writers with Drinks OUTDOORS Bernal Heights Park Kadampa Meditation Center SF g Maps g Contents ← MAP 5 → n Double-tap image to read the labels EAT Atelier Crenn Breadbelly B Star Bar Jane on Fillmore KAIYŌ Pizzetta 211 Salt & Straw Wildseed DRINK California Wine Merchant High Treason SHOP Green Apple Books Inner Sunset Flea March ARTS & CULTURE Andy Goldsworthy Sculptures California Academy of Sciences St.

pages: 769 words: 397,677

Frommer's California 2007 by Harry Basch, Mark Hiss, Erika Lenkert, Matthew Richard Poole

airport security, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, Columbine, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, Maui Hawaii, retail therapy, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

SOMA Although this area is too big and shops are too scattered to be suitable for strolling, you’ll find good discount shopping, along with a few great regular retail shops, in warehouse spaces south of Market. Most major hotels carry discount-shopping guides. Many buses pass through this area, including nos. 9, 12, 14, 15, 19, 26, 27, 30, 42, 45, and 76. The SFMOMA MuseumStore, 151 Third St., 2 blocks south of Market Street, across from Yerba Buena Gardens (& 415/357-4035; www.sfmoma.org), is a favorite among locals. The shop’s art cards and books, as well as jewelry, housewares, and knickknacks are well designed. For visitors, the San Francisco mementos here are much more tasteful than those sold in Fisherman’s Wharf.

…

Other popular features include: • • • • Online updates of our most popular guidebooks Vacation sweepstakes and contest giveaways Newsletters highlighting the hottest travel trends Online travel message boards with featured travel discussions What’s New in California SAN FRANCISCO San Francisco doesn’t appear to have enough undeveloped space to welcome a few more parking spaces, let alone major development, but it is evolving and changing at an astounding pace. Anyone who hasn’t been here in a few years will marvel at how much more attractive the Embarcadero waterfront is—not to mention how much more there is to do there. Likewise for South of Market (SoMa), which, despite a mass exodus of start-up companies after the dot.com bust, has become an epicenter of urban regrowth, with a burgeoning number of lofts, shops, and restaurants near the ballpark, and four-star hotels and museums around Yerba Buena Gardens.

…

Safety Few locals would recommend walking alone late at night in certain areas, particularly the Tenderloin, between Union Square and the Civic Center. Compared to dodgy neighborhoods in other cities, however, even this section of San Francisco is relatively tranquil. You should also be alert in the Mission District, around 16th and Mission streets; the lower Fillmore area, around lower Haight Street; and SoMa (south of Market St.). Taxes An 8.5% sales tax is added at the register for all goods and services purchased in San Francisco. The city hotel tax is a whopping 14%. Transit Information For live help, call Muni (& 415/673-6864) weekdays from 6am to 8pm, and weekends 8am to 6pm.

pages: 256 words: 58,652

The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993 by Jordan Mechner

game design, Menlo Park, place-making, restrictive zoning, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs

I wondered where Tomi was. She’d been supposed to meet Rob Finkelstein in Menlo Park to watch the game on TV. I looked around and there she was, coming down the sidewalk. I’d never been so happy to see someone. We sat in her car and listened to the radio. When we heard that some buildings had fallen down south of Market, and a 50-foot section of the Bay Bridge had collapsed, it finally started to sink in that we were in the middle of a major event. By now they were calling it 6.9 or 7.0. I took Tomi upstairs and showed her the damage. She was impressed. It seemed like it would be a good idea to get out of the city, but the radio was telling everyone to stay put, and the prospect of getting stuck in a mass exodus of bumper-to-bumper traffic was not appealing.

…

I like the nuts-and-bolts aspects of working on this project, too. I hate to admit it, but it’s more fun than 16mm student filmmaking. So, why don’t I do more of it? A question I’m beginning to ask seriously. As in, why don’t I come back in (say) December, rent a one-bedroom in North Beach or south of Market, pitch a new project to Broderbund, and live half the year here and half in Paris? In May 1993 Robert will be out of school… he’d join me and Tomi in a flash. It’s something to think about. Ken Goldstein (Yale ’84) is working for Broderbund. Man, was I surprised to see him. Small world.

…

“Actually,” Ed said, “I was expecting you today.” My life is about to change. California September 10, 1986 [San Francisco] “I thought you were the pizza man,” Tomi said when she opened the door to the Baker Street apartment and saw me there at the top of the steep steps with my two bags. Now I’m reclining in luxury in one of their new armchairs, listening to Maurizio Pollini play Chopin preludes on their new CD player. There’s a stunning view of San Francisco Bay out the windows that makes my stomach contract every time I look at it. Did I mention that I’m scared? Getting a ride to work this morning with Tomi, pulling into the Broderbund parking lot – that was scary.

Lonely Planet's Best of USA by Lonely Planet

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, Golden Gate Park, haute cuisine, mass immigration, obamacare, off-the-grid, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, the High Line, the payments system, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, Works Progress Administration

San Francisco 1 Sights 1 Aquarium of the Bay C1 2 Beat Museum D3 3 Children’s Creativity Museum D7 4 Chinatown Alleyways C4 5 Chinese Historical Society of America C4 6 City Lights Bookstore C3 7 Coit Tower D2 8 Commercial Street D4 9 Exploratorium E3 10 Ferry Building E4 11 George Sterling Park A3 12 Justin Herman Plaza E4 13 Lombard Street A2 14 Maritime National Historical Park A1 15 Ross Alley C4 16 Spofford Alley C4 17 Tin How Temple C4 2 Activities, Courses & Tours 18 Chinatown Alleyway Tours D4 5 Eating 19 Brenda’s French Soul Food A7 20 City View D4 21 Cocotte A4 22 Cotogna D3 23 Ferry Plaza Farmers Market F4 24 Mijita F4 25 Molinari C3 26 Swan Oyster Depot A5 6 Drinking & Nightlife 27 Aunt Charlie’s Lounge C7 28 Caffe Trieste C3 29 Comstock Saloon D4 30 Tonga Room C5 31 Top of the Mark C5 3 Entertainment 32 Beach Blanket Babylon C3 33 San Francisco Giants F8 34 San Francisco Opera A8 35 SFJAZZ Center A8 7 Shopping 36 Britex Fabrics C6 37 Electric Works B8 38 Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Company C4 39 Heath Ceramics F4 1 SIGHTS Let San Francisco’s 43 hills stretch your legs and your imagination as they deliver breathtaking views. Keep your city smarts and wits about you in the Tenderloin and South of Market (SoMa) neighborhoods. 1 Embarcadero Exploratorium Museum Map Google Map Is there a science to skateboarding?

…

. (%415-984-1478; www.chinatownalleywaytours.org/; tours depart Portsmouth Sq, near Washington & Kearny Sts; adult/student $26/16; htours 11am Mon, Tue & Sat, 3pm Thu & Fri; c; g1, 8, 10, 12, 30, 41, 45, jCalifornia St, Powell-Mason, Powell-Hyde) OVERSNAP / GETTY IMAGES © LGBT San Francisco Doesn’t matter where you’re from, who you love or who’s your daddy: if you’re here, and queer, welcome home. The Castro is the historic heart of the gay scene. South of Market (SoMa) has leather bars and thump-thump clubs. The Mission is the preferred ’hood for many women and a diverse transgender community. Cafe Flore You haven’t done the Castro till you’ve idled on the sun-drenched patio – everyone winds up here sooner or later.

…

If California is one grand, sweeping gesture, a long arm cradling the Pacific, then San Francisco – that seven-by-seven-mile peninsula – is a forefinger pointing upward. Take this as a hint to look up: you’ll notice San Francisco’s crooked Victorian rooflines, wind-sculpted treetops and fog tumbling over the Golden Gate Bridge. Cable car / BILLY RICHARDS PHOTOGRAPHY / GETTY IMAGES © y In This Section Golden Gate Bridge Cable Cars Alcatraz Ferry Building Chinatown Sights Tours Shopping Entertainment Eating Drinking & Nightlife San Francisco Airport / KAREN DESJARDIN / GETTY IMAGES © 8 Arriving in San Francisco San Francisco Airport (SFO) Fast, 30-minute rides to Downtown on BART cost $8.65; door-to-door shuttle vans cost $17 to $20; express bus fare to the Temporary Transbay Bus Terminal is $5; taxis cost $40 to $55.

pages: 394 words: 108,215

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, card file, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, punch-card reader, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, union organizing, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

After several newspaper accounts appeared, Moore was besieged with financial requests both by phone and mail. And like Frodo’s ring, the money wouldn’t stay in the ground. Despite his views on the institutions that controlled money, Moore was soon forcibly turned into a “people’s banker” when a small group of San Francisco activists who were engaged in building a collective in a warehouse in a tattered neighborhood south of Market Street heard about the windfall. Project One was a single site that encompassed a diverse set of community political projects, ranging from education to organizing to theater to one of the first community time-sharing computer efforts, which was called Resource One and had become the final resting place for Doug Engelbart’s SDS-940.

…

Franklin eventually coauthored What to Do After You Hit Return with Albrecht, an introduction to programming games in BASIC that soon became a hot seller. Another of the potluck regulars was Lee Felsenstein, who would arrive each Wednesday evening by train from San Francisco, where he was tending an SRI mainframe computer that had been donated by the Transamerica Leasing Corporation to Project One community activists who had taken over a warehouse in the city’s South-of-Market district. For Felsenstein, the PCC was a glimpse of the future, as forecast by Nelson and Albrecht. A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement whose career had already run the gamut from being a junior engineer at Ampex to working on the editorial collective of the Berkeley Barb, Felsenstein, like Lenny Siegel at Stanford, was an antiwar activist who was not anti-technology.

…

During the next four years, initially charging subjects five hundred dollars to participate in a study of LSD and creativity, the foundation ultimately led more than 350 people, including some of the Valley’s best engineers, through their first psychedelic experiences. On the San Francisco Midpeninsula, the late fifties and the early sixties were a bucolic time. Kepler’s bookstore on El Camino Real, just two miles north of the Stanford University campus, served as a beacon for an eclectic group of intellectuals who were outsiders in a community that was largely split in its economic dependence among Stanford, a fledgling electronics industry, and large military contractors like Lockheed. Woodside, a forested town just northwest of Stanford, was already a bedroom community and retreat, but for an earlier San Francisco financial elite with roots in the California Gold Rush.

A Paradise Built in Hell: Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, centre right, Community Supported Agriculture, David Graeber, different worldview, dumpster diving, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, illegal immigration, Loma Prieta earthquake, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, San Francisco homelessness, South of Market, San Francisco, Thomas Malthus, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

The socialist novelist Jack London, whose birthplace in the poor district south of Market Street burned in the quake aftermath, agreed: “Remarkable as it may seem, Wednesday night while the whole city crashed and roared into ruin, was a quiet night. There were no crowds. There was no shouting and yelling. There was no hysteria, no disorder. I passed Wednesday night in the path of the advancing flames, and in all those terrible hours I saw not one woman who wept, not one man who was excited, not one person who was in the slightest degree panic-stricken. The most perfect courtesy obtained. Never in all San Francisco’s history, were her people so kind and courteous as on this night of terror.”

…

When they were done, half the city was ash and rubble, more than twenty-eight thousand buildings had been destroyed, and more than half the population of four hundred thousand was homeless. Mansions burned down atop Nob Hill; the slum district south of Market Street was nearly erased. The disaster provoked, as most do, a mixed reaction: generosity and solidarity among most of the citizens, and hostility from those who feared that public and sought to control it, in the belief that an unsubjugated citizenry was—in the words of Funston—“an unlicked mob.” For all the picturesqueness of men in bowler hats and women in long skirts fleeing a disaster more than a century ago, the San Francisco earthquake has, in all its essentials, the same ingredients as most contemporary disasters, the same social solidarities and schisms, the same generous and destructive characters.

…

The writer Mary Austin, who was there for the earthquake and its aftermath, said that the people of San Francisco became houseless, but not homeless, “for it comes to this with the bulk of San Franciscans, that they discovered the place and the spirit to be home rather than the walls and the furnishings. No matter how the insurance totals foot up, what landmarks, what treasures of art are evanished, San Francisco, our San Francisco is all there yet. Fast as the tall banners of smoke rose up and the flames reddened them, rose up with it something impalpable, like an exhalation.” Mary Austin’s San Francisco didn’t burn down, it rose up. The morning of the quake, policeman H.

pages: 482 words: 147,281

A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asilomar, butterfly effect, California gold rush, content marketing, Easter island, Elisha Otis, Golden Gate Park, index card, indoor plumbing, lateral thinking, Loma Prieta earthquake, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, place-making, risk tolerance, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, supervolcano, The Chicago School, transcontinental railway, wage slave, Works Progress Administration

The Ultimate Guide to San Francisco. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1989 Dickson, Samuel. San Francisco is Your Home. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1947 Dillon, Richard H. The Hatchet Men. New York: Coward-McCann, 1962 —Embarcadero. New York: Coward-McCann, 1959 —Shanghaiing Days. New York: Coward-McCann, 1961 Downs, Tom. San Francisco. Victoria, Australia: Lonely Planet Publications, 2002 Eames, David B. San Francisco Street Secrets: The Stories behind San Francisco Street Names. [n.p.]: Gem Guide Books, 1995 Elliott, James Welsh. Taylor & Taylor: A Reminiscence. San Francisco: The Kemble Collections, 1985 Erickson, Jon.

…

London: Cassell, 2002 Turner, Patricia (ed.). 1906 Remembered: First-hand Accounts of the San Francisco Disaster. San Francisco: Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, 1981 Watkins, T. H., and R. R. Olmsted. Mirror of the Dream: An Illustrated History of San Francisco. San Francisco: Scrimshaw Press, 1976 Weber, Francis J. A Bicentennial Compendium of Maynard J. Geiger’s ‘The Life and Times of Fray Junipero Serra’. San Luis Obispo, CA: EZ Nature Books, 1988 Wiley, Peter Booth. National Trust Guide: San Francisco. New York: John Wiley, 2000 Wilson, James Russel (‘The Well-known Author’). San Francisco’s Horror of Earthquake and Fire, Terrible Devastation and Heart-Rending Scenes, Immense Loss of Life and Hundreds of Millions of Property Destroyed.

…

Outpost of Empire: The Story of the Founding of San Francisco. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939 Brechin, Gray. Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999 Bronson, William. The Earth Shook, the Sky Burned. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1986 Brook, James, Chris Carlsson, and Nancy J. Peters (eds.). Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998 Butler, Jon, Grant Wacker, and Randall Balmer. Religion in American Life: A Short History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002 Caen, Herb. The San Francisco Book. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948 —and Dong Kingman.

pages: 332 words: 97,325

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups by Randall Stross

affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, always be closing, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Elon Musk, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, inventory management, John Markoff, Justin.tv, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, medical residency, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Morris worm, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, transaction costs, Y Combinator

See also Kalvins Ries, Eric, 55, 77, 147 RocketMail, 151 RocketSpace, 136 Rolnitzky, David, 89–90, 134 Ruby, 31, 124, 148, 193 Rushkoff, Douglas, 267n1 Russell, Andy, 127–28 Sacca, Chris, 57, 61 Said Business School, 57 Salesforce.com, 31, 204 Salt Lake City, UT, 42 San Diego, CA, 20 San Francisco, CA, 41, 54 CampusCred, 111 hipsters, 36, 211 living in, 9, 35–36 Mission, 165 MobileWorks, 90 MUNI, 153 rideshare listings, 120–21 Russian Hill, 165 South of Market, 163 Standard Chartered Bank office, 90 Taylor Street, 223–24 Y Scraper, 223–24 YC founders in, 58, 71, 133–34, 141, 142, 163, 229 San Francisco Gray Line, 1 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, 41–42, 202–3 Santa Barbara, CA, 20 Sapient, 29 Say It Visually, 101–2 Schmidt, Geoff, 234 Science Exchange, 46, 163, 171–82 Scott, Riley, 51 Scribd, 166, 224, 230 Seattle, WA, 71 Securities Act of 1933, 205 Seibel, Michael, 142, 144, 228, 229 Sequoia Capital, 3, 66, 74, 86, 87, 153, 157 Seyal, Omar, 66, 151 Shah, Sagar, 110–14, 117, 136–37 Sharpie, 165 Shazam, 81 Shear, Emmett education, 15 Kan, Daniel, 229 Kan, Justin, 162–63 Kiko, 14, 16, 23 Justin.tv, 141–44 Rap Genius, 201 Twitch.tv, 144–47, 228 2005, summer batch, 14–16 YC partner, 63, 150 Shen, Jason, 68, 69, 163–64, 266n3 AnyAsq, 166 Art of Ass-Kicking blog, 9 Demo Day, 211 finalist interview, 10 Prototype Day, 120–21 Rehearsal Day, 187–88 Shirky, Clay, 105 Shpilman, Felix, 88, 222 Siberian ginseng, 134 Sift Science, 70–76, 121, 134, 138, 210 Silicon Valley Australian view of, 267n6 failure, forgiving of, 220 image, 114 merit over seniority, 60 programmers, 212 startups, 56–57, 58–59 Taggar, Harj, 58–60 tours, 1 uniqueness of, 237, 238 women in, 54 YC, 40 Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford, 57 Silver Tail, 54 Sims, Zach, 124–25, 147–49, 192–93, 194–96, 215–16, 227 Singapore, 154, 238 Skype, 17, 38, 124, 223, 265n1 Snapjoy, 43–44, 103, 130–33, 186–87, 194 Socialcam, 144, 147, 228 software is eating the world, 1–2, 6, 216, 238, 239 South Africa, 17 Spain, 238 Spanish (language), 213 Splitterbug, 123, 187, 209 Square, 91 Stamatiou, Paul, 219 Standard Chartered Bank, 90 Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, 47 Bing Nursery School, 52 computer science students, 47, 60, 66, 256n6 dorms, 52 Google, 86 graduates of, 9, 29, 68, 91, 214, 261n1, 266n3 photo books, 10 Stanford Daily, 163 students, current, 213 Start Fund, 43, 95, 137, 169, 219, 233 Andreesen Horowitz, 230 beginnings, 4, 28 Clerky, 126 Graham, Paul, 35, 87–88 Science Exchange, 179 Shpilman, Felix, 88 Tagstand, 154 Steiner, Chris, 51, 191, 208–9, 264n2 Stigsen, Alexander, 51, 103 Stripe, 64–66 Stypi, 194 Su, Andy, 52–53 Sunnyvale, CA, 125, 130, 149 SuperValu, 209 Suzman, Ted, 164–65, 224 Suzman, Tim, 164–68, 223–24 SV Angel, 137, 219, 233 Andreesen Horowitz, 230 Clerky, 126 Conway, Ron, 88–89 Lee, David, 88–89, 91 MongoHQ, 95 Science Exchange, 179 Stripe, 66 Tagstand, 154 Sweden, 168, 238 Swedish, 214 Taggar, Harj (Harjeet) AnyAsq, 166 Auctomatic, 60–63, 204 Boso, 57–58 coding, 58, 60 Kalvins/Ridejoy, 68 Rap Genius, 80–85, 127, 196 Sift Science, 71–75 Silicon Valley, 58–60 speaking style, 81 on startups, 59, 61, 66, 161–62 2007, winter, 58–61 YC partner, 62–63, 150, 166, 256–57n3, 263n13 Taggar, Kulveer, 151–60 Auctomatic, 60–62, 159, 204 Boso, 57–58 coding, 58, 60 Demo Day, 210, 264n1 Tagstand, 66 YC, 58–61, 66, 154, 160 Tagstand, 66, 151–60 Taiwan, 238 Tam, Chris, 98–100 Tamagotchi, 156 Tamplin, James, 134–36, 138 Tan, Garry Science Exchange, 171, 180–81 Tagstand, 151, 155 YC partner, 63, 64, 150 Tan, Jason, 71–76, 121, 134–36, 210 TapEngage, 187, 192, 209 Target, 169 TaskRabbit, 54 Tech Wildcatters, 41 TechCrunch, 93, 197 Codecademy, 195, 227 Snapjoy, 131 Socialcam, 147 women, 48 YC, 194 TechStars, 41, 42–44, 53, 169, 255n5–6, 255n10, 261n2 10gen, 30, 93 Thiel, Peter, 66, 140, 261n1 Thing Marks, 148 Thomas, Eric, 106, 108 TightDB, 51, 103, 223 Toontastic, 127–28 Topps, 152 Traf-O-Data, 16 Transition School, 15 Trott, Mena, 46 Tumblr, 147 Turkey, 17 Twitch.tv, 145–47, 228 Twitter, 57, 58, 91 Codecademy, 195, 227 Conway, Ron, 87 female users, 256n10 NowSpots, 168 Socialcam, 147 280 North, 64 UC Davis, 20 UCLA, 20 UC San Diego, 20 UC Santa Cruz, 20 UK, 17, 57, 59, 61, 184, 238 Union Square Ventures, 267n1 United Nations, 162, 214 University of Maryland, 39 University of Miami, 171 University of Southern California, 20, 88 University of Texas, Austin, 112 University of Washington, 15, 70, 71 U.S.

…

In the fall of 2009, Shen and Wang got an apartment in San Francisco but didn’t then work together. Shen, who had studied biology and philosophy, worked after graduation as the business manager of the Stanford Daily and commuted down to Stanford. Wang, a computer science major, worked at a number of startups and landed at Virgance, an incubator located in the South of Market area of San Francisco, not far from their apartment. The two needed to find someone for the third bedroom in their apartment. They ran an ad on Craigslist, brought in a roommate whom they had to ask to leave after only three months, and found themselves having to start over. This time, however, they determined to go about their search differently.

…

12 HACKATHON 13 NEW IDEAS 14 RISK 15 MARRIED 16 FEARSOME 17 PAY ATTENTION 18 GROWTH 19 FIND A DROPBOX 20 DON’T QUIT 21 SOFTWARE IS EATING THE WORLD Epilogue Acknowledgments Appendix: The Summer 2011 Batch Notes Index INTRODUCTION San Francisco Gray Line is the largest sightseeing tour company in Northern California. It offers tours of San Francisco, of Muir Woods and Sausalito or the wine country north of the city, but it no longer offers a tour of Silicon Valley, immediately south. From a bus seat, there just isn’t much to be seen.1 Silicon Valley’s past is more accessible than its present.

pages: 444 words: 127,259

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

Chapter 3 POST-POP DEPRESSION Despite the RIAA’s obliteration of Scour and the betrayal by Ovitz, Kalanick walked away from bankruptcy court with some money in his pocket. He had thought Scour was going to be worth millions of dollars—and had he been just a few years older and lived five hundred miles to the north he might have been right. When Travis Kalanick was still an undergrad, South of Market—SoMa for short—in San Francisco was a dot-com wonderland. In the 1990s, the airy lofts at the corner of Second and Bryant housed dozens of startups with dreams of transforming the web. Companies like Bigwords.com, Macromedia, and Substance were quartered along South Park, a cozy green area tucked between Second and Third streets.

…

v=TS0NuV-zLZE. 244 “We will impound the vehicle”: Victor Fiorillo, “Uber Launches UberX In Philadelphia, but PPA Says ‘Not So Fast,’ ” Philadelphia, October 25, 2014, https://www.phillymag.com/news/2014/10/25/uber-launches-uberx-philadelphia/. 244 “UBERX: REMINDER”: Documents held by author. 245 a behavior engineers called “eyeballing”: Mike Isaac, “How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide,” New York Times, March 3, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html. 247 “Uber has for years used”: Isaac, “How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide.” 247 Uber’s security chief, prohibited employees: Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Uber Seeks to Prevent Use of Greyball to Thwart Regulators,” New York Times, March 8, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/business/uber-regulators-police-greyball.html. 247 Department of Justice opened a probe: Mike Isaac, “Uber Faces Federal Inquiry Over Use of Greyball Tool to Evade Authorities,” New York Times, May 4, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/technology/uber-federal-inquiry-software-greyball.html. 247 the inquiry widened to Philadelphia: Mike Isaac, “Justice Department Expands Its Inquiry into Uber’s Greyball Tool,” New York Times, May 5, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/technology/uber-greyball-investigation-expands.html. 248 He called it The Rideshare Guy: Harry Campbell, “About the Rideshare Guy: Harry Campbell,” The Rideshare Guy (blog), https://therideshareguy.com/about-the-rideshare-guy/. 248 directly due to the string of controversies: Kara Swisher and Johana Bhuiyan, “Uber President Jeff Jones Is Quitting, Citing Differences Over ‘Beliefs and Approach to Leadership,’ ” Recode, March 19, 2017, https://www.recode.net/2017/3/19/14976110/uber-president-jeff-jones-quits. 250 “there’s just a bunch of models”: Emily Peck, “Travis Kalanick’s Ex Reveals New Details About Uber’s Sexist Culture,” Huffington Post, March 29, 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/travis-kalanick-gabi-holzwarth-uber_us_58da7341e4b018c4606b8ec9. 253 “I am so sorry for being cold”: Amir Efrati, “Uber Group’s Visit to Seoul Escort Bar Sparked HR Complaint,” The Information, March 24, 2017, https://www.theinformation.com/articles/uber-groups-visit-to-seoul-escort-bar-sparked-hr-complaint. 253 reporter’s cell phone number: Efrati, “Uber Group’s Visit to Seoul Escort Bar.” Chapter 26: FATAL ERRORS 254 who called the maneuver illegal: Mike Isaac, “Uber Expands Self-Driving Car Service to San Francisco. D.M.V. Says It’s Illegal.,” New York Times, December 14, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/technology/uber-self-driving-car-san-francisco.html. 254 Uber issued a statement: Isaac, “Uber Expands Self-Driving Car Service to San Francisco.” 255 Uber’s narrative was false: Mike Isaac and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “A Lawsuit Against Uber Highlights the Rush to Conquer Driverless Cars,” New York Times, February 24, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/technology/anthony-levandowski-waymo-uber-google-lawsuit.html. 255 Levandowski was unceremoniously terminated: Mike Isaac and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Uber Fires Former Google Engineer at Heart of Self-Driving Dispute,” New York Times, May 30, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/30/technology/uber-anthony-levandowski.html. 256 “possible theft of trade secrets”: Aarian Marshall, “Google’s Fight Against Uber Takes a Turn for the Criminal,” Wired, May 12, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/05/googles-fight-uber-takes-turn-criminal/. 256 expressed contrition in a press interview: Mike Isaac, “Uber Releases Diversity Report and Repudiates Its ‘Hard-Charging Attitude,’ ” New York Times, March 28, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/28/technology/uber-scandal-diversity-report.html. 257 existence of Uber’s program “Hell”: Efrati, “Uber’s Top Secret ‘Hell’ Program.” 257 The team kept tabs: Kate Conger, “Uber’s Massive Scraping Program Collected Data About Competitors Around the World,” Gizmodo, December 11, 2017, https://gizmodo.com/ubers-massive-scraping-program-collected-data-about-com-1820887947. 257 recorded private conversations: Paayal Zaveri, “Unsealed Letter in Uber-Waymo Case Details How Uber Employees Allegedly Stole Trade Secrets,” CNBC, December 15, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/15/jacobs-letter-in-uber-waymo-case-says-uber-staff-stole-trade-secrets.html. 261 personal, private medical files: Kara Swisher and Johana Bhuiyan, “A Top Uber Executive, Who Obtained the Medical Records of a Customer Who Was a Rape Victim, Has Been Fired,” Recode, June 7, 2017, https://www.recode.net/2017/6/7/15754316/uber-executive-india-assault-rape-medical-records. 262 it was over for Eric Alexander: Mike Isaac, “Uber Fires Executive Over Handling of Rape Investigation in India,” New York Times, June 7, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/07/technology/uber-fires-executive.html. 262 Kalanick accepted her resignation: Mike Isaac, “Executive Who Steered Uber Through Scandals Joins Exodus,” New York Times, April 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/technology/ubers-head-of-policy-and-communications-joins-executive-exodus.html. 263 “The last note I got from her”: Kalanick, “Dad is getting much better in last 48 hours.” 265 “Over the last seven years”: Unpublished letter, obtained by author.

…

See also Silicon Valley as epicenter of venture deals, 75 popularity of Uber in, 78, 83 regulators in, 86–87 ride-hailing companies based in, 78 rollout of UberCab in, 59–60, 63 success in, 147 transportation in, 41, 44, 48–49, 59–60, 63, 108–9 Uber offices in, xiii, xiv, xix, 83–84, 90, 95, 131, 144, 146, 149, 151–52, 159, 224, 244, 250 US Attorney’s Office in, 255–56 San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, 63 San Mateo, California, 29 Santa Monica, California, 151 São Paolo, Brazil, 174, 195 Sapient, 28 Saudi Arabia, 187, 202, 258, 270–71, 287 Saudi Public Investment Fund, 270, 317 Schifter, Doug, 113 Schildkrout, Aaron, 137–38, 237, 331 Schiller, Phil, 161–62, 163 Schmidt, Eric, 225 Scour.net, 21–25, 28, 31, 81, 106, 189, 192, 286 Seattle, 83, 84 Seoul, South Korea, 250–51 Sequoia Capital, 40, 79, 92n, 98 Shah, Sagar, 117 Sheen, Charlie, 120 Shenzhen, China, 141 Shore Club, 120 Sidecar, 85, 86, 87 Silicon Valley, xi, xviii–xix, 4–9, 22, 27, 29, 71, 132 “asshole culture” in, 119 China and, 140 company-wide dinner service in, 112–14, 117 customer privacy vs. data collection in, 188 entrepreneurs in, 285–86 female chief executives in, 285 “founder” culture in, 74–77 funding ecosystem in, 96 growth as mantra of, 111 IPOs in, 97 security in, 171 Singhal, Amit, 235–36, 254 Slack, 241 Slice Intelligence, 166 SLS, 120 Smith, Ben, 128–31 Snap, 290 Snapchat, 6, 9, 235 Softbank, 316–18, 326–27, 335 Son, Masayoshi (“Masa”), 316–18, 326 South America, 259 South by Southwest (SXSW), 78, 125–26 Southeast Asia, 148, 150, 150n, 187, 194–95, 258, 260, 333 South Korea, 194, 246, 250–51, 254, 256, 260, 262 South of Market (SoMa), 26, 28 Southwestern Bell, 92 SpaceX, 199 Spiegel, Evan, 9, 77, 140 Sprint, 317 Spruce, 78 Stanford University, 289 “Startup Mixology,” 46 Startups.com, 27 Stassinopoulos, Agapi, 228 Stassinopoulos, Elli, 228 Stassinopoulos, Konstantinos, 228 Stitch Fix, 285–86, 335 St.

pages: 220

Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea Into a Global Business by Mikkel Svane, Carlye Adler

Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, credit crunch, David Heinemeier Hansson, Elon Musk, fail fast, housing crisis, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marc Benioﬀ, Menlo Park, remote working, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Tesla Model S, web application

After so many visits to the West Coast, we were sure San Francisco was the right place: being part of a startup industry, the early adopter first-mover customers, the investors, the talent (and talent with actual relevant experience), the sheer density of startups and startup people, and of course the sunshine. And then came the less obvious part—we had to decide where exactly to set up shop. As usual, there was a difference of opinion. I flew out to San Francisco, toured a few office spaces, and selected what I thought to be a solid choice, 410 Townsend Street, in the South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood, which was home to so many software companies including Airbnb, Dropbox, salesforce.com, Twitter, and many more.

…

Starting Over, Again We signed a lease on an office at 410 Townsend in August, and by September 2009 all of us had officially moved to San Francisco. After a beastly summer in Boston, we were looking 119 Page 119 Svane c07.tex V3 - 10/24/2014 9:41 P.M. S TA R TU P L A N D forward to a cool fall in the Fog City, but of course we soon learned that in San Francisco the summers are chilly with fog, but the fall days are warm. When we first flew into SFO there was an unusual heat wave, which made the first couple of nights in San Francisco—again, with no air conditioning—warm and sticky. Before moving over, I had found a nice little house for my family. Unlike in Boston, in San Francisco we could actually find a house that we could afford and that wasn’t hours outside of the city.

…

This was the early days of Netscape Navigator, and the Web was just becoming searchable, but I certainly didn’t know where the Internet was headed. However, a trip to San Francisco in 1995 made everything more clear—it was going to change everything. In San Francisco, everything related to the Internet was being totally embraced. Everything was about the Web. Billboards advertised companies with “www” addresses. My San Franciscan friends ordered food and DVDs online. The Internet was a part of their daily lives. Everyone communicated saying, “Send me an email,” and everybody had an email address. I experienced emailing between Copenhagen and San Francisco and having these messages arrive instantly. I couldn’t believe how much smaller the world was, now that it 10 Page 10 Svane c01.tex V3 - 10/24/2014 8:14 P.M.

Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers by Tom Wolfe

do well by doing good, full employment, means of production, Mount Scopus, plutocrats, South of Market, San Francisco, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom

Would that black apparition, that damnable Negro by the piano, be rising up from the belly of a concert grand for the rest of his natural life? Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers Going downtown to mau-mau the bureaucrats got to be the routine practice in San Francisco. The poverty program encouraged you to go in for mau-mauing. They wouldn't have known what to do without it. The bureaucrats at City Hall and in the Office of Economic Opportunity talked "ghetto" all the time, but they didn't known any more about what was going on in the Western Addition, Hunters Point, Potrero Hill, the Mission, Chinatown, or south of Market Street than they did about Zanzibar. They didn't know where to look. They didn't even know who to ask. So what could they do?

…

Everybody was out mau-mauing up a storm, to see if they could win the victories the blacks had won. San Francisco, being the main port of entry for immigrants from all over the Pacific, had as many colored minorities as New York City. Maybe more. Blacks, Chicanos, Latinos, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, American Indians, Samoans-everybody was circling around the poverty program. By the end of 1968 there were eighty-seven different groups getting into the militant thing, getting into mau-mauing. Nobody kept records on the confrontations, which is too bad. There must have been hundreds of them in San Francisco alone. Across the country there must have been thousands.

…

A lot of whites seemed to think all the angry young men in the ghettos were ready to riseu p and follow the Black Panthers at a moment's notice. Actually the Panthers had a complicated status in the ghettos in San Francisco. You talked to almost any young ace on the street, and he admired the Panthers. He looked up to them. The Panthers were stone courageous. They ripped off the white man and blew his mind and fucked him around like nobody as ever done it. And so on. And yet as an organization the Panthers hardly got a toehold in the ghettos in San Francisco, even though their national headquarters were just over the Bay Bridge in Oakland. Whites always seemed to think they had the ghetto's leaders identified and catalogued, and they were always wrong.

pages: 263 words: 61,784

Patricia Unterman's San Francisco Food Lover's Pocket Guide by Patricia Unterman, Ed Anderson

Blue Bottle Coffee, Golden Gate Park, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, place-making, South of Market, San Francisco

eISBN: 978-0-307-78410-0 v3.1 CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Introduction THE NEIGHBORHOODS Chinatown Civic Center & Hayes Valley Embarcadero & Fisherman’s Wharf Financial District & Union Square Lower and Upper Haight & Cole Valley The Marina & Cow Hollow The Mission, Bernal Heights & the Excelsior Noe Valley, the Castro, Diamond Heights, Upper Market & Glen Park North Beach Pacific Heights & Japantown Polk Street, Nob Hill, Russian Hill & Van Ness Avenue The Richmond South of Market, Third Street & Potrero Hill The Sunset OUT OF TOWN The East Bay Marin County Wine Country INTRODUCTION The San Francisco Food Lover’s Guide was written both for visitors and for residents who want to explore the culinary landscape of their own city. The new pocket edition, fully updated, with shortened entries and a convenient size for purse, glove compartment, or backpack, means that my comprehensive and opinionated restaurant and food guide can always be handy.

…

The new pocket edition, fully updated, with shortened entries and a convenient size for purse, glove compartment, or backpack, means that my comprehensive and opinionated restaurant and food guide can always be handy. For over three decades, I have been developing my sense of taste as a restaurant critic (at the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner), and as a cook both at home and in San Francisco at the Hayes Street Grill, which I own with my partner of thirty years, Richard Sander. But what I really am is an eater, someone who loves food of every kind, but with an almost obsessive discrimination. Such openness combined with unrelenting critical consciousness seems like a paradox; being a connoisseur suggests a narrowing of taste.

…

Delicatessens also sell food to eat on the spot, though usually there are no places in the stores to sit. BAKERIES/PASTRIES The Bay Area is now the undisputed American, and arguably the world, capital of artisanal bread. Of course, San Francisco has a long tradition of bread making, started during the gold rush with our unique sourdough. Few artifacts represent San Francisco to the world as vividly as a crusty, chewy loaf of sourdough bread. However, with the rise of Acme Bread in 1983, Berkeley became the epicenter for high-quality levain and a range of other superb organic breads, albeit on a much smaller scale.

pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

It felt good to be back in the anonymous city—that reassuring place of self-erasure and self-invention. I shivered and, dodging a couple of networked Uber limousines, hailed a licensed yellow cab. “So what’s that new club like?” the driver asked me as we sped off down Battery Street toward San Francisco’s South of Market (SoMa) district, where the new offices of Internet companies like Twitter, Yelp, and Instagram are destroying local businesses. “It’s a failure,” I replied. “An epic fucking failure.” ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Sometimes one gets lucky. In March 2013, at Julia Hobsbawm’s Names Not Numbers conference in the delightful little town of Adeburgh on the Suffolk coast, I had the great fortune to meet the Atlantic Books CEO Toby Munday.

…

,” Letters to the Editor, Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2014. 34 Nick Wingfield, “Seattle Gets Its Own Tech Bus Protest,” New York Times, February 10, 2014. 35 Packer, “Change the World.” 36 Ibid. 37 Guynn, “San Francisco Split by Silicon Valley’s Wealth.” 38 Stephanie Gleason and Rachel Feintzeig, “Startups Are Quick to Fire,” New York Times, December 12, 2013. 39 See, for example, Eric Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (New York: Crown, 2011). 40 Quentin Hardy, “Technology Workers Are Young (Really Young),” New York Times, July 5, 2013. 41 Vivek Wadhwa, “A Code Name for Sexism and Racism,” Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2013. 42 Jon Terbush, “The Tech Industry’s Sexism Problem Is Only Getting Worse,” The Week, September 12, 2013. 43 Jessica Guynn, “Sexism a Problem in Silicon Valley, Critics Say,” Los Angeles Times, October 24, 2013. 44 Terbush, “The Tech Industry’s Sexism Problem Is Only Getting Worse.” 45 Elissa Shevinsky, “That’s It—I’m Finished Defending Sexism in Tech,” Business Insider, September 9, 2013. 46 Max Taves, “Bias Claims Surge Against Tech Industry,” Recorder, August 16, 2013. 47 Colleen Taylor, “Key Details of the Kleiner Perkins Gender Discrimination Lawsuit,” TechCrunch, May 22, 2012. 48 Alan Berube, “All Cities Are Not Created Unequal,” Brookings Institution, February 20, 2014. 49 Timothy Egan, “Dystopia by the Bay,” New York Times, December 5, 2013. 50 Marissa Lagos, “San Francisco Evictions Surge, Reports Find,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 5, 2013. 51 Carolyn Said, “Airbnb Profits Prompted S.F. Eviction, Ex-Tenant Says,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 22, 2014. 52 Ibid. 53 Casy Miner, “In a Divided San Francisco, Private Tech Buses Drive Tension,” NPR.org, December 17, 2013. 54 Andrew Gumbel, “San Francisco’s Guerrilla Protest at Google Buses Wells into Revolt,” Observer, January 25, 2014. 55 Carmel DeAmicis, “BREAKING: Protesters Attack Google Bus in West Oakland,” Pando Daily, December 20, 2013. 56 Robin Wilkey, “Peter Shih ‘10 Things I Hate About You’ Post Draws San Francisco’s Ire, Confirms Startup Stereotypes,” Huffington Post, August 16, 2013. 57 Jose Fitzgerald, “Real Tech Worker Says SF Homeless ‘Grotesque,’ ‘Degenerate,’ ‘Trash,’” San Francisco Bay Guardian, December 11, 2013. 58 Yasha Levine, “Occupy Wall Street Leader Now Works for Google, Wants to Crowdfund a Private Militia,” Pando Daily, February 7, 2014. 59 J.

…

It encapsulates what the New York Times’ Timothy Egan describes as the “dystopia by the Bay”—a San Francisco that is “a one-dimensional town for the 1 percent” and “an allegory of how the rich have changed America for the worse.”10 The Birches’ one-dimensional club is a 58,000-square-foot allegory for the increasingly sharp economic inequities in San Francisco. But there’s an even bigger issue at stake here than the invisible wall in San Francisco separating the few “haves” from the many “have-nots,” including the city’s more than five thousand homeless people. The Battery may be San Francisco’s biggest experiment, but there’s a much bolder social and economic experiment going on in the world outside the club’s tinted windows.

pages: 200 words: 60,314

Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss by Frances Stroh

cognitive dissonance, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Ford Model T, Golden Gate Park, imposter syndrome, Kickstarter, new economy, nuclear winter, post-work, South of Market, San Francisco, urban renewal

I still had the signed copy of Ginsberg’s Collected Poems on my bookshelf in the Haight. It had survived the ’89 quake, when my bookshelf toppled over, crashing into my dresser, sending my books in every direction. Ginsberg had signed the book, his childish inscription the only evidence that still remained of my evening with the Beats. San Francisco Camerawork Gallery was located just south of Market Street in a former warehouse boasting floor-to-ceiling windows, creaky hardwood floors, and a freight elevator that could carry a crowd, twenty at a time, two floors up to the opening reception. I’d spent nearly twenty-four hours installing my piece, breaking for a short nap on the gallery couch sometime before dawn, and afterward heading to the airport to retrieve my parents.

…

He was a big fan, apparently, of lemurs. When the salads arrived, Ginsberg praised the restaurant’s tofu-tahini dressing. I seized my chance to join the conversation. “I know. I’ll miss this dressing when I’m in San Francisco,” I told him. “Ah, San Francisco,” said Ginsberg with an ironic little twirl of his salad fork. “And what ’ill you be doing there?” “I’m going to be an artist.” Nodding vaguely, he encouraged me to spend time at the San Francisco Art Institute. “It’s a wonderful place,” he said. “I taught a writing workshop there once.” After dinner we all drove to an auditorium on campus where Ginsberg would read. My friends and I sat on the edge of the stage, drinking red wine from the bottle, as the beatniks had once done at Ginsberg’s quixotic first reading of “Howl” in North Beach.

…

“You know? I really miss everyone.” My work had been selected as part of a group exhibition at San Francisco Camerawork Gallery entitled The Family Seen. Video screens of my family members talking would play in a darkened room simultaneously. We’d all met in Dallas for a couple of days so I could shoot the interviews—the only time the four of us had ever met outside a family occasion. Whitney had come all the way from Missoula, where he was a senior at the University of Montana. I had come from San Francisco, where I lived and worked as an artist. Bobby and Charlie lived near each other in Dallas but hardly saw each other.

pages: 237 words: 74,109

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional

The programmers arrived with a flood of nontechnical carpetbaggers: former Ph.D. students and middle-school teachers, public defenders and chamber music singers, financial analysts and assembly-line operators, me. I had booked another bedroom using the home-sharing platform, this time in the South of Market neighborhood, several blocks from the office. The room was on the garden level of a duplex, adjacent to a concrete patio and accessed through an alley, just past the recycling bins. It was decorated with the same lightweight, self-assembly furniture as my friends’ bedrooms back in Brooklyn. The woman who operated the rental was an entrepreneur in the renewable-energy space and described herself as never home.

…

Most of the founders’ professional network—the other startups in their venture capitalists’ portfolios—lived in the Bay Area. The CPO spoke wistfully of California. “I maintain that San Francisco is the best place to be a young person,” he told me. “You should really try to get out there before too long.” I wanted to tell him that I thought I was still young: I was only twenty-five. Instead, I told him I would try. Everyone I knew in San Francisco had already left. Our college class had graduated straight into a recession, and while most of us trudged to New York or Boston to compete for unpaid internships and other scraps of a ravaged economy, those who moved west refused to bend to despair.

…

It was a world I wasn’t sure I could still call mine. If, in New York, I had never considered that there were people behind the internet, in San Francisco it was impossible to forget. Bubbly startup logos glowed from the tops of warehouses and office towers, and adorned the hats and vests and cycling kits of commuters downtown. The city was dotted with reminders that the English language was being disrupted. The stretch of highway that swept Silicon Valley, from San Francisco down to San Jose—where the money really started to tumble; where billboard space cost the most—was flanked with advertisements pitching software products to software developers in a language that only somewhat resembled modern speech.

pages: 265 words: 69,310

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Lichaa, 32 years old, advertised seats for the “mac attack” on a site called EatFeastly.com for $19.80 each.2 And here is Wired magazine, in the same vein: In about 40 minutes, Cindy Manit will let a complete stranger into her car. An app on her windshield-mounted iPhone will summon her to a corner in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, where a russet-haired woman in an orange raincoat and coffee-colored boots will slip into the front seat of her immaculate 2006 Mazda3 hatchback and ask for a ride to the airport.3 Peers is only one lens through which to view the makeup of the Sharing Economy. In 2013 Rachel Botsman presented a classification of Sharing Economy services,4 and in a 2015 report, consultant Jeremiah Owyang presented his own profile.5 In addition to the examples given above, Botsman and Owyang each highlight some sectors that are less well-represented among the Peers membership.

…

Taxi earnings and employment models vary greatly from city to city, but comparing Uber’s estimates to taxi reports from Los Angeles, San Diego, and Toronto shows that Uber’s 20% cut of the fare, plus its $1 “safety fee” was about the same as that taken by medallion owners; there was no magic there after all.46 Payments for gas, maintenance, car depreciation, and insurance together with additional expenses (tolls, parking) accounted for about half of each dollar of taxi fare, which would take the earnings down to more like $45,000 in New York and $37,000 in San Francisco. Uber did not choose New York City and San Francisco at random for their report: the company selected these two cities because that’s where Uber drivers earn the most. A later report47 showed that New York City earnings were 50% more than those in any other city except for San Francisco, which was comfortably in second place, so in many cities the earnings would come to about $30,000, which is the average for a taxi driver. Once additional expenses are accounted for, the “astounding” gap between Uber earnings and taxi earnings vanished.

…

The Guardian, December 15, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/15/uber-offers-free-rides-after-backlash-over-surge-pricing-during-sydney-siege. Crunchbase. “TaskRabbit.” CrunchBase. Accessed June 19, 2015. https://www .crunchbase.com/organization/taskrabbit. Cushing, Ellen. “Uber Employees Warned a San Francisco Magazine Writer That Executives Might Snoop on Her.” Accessed May 23, 2015. http://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/uber-employees-warned-san-francisco-magazine-writer-executives-might-snoop-her. Dale, Daniel. “Council Votes to Overhaul Toronto Taxi Industry.” The Toronto Star, February 19, 2014. http://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2014/02/19/council_votes_to_overhaul_toronto_taxi_industry.html.

pages: 232 words: 71,965

Dead Companies Walking by Scott Fearon

Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cost per available seat-mile, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear of failure, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, housing crisis, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Larry Ellison, late fees, legacy carrier, McMansion, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, young professional

You might as well start measuring your head for a shiny new tinfoil hat, because you’ve officially crossed over into an alternate universe. And yet most people in the valley thought Bandel and I were the crazy ones for being skeptical of this nonsense. Sunk One month after my visit to Women.com, I parked my car on Brannan Street in the South of Market neighborhood of San Francisco and strolled into the corporate headquarters of a company called Quokka Sports (stock symbol: QKKA). Its CEO was a youthful, energetic Aussie named Alan. He had curly blond hair, brilliant white teeth, and an unusual idea for the next big thing in sports broadcasting. “Yacht racing!”

…

Chapman has never been shy about criticizing the managers of businesses he invests in, but he was particularly pointed with the brass at BMHC. He took to publicly calling out Rob as “San Francisco’s own $6 Million Man” and urged the company to reduce “its bloated cost structure.”* Even as the housing crisis became a clear supercycle event, BMHC—again, a low-margin commodity and service provider with its roots in Boise, Idaho—kept its tony corporate headquarters on the San Francisco waterfront. That fact alone, even more than the firm’s increasingly gruesome finances, convinced me to short its stock. Relatively speaking, the expense of maintaining the San Francisco office might have been small compared to BMHC’s overall budget, but the symbolism of it was enormous.

…

It taught me perhaps the single most important lesson about business and about life: Things go wrong more often than they go right. Failure is actually a natural—even crucial—element of a healthy economy. And the people who are willing to acknowledge that fact can make a hell of a lot of money. The Business of Failure Shortly after the collapse, I left Houston for the San Francisco Bay Area. From 1987 to 1990, I managed a mutual fund in downtown San Francisco. Since 1991, I’ve run a hedge fund from a modest Marin County office park in the shadow of Mount Tamalpais. I’ve lived through several more booms and busts since then, but I’ve almost always managed to make a profit, even in the worst of times. Over twenty-three years, my fund rose roughly 1,100 percent after all fees—significantly higher than the S&P 500’s total return during that same period.

pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

“Despite the perception” “How to Determine the Value of Your Pre-Revenue Startup,” January 2015, entrepreneur.com. a seven-year lease Blanca Torres, “NerdWallet Signs Lease for New Market Street Headquarters in San Francisco,” June 13, 2014, bizjournals.com. “Fail Wall” Julie Balise, “At NerdWallet, Nerds and Finance Rule,” June 17, 2015, sfgate.com. “room to grow” Joe Gose, “Office REITs Counting on Record Rent Levels in San Francisco,” September 3, 2014, theregistrysf.com; Dan Levy, “San Francisco’s Blighted Market Street Reborn as Tech Hub,” September 18, 2013, bloomberg.com. Tim Chen Jonathan Shieber, “Scorching FinTech Market Keeps Attracting New Players as NerdWallet Raises $64 Million,” May 11, 2015, techcrunch.com.

…

At $85 per night, the place cost less than the market average, but still more than I could afford. On the upside, it was in what the real estate hucksters called SoMa—a trendy neighborhood well suited to my journalistic and entrepreneurial purposes. Once a low-rent manufacturing district, the South of Market Street area had become the go-to place for startups seeking industrial-chic open-plan offices, though the poor and homeless had not yet been fully purged. The ad for Hacker Condo stated an express preference for techies: “We would like to welcome motivated and serious entrepreneurs who are looking to expand their network,” it said.

…

The only way 99.99999 percent of us are going to become billionaires is through some Weimaresque economic cataclysm that leaves us pushing wheelbarrows full of high-denomination bills to barren grocery stores, where we can wait in long lines to buy stale bread and muesli cut with sawdust. Another thing I didn’t know when I packed up and flew to San Francisco in 2015, but which appears evident today, was that those days might come faster than most “reasonable” people thought. I Poor Winners Within hours of my arrival in the gleaming consumer paradise of boom-time San Francisco, people started giving me free things. Free snacks, free liquor, free T-shirts, free tchotchkes, free personal brand-building buzz, free advice—it was all there for the taking, emblazoned with corporate logos and gifted, ultimately, by benefactors who rarely showed their faces.

pages: 404 words: 118,759

The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature by Ben Tarnoff

California gold rush, interchangeable parts, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, new economy, New Journalism, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, South of Market, San Francisco, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman

He still felt adrift. “I have torn up my roots so often that they do not strike into any soil with much vigor,” he wrote. San Francisco had changed almost as much as he had. The city had been a refuge in the 1860s, but now it looked more like a dumping ground. People from other parts of the country washed up on its shores looking for work, swelling the ranks of the poor. By 1877, San Francisco’s unemployment rate was as high as 25 percent. Stoddard’s parents lived south of Market Street, a sprawling neighborhood that bore the brunt of the bad economy. Among its flophouses and slums, jobs were scarce and crime was commonplace.

…

., 3–4, 5, 16–17, 21, 27, 39, 50–51, 55–57, 63–64, 83–84, 185, 245, 251 bachelor life in, 55 Civil War and, 18–19, 55, 63–64 Coolbrith’s arrival in, 35–36 earthquake in, 159, 160–61, 190 economy of, 186 Harte’s arrival in, 26, 192 Harte’s departure from, 192–93, 197–98 Lick House in, 10, 41, 46, 60 Lincoln’s death and, 94 Montgomery Street in, 76 newspapers in, 17, 26, 55, 77 railroads and, 149–50, 154, 162–63, 165–66, 186 Stoddard’s arrival in, 38–39 Sydney-Town, 39 Telegraph Hill, xii, 43 Twain’s departure from, 133 Twain’s visits and move to, 2–4, 9–11, 17, 45–46, 71–72, 75, 77, 85, 87–88 San Francisco Alta California, see Alta California San Francisco Call, 244 San Francisco Chronicle, 215, 216, 229, 238, 250 San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle, 111, 118–19, 132, 154 San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 169 San Francisco Examiner, 104 San Francisco Morning Call, 17, 41, 45, 46, 72, 84, 85–88, 89–90, 104, 111, 112, 127, 153 San Francisco News Letter and Commercial Advertiser, 184 San Francisco Police Department, 104, 111 San Francisco Youths’ Companion, 111 Sanitary Commission, 68–70, 132 Sappho, 32 Saturday Club, 199–200 Saturday Press, 54, 65 Scott, Winfield, 1 Scribner’s, 201 Sellers, Isaiah, 12 Sewall, G.

…

Messianic rhetoric and anticipation: William Deverell, “Redemptive California? Re-thinking the Post–Civil War,” Rethinking History 11.1 (March 2007), pp. 65–66. Any citizen July 4 festivities: San Francisco Evening Bulletin, July 6, 1863. The news from First news of Gettysburg in SF: San Francisco Evening Bulletin, July 6, 1863. First news of Vicksburg in San Francisco: San Francisco Bulletin, July 7, 1863. Growing exhaustion with the war: SFLF, pp. 108–109. Bad turnout and 35 cases of public drunkenness: San Francisco Evening Bulletin, July 6, 1863. King knew how King at the Metropolitan: ibid. King: Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1986 [1973]), pp. 99–105.

pages: 572 words: 124,222

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business climate, centre right, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark triade / dark tetrad, defund the police, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, gentrification, George Floyd, Golden Gate Park, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, Housing First, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, mandatory minimum, Marc Benioﬀ, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peoples Temple, Peter Pan Syndrome, pill mill, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, South of Market, San Francisco, Steven Pinker, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, walkable city

.* Overdose deaths rose from 17,415 in 2000 to 93,330 in 2020, a 536 percent increase.30 Significantly more people die of drug overdoses today than of homicide (13,927 in 2019) or car accidents (36,096 in 2019).31 The overdose crisis is worse in San Francisco than in other cities. In Seattle, Phoenix, and Chicago, there were 23, 46, and 48 overdose deaths per every 100,000 people, in 2020. In San Francisco, there were 81.32 Overdose deaths rose from 196 in 2015 to 713 in 2020.33 Just over half occurred in the Tenderloin, the Inner Mission, and South of Market.34 There are about twenty-five thousand injection drug users in San Francisco, a number 50 percent larger than the number of students enrolled in the city’s fifteen public high schools.35 San Francisco gives away more needles to drug users, six million per year, than New York City, despite having one-tenth the population.36 When you walk through the open-air drug scenes in the Tenderloin in San Francisco, Skid Row in Los Angeles, and the Blade in Seattle, you see people of all races and ages injecting and smoking fentanyl, heroin, meth, and other hard drugs right there on the sidewalk near where they bought them.

…

The chiefs of Seattle and Dallas happened to be black.73 Today there are fewer police officers per capita than at any time since 1992.74 In 2020, San Francisco had fewer police on the streets than it did a few years earlier. San Francisco’s current police staffing in 2019 was already “severely inadequate,” according to a city-commissioned study. San Francisco in 2019 had just 1,971 officers but needed 2,176 by law.75 The number of San Francisco police officers leaving their job grew from 12 officers in 2018 to 26 in 2019 to 31 in 2020. “That might be hard to make up,” noted the Chronicle, “as the last police academy had only 19 cadets. Most classes are budgeted for 55 people.” The head of San Francisco’s police officer’s union warned, “This is just the beginning.

…

Erica Sandberg, “Harm Reduction in San Francisco: The City by the Bay Has Embraced a New Religion: Drug Normalization,” City Journal, February 14, 2019, www.city-journal.org; Joshua Sabatini, “SF’s New Needle Cleanup Team to Get Van and Branded Jackets,” San Francisco Examiner, May 25, 2018, www.sfexaminer.com. 46. City of San Francisco, 311 Cases, (July 13, 2021), distributed by Data SF, www.datasf.org. 47. City of San Francisco, 311 Cases: Needle-Related Cases After January 1, 2017 (January 22, 2021), distributed by Data SF, www.datasf.org. 48. Fuller, “Life on the Dirtiest Block in San Francisco.” 49. Cowan and Dougherty, “What Would It Take to End Homelessness?”

Food Trucks: Dispatches and Recipes From the Best Kitchens on Wheels by Shouse, Heather

fixed-gear, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, place-making, rolodex, side project, South of Market, San Francisco

Bryce is from Austin, where his dad, Jack Gilmore, has been known for his chef skil s for a couple of decades, earning himself a good rep first at Z’Tejas and now at his own restaurant, Jack Al en’s Kitchen. Not surprisingly, Bryce joined his dad in the kitchen by the time he was fourteen, then headed west to San Francisco’s California Culinary Academy, where he fel in love with farmers’ markets and eventual y landed a job cooking at Boulevard under James Beard–winner Nancy Oakes. “As much as I love San Francisco, I love Austin more,” Bryce says. “Austin’s my home, and real y, as I was getting exposed to al this stuff in San Francisco, Austin was also getting into the local food movement and the farmers’ markets were starting to get better. I felt like I wanted to be a part of the beginning of this and felt I had a lot to offer Austin.

…

Transfer to a plate, cut into triangle-shaped pieces, and serve. San Francisco, California When an unlicensed street food vendor known as “the Tamale Lady” has nearly as many Yelp reviews as The Dining Room at the Ritz Carlton, it’s clear that you have an interesting culinary community on your hands. Virginia Ramos, a.k.a. the Tamale Lady, operates on foot, not on wheels, but the Mexican immigrant recal s that when she started her side job in the early 1990s, the only other mobile food vendors were other Latinos operating taco trucks. Today, San Francisco’s street food scene has changed considerably, and as this book was going to print there was so much interest in curbside dining that city officials were holding public hearings with restaurant owners, cart operators, and members of the police force to figure out how to navigate the massive spike of interest in mobile food vending.

…

Spencer on the Go FIND IT: Folsom St. between 7th and Langton Sts., San Francisco, California KEEP UP WITH IT: www.spenceronthego.com or twitter.com/chezspencergo Escargot drenched in garlic butter, wrapped in puff pastry, and stabbed with a skewer seems like the type of thing you’d find being passed around on silver trays at a party where more people spoke French than didn’t and owning a home on the Riviera was more common than owning al of your own teeth. But thanks to a long-running joke that final y became reality, you’l actual y find these little lol ipop-like escargot puffs being sold out of a gleaming silver truck in San Francisco’s South of Market District, several blocks away from the Mission.

Western USA by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cotton gin, Donner party, East Village, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, intermodal, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Maui Hawaii, off grid, off-the-grid, retail therapy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supervolcano, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Glimpse Golden Gate Bridge views atop the MH de Young Museum, take a walk on the wild side inside the California Academy of Sciences rainforest dome, then dig into organic Cal-Moroccan feasts at Aziza. Sights Let San Francisco’s 43 hills and more than 80 arts venues stretch your legs and imagin-ation, and take in some (literally) breathtaking views. The 7 x 7-mile city is laid out on a staid grid, but its main street is a diagonal contrarian streak called Market St. Downtown sights are within walking distance of Market St, but keep your city smarts and wits about you, especially around South of Market (SoMa) and the Tenderloin (5th to 9th Sts). SF’s most historic landmarks are in the Mission, while exciting new destinations are inside Golden Gate Park. San Francisco & the Bay Area Sights 1Baker BeachB3 2California Palace of the Legion of HonorB4 3Candlestick ParkC4 4Cliff HouseB4 5di Rosa Art + Nature PreserveC1 6Fort PointC3 7Golden Gate ParkB4 8Jack London Historic State ParkB1 9Lands EndB4 10Muir Woods National MonumentB3 11Ocean BeachB4 12Pantoll StationB3 13Point Reyes LighthouseA3 14Rodeo BeachB3 15University of California, BerkeleyC3 ACTIVITIES, COURSES & TOURS 16Aqua Surf ShopB4 Sutro Baths(see 4) Sleeping 17HI Marin Headlands HostelB3 18HI Point Reyes HostelA3 19Motel InvernessA2 Downtown San Francisco Top Sights Asian Art MuseumC7 Coit TowerD3 Davies Symphony HallB7 Ferry BuildingF4 San Francisco Museum of Modern ArtE6 Sights 114 GearyE6 249 GearyE6 377 GearyD6 4Aquarium of the BayD2 5Aquatic Park BathhouseB2 6Art InstituteC3 7Beat MuseumD4 8Cartoon Art MuseumE6 9Catharine Clark GalleryE6 10Children’s Creativity MuseumE6 11Chinatown GateD5 12Chinese Culture CenterD4 13Chinese Historical Society of America MuseumD5 14City HallB7 15Contemporary Jewish MuseumE6 16George Sterling ParkB3 17Grace CathedralC5 18Hyde Street Pier Historic ShipsB2 19Musée MécaniqueC2 20Museum of African DiasporaE6 21Museum of Craft & Folk ArtsE6 22Pier 39D1 23San Francisco Maritime National Historical ParkB2 24Transamerica PyramidE4 25Union SquareD6 26Uss PampanitoC2 Activities, Courses & Tours 27Adventure CatD2 28Alcatraz CruisesD2 29Blazing SaddlesB2 30City KayakG6 31Meeting Point for Fire Engine ToursB2 Sleeping 32Golden Gate HotelD5 33Hotel AbriD6 34Hotel BohèmeD4 35Hotel des ArtsD5 36Hotel RexD5 37Hotel VitaleF5 38Orchard Garden HotelD5 39Pacific TradewindsE5 40Petite AubergeC5 41San Remo HotelC3 42Stratford HotelD6 Eating 43Bar JulesA8 44BenuE6 45BocadillosE4 46Brenda's French Soul FoodB6 47CinecittàD3 48CoiE4 49CotognaE4 50Crown & CrumpetB2 51FarmerbrownD6 52Farmers MarketF4 53GitaneE5 Gott's Roadside(see 52) Hog Island Oyster Company(see 52) 54In-N-Out BurgerC2 55JardinièreB7 Mijita(see 52) 56MolinariD4 57Off the GridA2 58Saigon Sandwich ShopC6 Slanted Door(see 52) Drinking 59Aunt Charlie'sD6 60EndupE7 61Rebel BarB8 62Smuggler's CoveB7 63StudD8 64Tosca CafeD4 Entertainment 65111 MinnaE5 66American Conservatory TheaterD6 67AT&T ParkG7 68Cat ClubD8 69Club FugaziD3 70HarlotE5 71MezzanineD7 TIX Bay Area(see 25) 72War Memorial Opera HouseB7 73Yerba Buena Center for the ArtsE6 Shopping 74City Lights BookstoreD4 SOMA Cartoon Art Museum MUSEUM ( 415-227-8666; www.cartoonart.org; 655 Mission St; adult/child $7/5; 11am-5pm Tue-Sun) Comics earn serious consideration with shows of original Watchmen covers, too-hot-to-print political cartoons and lectures with local Pixar studio heads.

…

GAY/LES/BI/TRANS SAN FRANCISCO Doesn’t matter where you’re from, who you love or who’s your daddy: if you’re here, and queer, welcome home. The intersection of 18th and Castro Sts is the heart of the gay cruising scene, but dancing queens and slutty boys head South of Market (SoMa) for thump-thump clubs. The Mission is the preferred ’hood of alt-chicks, trans FTMs (female-to-males) and flirty femmes. Bay Area Reporter (aka BAR; www.ebar.com) covers community news and listings; San Francisco Bay Times (www.sfbaytimes.com) also has good resources for transsexuals; and free mag Gloss Magazine (www.glossmagazine.net) covers nightlife. To find out where the party is, check Honey Soundsystem (www.honeysoundsystem.com) for roving queer dance parties; Betty’s List (www.bettyslist.com) for parties, fundraisers and power-lesbian mixers; and Juanita More (www.juanitamore.com) for fierce circuit parties thrown by a drag superstar.

…

Another mile north, HI Point Montara Lighthouse Hostel ( 650-728-7177; www.norcalhostels.org; Hwy 1 & 16th St; dm $26-31, r $70-105; check-in 3:30-10:30pm; ) is an airy, ecofriendly hostel with a small private beach (reservations essential). From there, it’s just 20 more miles to San Francisco via Devil’s Slide. SAN FRANCISCO & THE BAY AREA San Francisco If you’ve ever wondered where the envelope goes when it’s pushed, here’s your answer. Psychedelic drugs, newfangled technology, gay liberation, green ventures, free speech and culinary experimentation all became mainstream long ago in San Francisco. After 160 years of booms and busts, losing your shirt has become a favorite local pastime at the clothing-optional Bay to Breakers race, Pride Parade and hot Sundays on Baker Beach.

pages: 349 words: 109,304

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road by Nick Bilton

bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, crack epidemic, Edward Snowden, fake news, gentrification, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, Ross Ulbricht, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the market place, trade route, Travis Kalanick, white picket fence, WikiLeaks

Between explorations Ross went on boating trips with friends through the choppy waters of the bay, brushing past Alcatraz, the notorious prison that had once been home to Al Capone, the American gangster who fought the U.S. government during Prohibition. But one of the more memorable experiences of his time in San Francisco happened on a Thursday afternoon in early December, when Ross and René happened upon the Contemporary Jewish Museum in the South of Market area of the city. Homeless people, mostly drug addicts who had fallen on hard times, lined the streets, pushing their lives in carts from one soup kitchen or rehab center to the next, past the big glass buildings where those billion-dollar start-ups grew larger and more powerful by the hour.

…

In other words, the Dread Pirate Roberts might have wiped the murder scene down, but he had left the corner of a thumbprint on the front door when he walked out. This digital fingerprint led the FBI agents to a small bistrolike café on Laguna Street in San Francisco called Momi Toby’s. Whoever the Dread Pirate Roberts was, he was either living in San Francisco or had spent some time there. But that was it. One measly clue that possibly pointed to the whereabouts of the Dread Pirate Roberts. “Not much I can do with it,” Tarbell said to Jared. “What am I going to do, send an FBI agent into a coffee shop in San Francisco and tell them to look for someone on a laptop?” Still, they had been scouring the Internet traffic from the café, looking for other leads.

…

Based on the mountain of evidence Gary had seen on the server, the butcher block paper on the wall with all those IP addresses, and Jared’s undercover account, Gary decided that there was clearly no reason for him to send the FBI the name of his “guy” in San Francisco. Chapter 58 JULIA COMES TO SAN FRANCISCO The train door slid open and Julia walked onto the platform and into another world. She wasn’t sure this was the right stop until she saw the sign that read GLEN PARK. She made her way toward the exit, dragging a large wheelie suitcase behind her. As she strode into the sunlight of San Francisco, she saw him standing on the street, waiting. His hair was as ragged as it had been the day they met, though he looked slightly different now.

pages: 404 words: 108,253

9Tail Fox by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

gentrification, Kickstarter, large denomination, San Francisco homelessness, sexual politics, South of Market, San Francisco, transcontinental railway

A dead man in a borrowed body. Bobby sighed. CHAPTER 13 Thursday 19 February Half of Bobby’s childhood seemed to have taken place on planes. San Francisco to New York. New York to Paris. Paris to San Francisco. Juggling families, trying to slip through gaps between the loyalties that threatened to crush him. Aged eleven, on a hot October afternoon, Bobby watched a couple ignore each other for the time it took a plane to travel from San Francisco to New York. Two children sat in the seats between them, buffers against a silence that was already frosting as the plane accelerated along the runway.

…

‘Pio Emilio Sanchez,’ he recited. ‘Otherwise known as Pete, Peter and Dirty Bastard, for obvious reasons. Born sixth September. In his third year as a SFPD officer. MA and PhD from Austin. Good connections. Well liked. Ambitious and occasionally ruthless. His father worked in a grocery store south of Market until last year …’ ‘Pete told me his father owned that store.’ Bobby shook his head and waited for Bea to join the dots, which she’d already begun to do, because he could see questions forming behind her eyes. ‘How do you know this stuff?’ she said. ‘It’s my job.’ Her laugh was hard and bitter.

…

CHAPTER 12 Thursday 19 February After the snow stopped falling and the runways had been cleared, Bobby caught the first flight out of New York for San Francisco. The hotels circling Kennedy Airport were full of families waiting for flights. So it took money and perseverance to find Bobby a seat, although it helped that Bobby wanted to fly business class and was willing to pay the first price offered. All he wanted was what everyone wanted, to get home. It was only as Bobby headed away from check-in that he realised his home might still be in San Francisco, but the house there was no longer his … ‘Mr Vanberg?’ The voice matched the questioner’s face, professionally pleasant and slightly watchful.

Frommer's California 2009 by Matthew Poole, Harry Basch, Mark Hiss, Erika Lenkert

airport security, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Columbine, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, European colonialism, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, post-work, retail therapy, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

See also specific neighborhoods accommodations, 703–722 area codes, 702 babysitters, 702 beaches, 739–741 doctors and dentists, 702 downtown, 699 accommodations, 703, 706–710 restaurants, 722–725 shopping, 754 sightseeing, 744–745 emergencies, 703 getting around, 700–702 hospitals, 703 layout of, 698 neighborhoods in brief, 699–700 nightlife, 755–759 outdoor activities, 749–753 police, 703 post office, 703 restaurants, 722–734 safety, 703 shopping, 753–755 sightseeing, 734–749 sightseeing tours, 748–749 taxes, 703 taxis, 702 traveling to, 695–696 visitor information, 698 what’s new in, 5–6 San Diego Air & Space Museum, 742 San Diego Aircraft Carrier Museum, 745 San Diego and environs, 695–768 San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge, 748 San Diego County Fair, 41 San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA), 742, 744 San Diego Natural History Museum (SDNHM), 744 San Diego Opera, 757 San Diego Padres, 744 San Diego Passport, 738 San Diego Repertory Theatre, 756 San Diego Symphony, 756–757 San Diego Wild Animal Park, 734–735 San Diego Zoo, 735–738 San Fernando Valley, 492 accommodations, 513–514 San Francisco, 65–149 accommodations, 77–94 reservations, 77 American Express, 75 architectural highlights, 125–126 area codes, 76 cable cars, 73–74, 120–121 The Castro, 72 accommodations, 93–94 restaurants, 115–116 shopping, 138 sightseeing, 130 Civic Center, 72, 126 accommodations, 92–93 restaurants, 111–112 climate, 38 Cow Hollow, 71 accommodations, 91–92 restaurants, 108–111 earthquakes, 76 emergencies, 76 Financial District, 70–71 accommodations, 85 restaurants, 102–104 Fisherman’s Wharf, 71 accommodations, 89–91 restaurants, 107–108 shopping, 138–139 sightseeing, 122–123 getting around, 73–75 Haight-Ashbury, 73 accommodations, 93–94 restaurants, 112–113 shopping, 139 Hayes Valley shopping, 138 hospitals, 76 Japantown, 72 restaurant, 111 layout of, 67, 70 Marina District, 71 restaurants, 108–111 Mission District, 72 restaurants, 116–117 sightseeing, 130 money-saving tourist passes, 67 neighborhoods, 70–73 sightseeing, 130–131 nightlife, 139–149 Nob Hill & Russian Hill, 71 accommodations, 88–89 restaurants, 105 sightseeing, 130–131 North Beach, 71 accommodations, 89–91 restaurants, 105–107 shopping, 139 sightseeing, 131 organized tours, 132 outdoor pursuits, 134–136 Pacific Heights, 72 accommodations, 91–92 parking, 75 restaurants, 94–117 Richmond & Sunset Districts, 73, 113–114 safety, 76 shopping, 136–139 sightseeing, 117–134 SoMa (south of Market Street), 72 accommodations, 85–88 restaurants, 99–102 shopping, 138 taxes, 76 taxis, 74–75 toilets, 76 traveling to, 65–66 visitor information, 66–67 what’s new in, 1–2 San Francisco Ballet, 140–141 San Francisco Brewing Company, 147 San Francisco CityPass, 67 San Francisco Giants, 120 San Francisco International Airport (SFO), 65 San Francisco International Film Festival, 40 San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Parade, 41 San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, 129 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), 129–130 San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge (San Francisco), 126 San Francisco Opera, 141 San Francisco Symphony, 141 San Francisco Zoo (& Children’s Zoo), 131 San Gabriel Mountains, 657 San Joaquin Valley (the Central Valley), 374–378 San Jose, 176–180 San Jose Historical Museum, 177 San Jose Museum of Art, 177 San Juan Bautista, 386 San Juan Bautista State Historic Park, 386 San Juan Capistrano, 643, 646 San Luis Obispo, 435–439 San Miguel, 473 San Simeon, 424–432 Santa Anita Racetrack (Arcadia), 576 Santa Barbara, 455–465 accommodations, 460–463 outdoor activities, 458–459 restaurants, 463–465 shopping, 459–460 sightseeing, 455–458 traveling to, 455 visitor information, 455 Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, 458 Santa Barbara County Courthouse, 456 Santa Barbara Family Vacation Center, 461 Santa Barbara International Film Festival, 39 Santa Barbara Island, 473–474 Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 456 Santa Barbara Zoo, 458 Santa Catalina Island, 602–611 Santa Cruz, 379–386, 472–473 Santa Cruz Harbor, 381 Santa Cruz Surfing Museum, 380 Santa Monica and the Beaches, 483, 550 accommodations, 498–502 restaurants, 515–520 shopping, 583 sightseeing, 551 Santa Monica Mountains, 572 Santa Monica Museum of Art at Bergamot Station (Los Angeles), 550 785 786 Santa Monica Pier (Los Angeles), 541 Santa Monica State Beach, 568 Santana Row (San Jose), 178 Santa Rosa accommodations, 214 restaurant, 215 Santa Rosa Chapel and Cemetery (Cambria), 428 Santa Rosa Island, 473 Santa Ynez Canyon, 572 Santa Ynez Valley, 448–454 Sausalito, 162–165 Sausalito Art Festival, 43 Sauvignon blanc, 34 Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker (Berkeley), 156 Schindler House (Los Angeles), 551 Schonchin Butte, 304 Schramsberg (Calistoga), 191–192 Scotts Flat Lake, 361 Scotty’s Castle & the Gas House Museum (Death Valley), 693 Scuba diving Channel Islands National Park, 474 Monterey, 391 San Diego, 753 Santa Catalina Island, 607 Seal and Bird Rocks, 403 Seal Beach, 642 Seal Rocks (San Francisco), 133 SeaWorld San Diego, 739 Sebastiani Vineyards & Winery (Sonoma), 202 Segway rentals, Los Angeles, 573 Segway tours Angel Island, 166 San Francisco, 122 Self-Realization Fellowship (Encinitas), 763 Senior travel, 51 Sentinel Bridge, 317 Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks, 339–347 accommodations, 346–347 Sequoia Audubon Trail, 170 17-Mile Drive (Pebble Beach), 402–403 Seymour Marine Discovery Center (Santa Cruz), 381 SFMOMA MuseumStore (San Francisco), 138 Shafer Vineyards (Napa), 186 Shasta (town), 290 Shasta, Lake, 290, 293 Shasta, Mount, 288, 293–297 Shasta Dam, 290 Shasta Dam and Power Plant, 293 Shasta Trinity National Forest, 292 Shaver Lake, 376–378 Shrine Drive-Thru Tree, 245 Sierra-at-Tahoe, 266 Sierra National Forest, 375–378 Sierra Summit Ski Area, 378 Silent Movie Theatre (Los Angeles), 598 Silver Lake (Los Angeles), 488 Simon Rodia Watts Towers Jazz Festival, 43 Siskiyou, Lake, 295 Sisson Museum, 294 Six Flags California (Los Angeles), 542 Skiing.

…

When asking for directions, find out the nearest cross street and the neighborhood where your destination is located, but be car eful not to confuse numerical av enues with numerical streets. N umerical av enues ( Third A ve. and so on) ar e in the Richmond and S unset Districts, in the western part of the city. Numerical streets (Third St. and so on) are south of Market Street, in the east and south par ts of town. NEIGHBORHOODS IN BRIEF Union S quare Union S quare is the commercial hub of San Francisco. Most major hotels and depar tment stores are crammed into the area surrounding the actual squar e, which was named for a series of violent pr o-union mass demonstrations staged here on the eve of the Civil War. A plethora of upscale boutiques, restaurants, and galleries occupy the spaces tucked betw een the larger buildings.

…

Most major hotels carr y discount-shopping guides. Many buses pass through this area, including nos. 9, 12, 14, 15, 19, 26, 27, 30, 42, 45, and 76. The SFMOMA MuseumStore, 151 Third St., 2 blocks south of Market Street, across from Yerba Buena Gardens ( & 415/357-4035; www.sfmoma.org), is a fav orite among locals. The shop’s art cards and books, as w ell as je welry, housewares, and knickknacks are well designed. For visitors, the San Francisco mementos here are much more tasteful than those sold in Fisherman’s Wharf. Fashionable bargain hunters head to Jeremys, 2 S. P ark, at S econd Street betw een Bryant and Brannan streets ( & 415/882-4929; www.jeremys.com), where top designer fashions, from shoes to suits, sell at rock-bottom prices.

pages: 284 words: 92,688

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blue Bottle Coffee, call centre, Carl Icahn, clean tech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, Dunning–Kruger effect, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, growth hacking, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise

Suddenly I am the editor-in-chief of a struggling technology news website called ReadWrite, a tiny blog with three full-time employees and a half-dozen woefully underpaid freelancers. ReadWrite is based in San Francisco, which means I fly out on Monday and take a redeye back to Boston on Thursday or Friday. On weeks when I’m not in San Francisco I’m either in New York, where ReadWrite’s parent company is based, or in some other city, making sales calls, trying to get tech companies to buy ads from us. It’s not a lot of fun, but I’m making a paycheck and keeping my eyes open for something better. ReadWrite’s offices are on Townsend Street, in the South of Market neighborhood, where all of the hot tech start-ups are located—Twitter, Uber, Dropbox, Airbnb.

…

But as things turned out, those people may have been right to be afraid. Regarding terminology: When I use the term Silicon Valley I do not mean to denote an actual geographic region—the sixty-mile peninsula between San Francisco and San Jose, where the original technology companies were built. Instead, like Hollywood, or Wall Street, Silicon Valley has become a metaphorical name for an industry, one that exists in Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, Boston, and countless other places, as well as the San Francisco Bay Area. The term bubble, as I use it, refers not only to the economic bubble in which the valuation of some tech start-ups went crazy but also to the mindset of the people working inside technology companies, the true believers and Kool-Aid drinkers, the people who live inside their own filter bubble, brimming with self-confidence and self-regard, impervious to criticism, immunized against reality, unaware of how ridiculous they appear to the outside world.

…

With Sting, he traveled to the Peruvian rain forest, where they tripped on ayahuasca and ended up hugging and sobbing on a mud floor. He and his best friend, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, drove to the Tenderloin in San Francisco and fired water cannons at transvestite hookers. They made prank phone calls, dialing a local Thai restaurants to order “penis sauce” or calling a hardware store in the Castro section of San Francisco to inquire about black caulk. Eventually I got caught. A reporter at the New York Times figured out who was writing the Fake Steve blog and confronted me, and I came clean. There were profiles about me all over the place, from the New York Times to Der Spiegel in Germany and El Mundo in Spain.

pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

started in Silicon Valley.72 Moreover, most of the Internet start-ups that introduced e-commerce, and revolutionized business (such as Ebay), also clustered in Silicon Valley. The coming of multimedia in the mid-1990s created a network of technological and business linkages between computer-design capabilities from Silicon Valley companies and image-producing studios in Hollywood, immediately labeled the “Siliwood” industry. And in a run-down corner of San Francisco (South of Market), artists, graphic designers, and software writers came together in the so-called “Multimedia Gulch” that threatens to flood our living rooms with images coming from their fevered minds – in the process creating the most dynamic multimedia design center in the world.73 Can this social, cultural, and spatial pattern of innovation be extrapolated throughout the world?

…

Rohozinski, Rafal (1998) “Mapping Russian cyberspace: a perspective on democracy and the Net”, paper delivered at the United Nations Research Institute on Social Development Conference on Globalization and Inequality, Geneva, June 22. Rosen, Ken et al. (1999) “The multimedia industry in San Francisco’s South of Market area”, Berkeley, University of California, Haas School of Business, Centre for Real Estate Economics, research report. Rosenbaum, Andrew (1992) “France’s Minitel has finally grown up”, Electronics, 65(6). Rosenberg, Nathan (1976) Perspectives on Technology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1982) Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— and Birdzell, L.E. (1986) How the West Grew Rich: the Economic Transformation of the Industrial World, New York: Basic Books.

…

Sometimes, as in the European metropolitan regions, but also in California or New York/New Jersey, these centers are pre-existing cities incorporated in the metropolitan region by fast railway and motorway transportation networks, supplemented with advanced telecommunication networks and computer networks. Sometimes the central city is still the urban core, as in London, Paris, or Barcelona. But often there are no clearly dominant urban centers. For instance, the largest city in the San Francisco Bay Area is not San Francisco but San José, the capital of Silicon Valley. Yet, San Francisco remains the key location for advanced services, while the East Bay includes a major university (Berkeley) and a biotechnology global hub (Emeryville). In other instances, as in Atlanta or in Shanghai, the new centers (North Atlanta, Pudong) are induced by the fast growth of new business services in the metropolitan region.

pages: 361 words: 107,461

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs by Guy Raz

Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, business logic, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fear of failure, glass ceiling, growth hacking, housing crisis, imposter syndrome, inventory management, It's morning again in America, iterative process, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tony Hsieh, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Just ask Reed Hastings—or, better yet, ask his 7,000 employees. 21 Think Small to Get Big When we moved our family from Washington, DC, to the Bay Area, one of the first things we did was to take the ferry from Jack London Square in Oakland across the bay to San Francisco and spend the day walking around. My boys wanted to do the typical San Francisco stuff—watch the sea lions at Fisherman’s Wharf, ride a cable car down Powell Street, visit Alcatraz—but as we disembarked at the iconic Ferry Building, walked out onto the Embarcadero, and looked up Market Street toward downtown, I was taken by a view of the city I’d never seen before as a visitor when I’d come in from the airport or across the Bay Bridge. To one side was the San Francisco we know from movies: the two identical beige buildings of One Market Plaza; the Transamerica Pyramid; the four towers of the Embarcadero Center, which look like Earth reached up to give the sign of the horns using buildings instead of fingers.

…

With mercantile roots, he gave up his fantasy of finding gold and decided instead to open a store selling mining supplies and sweets in Stockton, a town at the midpoint on the road from San Francisco to the nearest mining claims in the Sierra foothills. Over the next few years, as that store flourished, he opened a second one in San Francisco, then a hotel, and when that burned down in 1851, he built a stand-alone confectionery that would become the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company. In 1852, as San Francisco began to explode with growth, Henry Wells and William Fargo came out from New York to form Wells, Fargo & Co. to service the banking needs of miners and merchants alike.

…

It has struck me on more than a few occasions when talking to founders that taking Levi’s route through a gold rush is far cheaper, much less risky, and potentially just as profitable as going all in to mine for the mother lode itself—or to chase a unicorn, in the language of modern-day entrepreneurship. Just think about the hundreds of millions of venture dollars required to launch the handful of tech companies lining Mission Street, filling the office space south of Market. Uber alone has raised $20 billion in the ten years since its founding, and yet for every Uber, there are a hundred Uber competitors or “Uber for _________” companies that never made it. The possibility of succeeding in that kind of capital-intensive, winner-take-all environment has always been much lower than in finding a small niche related but adjacent to a massive boom and building a business there.

pages: 339 words: 57,031

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

By the end of the decade, millions of Americans were investing their savings in Internet companies, very much in the belief that the economy and perhaps even humanity as a whole had entered a new era. Young engineers were migrating to the hubs of digital innovation as fast as they could. In the industrial-era lofts south of Market Street in San Francisco and in the narrow corridors of Manhattan’s Silicon Alley, twenty-something marketers pulled their six-hundred-dollar Herman Miller chairs around hand-hewn oak and redwood tables and plotted something called “web strategy.” More than a few began to imagine themselves as bits of talent and information swirling in the currents of a knowledge economy, their own careers tied to their ability to divine its rapidly changing laws.59 Corporations reconﬁgured ofﬁces to facilitate ﬂexible work, programmers camped in their companies’ open-all-night ofﬁces, and day after day, ﬁnanciers, technologists, and ordinary Americans checked the ﬁnancial pages for signs that the future was still dawning.

…

“I was looking for the wrong thing,” he wrote in his diary. “I was looking for San Francisco beauty, San Francisco people, San Francisco happiness—the bohemian style. . . . Therefore, Resolved—to go posh. To frequent the theaters, music halls, galleries, and homes not as an interloper taking all he can learn, but as a learning participant.”10 Brand remained somewhat isolated in Washington, but when he returned to Fort Dix, he found his way into a swirling New York art scene. In the summer of 1960, Brand had met a young San Francisco painter named Steve Durkee; by 1961 Durkee had moved into a lower-Manhattan loft, where Brand began to visit him on weekends from Fort Dix.

…

., 48 Roberts, Walter Orr, 130 Rolling Stone, 116 Roosevelt, Franklin, 17 Rosenblueth, Arturo, 20, 22, 25, 26, 122 Rossetto, Louis, 207, 209, 210, 216, 217, 225, 235, 236 Rossinow, Douglas, 34 Roszak, Theodore, 36, 47, 70; The Making of a Counterculture, 29, 32 Rothschild, Michael, 223, 224; Binomics: The Inevitability of Capitalism, 197–98 Royal Dutch/Shell: countercultural practices, 184; Planning Group, 181 Ruesch, Jürgen, 53 Sachs, Goldman, 235 Saffo, Paul, 172 SAGE (Semi-Automated Ground Environment air defense system), 19, 24, 27–28, 266n53 Salmon, Robert, 191 Salon (online magazine), 156 San Francisco Mime Troupe, 66 San Francisco Museum of Art, 1963 USCO performance, 51 San Francisco Oracle, 80 San Francisco Zen Center, 125 Santa Fe Institute (SFI), 176, 190, 198, 200 Savio, Mario, 11, 12, 14, 16 Saxenian, AnnaLee, 150, 278n23 scenario planning, 184, 186 – 87 School of Management and Strategic Studies, 129 Schwartz, Peter, 248; contributions to Wired, 217, 218; and Global Business Network, 183, 184 – 85, 187, 188; and Learning Conferences, 181, 182; “The Long Boom,” 233 –34; and scenario planning, 181, 187; and Wired, 211–12 science, sudden importance of after World War II, 17, 23 Scientiﬁc American, 80 Scorpion, 170 Seburn, Roy, 61 second-generation cybernetics, 148 Secret Service, 170, 172 Seed (newspaper), 36 self-directing system, 21, 22 servomechanisms, 21, 22 –23, 265n43 Shannon, Claude, 22, 23, 47, 265n37 shareware, 137 Shell Oil, 5, 182; Group Planning Ofﬁce, 186 Shirley, John, 164 Shugart, Diana, 98 Signal, 196 –97, 284n42 Silicon Beach Software, 211 Silicon Valley, 3; collaborative norm, 150; Defense Department contracts, 149 –50; growth of economy, 150; illegal aliens in workforce, 260; job turnover, 150 –51 Silver, David, 133 Simple Living Project, 70 Smith & Hawken, 128, 185 socioeconomic change, “Third Wave,” 228 soft technology, 125, 128 Software Review, 131, 132 Sol, 115 Soleri, Paolo, 81 Source, the, 130 Soviet Union, testing of an atomic bomb in 1949, 31 space station, 126 Spacewar, 116, 134 Spencer, Herbert, 210 Spengler, Oswald, 62 spinner, as power-leveling device, 65 Spooner, Lysander, 210 “stagﬂation,” 119 Index Stalin, Joseph, 24 Stallman, Richard, 136 Stanford Artiﬁcial Intelligence Laboratory, 116, 133, 134, 177 Stanford Research Institute (SRI), 70, 88; ARPANET node, 109; Augmentation Research Center (ARC), 61, 106, 107– 8, 109, 110; countercultural practices, 184; and human-computer integration, 104; and Peradam, 110; Values and Lifestyles Program, 183 – 84 Stanford University, 70, 150 Star, Susan Leigh, 72 Stark, David, 156, 157 Stephenson, Karen, 191 Sterling, Bruce, 164, 167 Stern, Gerd, 48, 49, 50, 51, 65 Stockwell, Foster, 267n70 Stolaroff, Myron, 61 Stone, Allucquère Rosanne, 163 Stone, Robert, 60 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 34, 35, 118, 209, 253, 267n80 “Summer of Love,” 32 Sun Microsystems, 172 surveillance data, 169 Sutherland, Ivan, 111 Syndicus, Maria, 151 Systems Science Laboratory, 112 systems theory, 264n28, 265n43; as contact language for robotics community, 198; facilitation of interdisciplinary collaboration, 24; and military-industrial-academic complex, 27, 28; and New Communalism, 38; and Whole Earth Catalog, 71, 78, 79, 84 Taylor, Robert, 111 TCI, 208 Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) Conference, 177, 211 techno-mysticism, 50 Telecommunications Act of 1996, 13, 230 telecommunications policy, 230 Terman, Frederick, 150 Tesler, Larry, 111, 112, 246, 251–52 Tet Offensive, 98 Thacker, Charles, 111 Theall, Donald, 52 Thinking Machines Corporation, 182 Thompson, Mark, 201 [ 325 ] Thoreau, Henry David, 55 Thrift, Nigel, 214 time-sharing computing, 28, 105, 107, 114, 117, 246 Tofﬂer, Alvin, 208, 215, 222, 227; “Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,” 228 –30 Tofﬂer, Heidi, 227 Tom Swift Terminal, 115 Tough, Paul, 167– 68, 169 “trading zone,” 72 Transcendentalism, 55, 75 tribalism, 49, 53 Trips Festival, 65 – 68, 67, 92, 164, 178 Truman administration, Defense Systems Engineering Committee, 27–28 Tucker, Benjamin, 210 Tudor, David, 48 Turkle, Sherry, 189 Turner, Ted, 211 Turoff, Murray, 130 2600 (magazine), 168, 169 Ullman, Ellen, Close to the Machine, 257–59 Uniﬁed Planning Machinery, 181 Universal Resource Locator (URL), 213 universal rhetoric, 84 universities: engagement with cold war politics, 12; wartime funding, 18 university-based research: after World War II, 18; before World War II, 17 Urban House, 70 urban rioting, 74 USCO, 48 –51, 66; anti-authoritarian humanism and tribal elitism, 54; design of comprehensive media environments, 58; electronic communication technologies, 52; motto, 54; multimedia backdrops, 51; questions of leadership and gender politics, 50; “Shrine,” 51; techno-mystical ideology, 49 – 50; theatrical ecologies, 51 Varela, Francisco, 182, 183 “Verbal American Landscape,” 51 Viacom, 208 Vietnam War, 74; end of, 120; protests against, 34, 35 virtual communities, 6, 142, 161– 62, 247, 248 “virtual reality,” 163 Volvo, 182 von Foerster, Heinz, Observing Systems, 122 [ 326 ] Index Von Neumann, John, 226, 264n28 VPL Research, 163, 165 Wack, Pierre, 186 – 87 Walking Journal, 131 Wallace, Bob, 136 –37 Warm Springs Indian Reservation, 59 Warshall, Peter, 182, 189, 191, 192 Weathermen, 118 Weaver, Warren, 23 Web browsers, 213 –14, 222 Weir, Bob, 166 WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link), 3, 6, 7, 141– 48, 247; as BBS, 144; “Bozo ﬁlter,” 145; as community held together by talk, 147; cultural tools inherited from counterculture, 156; design goals, 143; early management policies, 145; as economic heterarchy, 153 –59; ﬂuid boundary between public and private, 154; gift economy, 157– 58; hosting of regular forums to discuss Wired articles, 217; interactive collectivity in real time, 151; managed according to a mix of cybernetic principles, 147– 48; membership, 278n29; performance value, 155; powerful form of economic as well as interpersonal support, 248; prominence of women, 151–52; reputation value, 155 –56; resource for the redeﬁnition of cyberspace, 162; rhetoric of community, 157, 158; rhetoric of virtual community, 161; “Scribble” feature, 145; as a self-regulating biotechnological system, 146; subscription rates, 145; users from the growing computer industry, 151; users in earliest years, 143; users’ ownership of postings, 145; users’ postings had value in both the social and the economic registers, 156; as virtual community, 142, 158 –59; “WELL Engaged” system, 277n1; WELL Ofﬁce Parties (WOPs), 158; Whole Earth ethos, 146, 148; women and, 278n29 Wenner, Jann, 116 “We R All One,” 51 Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, La Jolla, California, 129 Wheeler, Bill, 77 Wheeler’s Ranch, 77 Whirlwind computer, 27 Whitman, Walt, 62 Whole Earth Catalog, 3, 4, 57, 82; celebrated small-scale technologies, 5, 79, 125; consistency, 81– 82; contributions from four social groups, 73; convergence of systems theory and New Communalist politics, 71, 104, 111; “Cowboy Nomad,” 86 – 87; deﬁned purpose, 82 – 83; Demise Party, 115; design framework, 80; development of, 71; few references to the Vietnam War, 98; ﬁrst, 79 – 80; front cover, 83; full ﬁnancial accounts in every issue, 90; function, 91; and geodesic domes, 94; geographically distributed network of counterculturalists, 151; guide to a new way of being an individual, 88 – 89; information goods, 92; as information technology, 69 –102; information technology and cybernetics to a New Communalist social vision, 104; legitimacy exchange, 85; little attention to questions of gender, race, and class, 91–102; local systems mirrored global systems, 100; material goods, 92; model for the WELL, 141, 142 – 43; narrow focus on women’s sexuality, 98; as network forum, 72, 73, 78 –91, 101, 245; offered new ways to imagine the possibilities of computers, 114; “personal” technologies, 92 –93; principles of juxtaposition, 84; products belonging to the do-ityourself tradition, 93; relationship between information, technology, and community, 110; replicated mainstream hierarchies of social distinction, 100; research orientation, 79; seemingly comprehensive informational system, 83; statement of purpose and arrangement of categories, 84 – 85; Supplement, 80 – 81; systems theory as contact language and structuring principle, 71, 79, 84; systems theory principles, 84; told readers how to reach out to one another, 84; tools for transformation, 91–97; “tools” linked multiple networks and institutions, 93; as town squares, 89; and typesetting technologies, 272n28; vision of technology as a countercultural force, 6; and the WELL, 153 –54, 156 Whole Earth community: imagined world as a series of overlapping information systems, 250; involvement with virtual reality, 281n61; rhetoric of cybernetics to facilitate exchange of legitimacy between technological and countercultural communities, 250 Whole Earth Epilog, 120 Index Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (WELL).

Frommer's San Diego 2011 by Mark Hiss

airport security, California gold rush, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, El Camino Real, gentrification, glass ceiling, machine readable, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

While in Tijuana, be sure to visit the excellent Centro Cultural Tijuana (p. 276), which covers the history, contemporary art, culture, and performing arts of Baja California and the rest of Mexico. Initially lured by the California gold rush in the 1850s, a small Chinese community came to live in San Diego and controlled much of the fishing industry until 1890; Chinese also helped build (and later staff) the Hotel del Coronado. Chinatown—downtown, south of Market Street—eventually merged with the rough-andtumble Stingaree, San Diego’s red-light district. At the turn of the last century, the area was a hub of gambling, prostitution, and opium dens, and Chinese families ran notorious bars such as the Old Tub of Blood Saloon and the Seven Buckets of Blood Saloon.

…

San Diego Chinese Historical Museum In the former Chinese Mission, where Chinese immigrants learned English and adapted to their new environment, this small museum contains antique Chinese lottery equipment, a series of panels documenting the gold rush, and artifacts unearthed from San Diego’s old Chinatown (south of Market, btw. Third and Fifth aves.). A nice gift shop and a pleasant garden in back with a bronze statue of Confucius complete the experience. Allow about half an hour for your visit. Walking tours of the Asian Pacific Historic District start here on the second Saturday of the month at 11am; the cost is $2. 404 Third Ave.

…

The British explorer George Vancouver was, in 1793, perhaps the first to wonder why San Diegans had situated their settlement so far away from what most agreed was a rather wonderful port. In 1850, San Francisco merchant William Heath Davis had a similar idea and purchased 160 acres of bayside land in what was then called “New Town” (present-day downtown), about 4 miles south of Old Town. In hopes of luring people and businesses, Davis built a wharf, ordered a handful of prefab saltbox houses shipped in from Maine, and oversaw the opening of two hotels. New Town didn’t take off, however, and the experiment was dubbed “Davis’s Folly.” NEW TOWN BOOM & BUST Less than 2 decades later, another San Francisco businessman, Alonzo Horton, swooped in and picked up 800 acres in New Town for $265.

pages: 1,540 words: 400,759

Fodor's California 2014 by Fodor's

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, Blue Bottle Coffee, California gold rush, car-free, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Donner party, Downton Abbey, East Village, El Camino Real, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, young professional

BART Travel BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) trains, which run until midnight, travel under the bay via tunnel to connect San Francisco with Oakland, Berkeley, and other cities and towns beyond. Within San Francisco, stations are limited to downtown, the Mission, and a couple of outlying neighborhoods. Trains travel frequently from early morning until evening on weekdays. After 8 pm weekdays and on weekends there’s often a 20-minute wait between trains on the same line. Trains also travel south from San Francisco as far as Millbrae. BART trains connect downtown San Francisco to San Francisco International Airport; the ride costs $8.25. Intracity San Francisco fares are $1.75; intercity fares are $3.15 to $8.50.

…

Getting Here and Around Air Travel The major gateway to San Francisco is San Francisco International Airport (SFO), 15 miles south of the city. It’s off U.S. 101 near Millbrae and San Bruno. Oakland International Airport (OAK) is across the bay, not much farther away from downtown San Francisco (via I–80 east and I–880 south), but rush-hour traffic on the Bay Bridge may lengthen travel times considerably. San Jose International Airport (SJC) is about 40 miles south of San Francisco; travel time depends largely on traffic flow, but plan on an hour and a half with moderate traffic. Airports San Francisco International Airport (SFO). | 800/435–9736, 650/821–8211 | www.flysfo.com.

…

The California Zephyr travels from Chicago to the Bay Area, and has spectacular alpine vistas as it crosses the Sierra Nevada range. San Francisco doesn’t have an Amtrak train station but does have an Amtrak bus station, at the Ferry Building, from which shuttle buses transport passengers to trains in Emeryville, just over the Bay Bridge. Shuttle buses also connect the Emeryville train station with downtown Oakland, the Caltrain station, and other points in downtown San Francisco. You can buy a California Rail Pass, which gives you 7 days of travel in a 21-day period for $159. Caltrain connects San Francisco to Palo Alto, San Jose, Santa Clara, and many smaller cities en route. In San Francisco, trains leave from the main depot, at 4th and Townsend streets, and a rail-side stop at 22nd and Pennsylvania streets.

pages: 238 words: 73,824

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

In New York City, smaller companies still manufacture everything from envelopes (customers can easily visit the factory to inspect designs before they go on the line) to handcrafted BMX bikes at Brooklyn Machine Works (at as much as $2,800 a frame, cheap labor is not the priority). In San Francisco, a thriving group called SFMade represents scores of entrepreneurial manufacturers who trade on their locality, from Timbuk2 bags to Mission Motors electric motorcycles. The sorts of businesses that capitalize on being close to their market range from custom furniture, which needs close contact with customers, to high-end mattresses (build-on-demand lowers cost), to niche couture (my own office building in the hot high-tech district South of Market also houses some textile factories, with immigrant Chinese workers working on locally designed clothes).

…

Just consider the high-end chocolate made by San Francisco’s Tcho, in a full beans-to-bars chocolate factory run on a converted pier on the Bay by the original founders of Wired. They started local, serving the same boutique demand for artisanal products that saw the rise of high-end coffee chains such as Peets (another San Francisco native) decades earlier. But because they’re a product of the Web Age, they went global more quickly, both through e-commerce and online word of mouth. Now, five years after its founding, Tcho is sold by more than four hundred retailers around the country. The factory on the pier in San Francisco run by Web pioneers makes chocolate around the clock to keep up with demand.

…

But if you want one in your own home, you’ll typically need a custom tank made at a cost of thousands of dollars. This didn’t seem right to Alex Andon. He had taken a fancy to jellyfish while sailing in the British Virgin Islands as a teenager. After graduating from Duke with a biology degree in 2006, he came to the San Francisco Bay Area for a biotech job. But the jellyfish fascinated him more, in part because San Francisco Bay is one of the best places in the world to catch them. He decided to quit his job and set up a company in a friend’s garage to make custom jellyfish tanks. He called it Jellyfish Art, and it grew quickly, offering modified fish tanks with special pumps and custom water-flow systems that kept the jellyfish off the sides.

pages: 462 words: 151,805

Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson by Corey Seymour, Johnny Depp, Jann S. Wenner

Bonfire of the Vanities, buy low sell high, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Mason jar, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, Y2K

Hunter decided he wanted to be closer to the action, so they moved down to a place right across from the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco. He and I rented a trailer and I moved them down, which was another adventure because the mattress flew out of the trailer, as it usually does. It was there where he mostly wrote Hell’s Angels. CHAPTER THREE San Francisco, Hells Angels, and Merry Pranksters I saw him two days after they beat him up. Both of his eyes were filled with blood. His ribs were taped. He could hardly stand up. SANDY THOMPSON We moved to San Francisco and got a place at the top of Golden Gate Park, right at the edge of the Haight.

…

Soldier of Fortune snapped him as he pulled the trigger, and we saw the tracer go fifty feet above the goddamn car. Not even close. JEANETTE ETHERIDGE is the owner of Tosca, a bar in San Francisco. I met Hunter in San Francisco in the late sixties, but we got to be good friends when he was working as the night manager of the O’Farrell Theater—which was run by the Mitchell brothers, who had made the classic porno film Behind the Green Door. Hunter was also writing a weekly column for the San Francisco Examiner, and became a regular at my bar in North Beach. JEFF ARMSTRONG is a manager of the O’Farrell Theatre. In 1984, he accepted an assignment from Playboy for a story he called “The Night Manager.”

…

I suggested he write about his sheriff’s campaign, and in part it could be seen as a prelude to our push in 1972 to get our readers to register to vote. That was just after eighteen-year-olds were given the right to vote. One day he called—I’m not sure if he had an appointment or not—and came in to the office to see me. At that time Rolling Stone was in a redbrick building south of Market, which was then an undeveloped warehouse and industrial area. In retrospect, what I saw was already classic, fully formed Hunter. Here’s this big guy, kind of awkward and clumsy—not knocking anything down exactly, but kind of lumbering in. He had his Converse sneakers and wore a pair of shorts and a polyester multicolored shirt, I think the famous one with red circles on it.

pages: 510 words: 138,000

The Future Won't Be Long by Jarett Kobek

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Donald Trump, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, Future Shock, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, quantum entanglement, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban decay, wage slave, War on Poverty, working poor, young professional

Each eruption demonstrated the hopeless delusions of the American political left. In general, The Power Mongers paid zero mind to the shrill ululations of San Francisco faggots on the topics about which, it may be assumed, the San Francisco faggots possessed some degree of expertise. Like a decade of dead gay men. Why then would our Dark Masters suddenly muster two fucks of a feather regarding a subject about which, it may be assumed, the San Francisco faggots knew nothing? Outside of America’s liberal hotbeds, the country was transfixed by a creeping jingoism. The great unwashed masses proudly wore t-shirts that read DESERT STORM and BONK BONKS SADDAM HUSSEIN and IT’S NOT OVER TILL STORMING NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF SAYS IT’S OVER!

…

Минерва had invited me to go with her to an event at Night Break called Sushi Sundays, during which the management erected tables and set up an impromptu restaurant. The denizens of San Francisco sat devouring tekka-maki and kappa-maki and were entertained by local punk and metal bands. I’d declined. Following a few merry-go-rounds with Минерва’s bong and its sweet maryjane, I couldn’t help myself. I spilled the beans about my fight with Nash Mac. “That boy is such a clod,” I said. “You know New York, darling, you’ve been there. You remember what it was like. San Francisco is nothing.” “Wrong,” said Минерва. “What?” I asked. “Wrong idea,” she said. “San Francisco is deadly.” “We walked over the corpses of junkies!

…

“Look here,” he said, pointing to an advertisement that read: FOR ALL RAVE INFO CALL RAVE HOTLINE 1-900-844-RAVE “There’s another on the other page,” he said. “Same thing, but different number. 900-844-4RAV. We’ll go home and use the telephone.” At Steiner House, Jeremy telephoned and listened. “It’s on Folsom, south of Market. Robert Anton Wilson will be there. It starts at 8, so let’s show up around 11. We can walk. It’ll take about an hour.” Минерва stumbled in and decided to accompany us, whilst making it ever so plain that she still disapproved of Jeremy’s fixation on Grant Morrison and other comics professionals, asking why he would ever desire such a thing and why he acted with such subterfuge.

pages: 319 words: 90,965

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon-based life, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, declining real wages, deliberate practice, discrete time, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, informal economy, invention of the printing press, inventory management, John Markoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Network effects, open borders, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush

Mobile, social, and cloud, each driven by venture-backed technology companies in Silicon Valley. Decades of increasingly powerful technology married to capital and the best minds of the research university had created a distinct and powerful culture in the converted industrial buildings south of Market Street in San Francisco and the storefronts and garages around the academic and industrial giants of Silicon Valley. It was a belief system in which people were not just augmented but liberated by technology—a place where people could discard the compromises and confusions of human living and build something more rational and enlightened in their place

…

It wasn’t hard to guess where those competitors would come from: Silicon Valley, a place with enough money, smart people, and cultural prestige to compete head-to-head with the hybrid universities, using a profoundly different philosophy about what to do with information technology and what the future should bring. — IT WAS FOUR in the afternoon on a gorgeous spring day in the Mission District of San Francisco. I was standing on a sidewalk with Michael Staton, waiting for an Uber to arrive. Michael came to the Bay Area in the early 2000s to launch an Internet start-up company that builds social networks for incoming college freshmen. He had recently switched to the investment side of the deal-making table and become a partner in a venture capital firm specializing in technology and education.

…

The United States government acted on Vannevar Bush’s recommendations for scientific investment on a gargantuan scale. Enormous amounts of money came to California. Some of it went to the research universities, but much of it went to defense contractors and scientific facilities that had begun growing as the military managed points of its global communications and aeronautical networks in and around the San Francisco Bay. Like other universities, Stanford experienced an influx of students after the war. One of Vannevar Bush’s MIT graduate students was appointed dean of engineering. His name was Frederick Terman, and he saw opportunity in symbiosis between business, technology, and academe. In 1951 he helped convert some nearby university land into the Stanford Industrial Park.

pages: 446 words: 138,827

What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, California energy crisis, clean water, cotton gin, deal flow, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, high net worth, imposter syndrome, job satisfaction, Menlo Park, microcredit, new economy, proprietary trading, rolling blackouts, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, telemarketer, traffic fines, work culture , young professional

He was concerned about community, which he feared had been lost in the last three decades, or maybe in the last three years, a time during which he’d also lost his one romantic love and his closest friend and a good deal of money. It had humbled him. He didn’t know where to turn. George shares a two-bedroom rented apartment on the tiptop of Potrero Hill. It’s spotlessly clean and uncluttered by the usual knickknacks one accumulates. From the couch tucked into the bay window of the living room, he looks down on the South of Market industrial neighborhood that was home to so many dot-coms, with the skyline of old money downtown rising up behind it. He can see right into the baseball park’s center field, and he can tell if Bay Bridge traffic is backed up. The view pans from Antioch in the north to Fremont in the south. Fantastic perspective, and it was perspective George needed when he settled into this couch after leaving start-ups forever.

…

How many times will you get the benefit of arriving at a crossroads, where you don’t have to fight the tug of rolling inertia, and your choice isn’t going to hurt someone you love? Not many. Make them count. They will define you. When I left First Boston, I joined my girlfriend managing and writing a subscription-only newsletter on San Francisco politics. I was earning about one thousand dollars a month. At night I took my first class in creative writing at San Francisco State, a lonely commuter school of mostly part-time students. I continued to wedge one class a week into my schedule for the next seven years. You might think that I had an obvious topic to write about, bringing to school my incredible front-row perspective on the unique macho culture of global finance.

…

Probably both. That’s friction. That’s what makes it interesting. Marc Weidenbaum is thirty-four, tall and slender. He moved here a year and a half ago. He’s an exotic here, because he’s a Jewish kid from Long Island via San Francisco who talks too fast and wears a backpack. “You don’t see many backpacks here,” he said. “The backpack is a staple of New York and San Francisco. It says you’re coming from somewhere, and you’re going somewhere else, and you have things you need that you can’t be without. Here, backpacks are unnecessary. People look at me and think I’m way too old to have a backpack.

Coastal California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, flex fuel, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, Lyft, machine readable, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

The Summer of Love brought free food, love and music to the Haight, and pioneering gay activists in the Castro helped elect Harvey Milk as San Francisco supervisor – America’s first out gay official. When San Francisco witnessed devastating losses from HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, the city rallied to become a global model for epidemic treatment and prevention. San Francisco’s unconventional thinking spawned the web in the 1990s, until the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. But risk-taking SF continues to float outlandish new ideas – social media, mobile apps, biotech. Congratulations: you’re just in time for San Francisco’s next wild ride. Downtown San Francisco & SoMa 1Top Sights 1Asian Art MuseumB5 2Cable Car MuseumC1 3Contemporary Jewish MuseumE4 4Ferry BuildingG1 5Luggage Store GalleryC5 6San Francisco Museum of Modern ArtE4 7SF CameraworkC5 1Sights 8Diego Rivera's Allegory of California FrescoE2 9Glide Memorial United Methodist ChurchC4 10Huntington ParkC2 11Yerba Buena GardensE4 2Activities, Courses & Tours 12City KayakH5 13Emperor Norton's Fantastic Time MachineD3 4Sleeping 14AxiomD4 15Golden Gate HotelC3 16Hotel CarltonB3 17Hotel VitaleG2 18MarkerC3 19Palace HotelE3 20Petite AubergeC3 5Eating 21AcquerelloA2 22BenuF4 23CalaA6 24El Porteño EmpanadasG1 25farm:tableB3 26Ferry Plaza Farmers MarketG1 27Hog Island Oyster CompanyG1 28In SituF4 29JardinièreA6 30MijitaG1 31Red ChilliC4 32Rich TableA7 33SentinelE3 34Seven HillsB1 Slanted DoorG1 35Swan Oyster DepotA2 36Tout SweetD3 6Drinking & Nightlife 37Big 4C2 38Blue Bottle Coffee KioskA6 39Bourbon & BranchC4 40Club OMGD5 41Hole in the WallC7 42PowerhouseC7 43StudC7 3Entertainment 44AMC Metreon 16E4 45American Conservatory TheaterC3 46Great American Music HallA4 47San Francisco BalletA6 San Francisco OperaA6 48San Francisco SymphonyA6 49SFJAZZ CenterA6 50Strand TheaterC5 51Yerba Buena Center for the ArtsE4 7Shopping 52Heath CeramicsG1 53Recchiuti ChocolatesG1 54Westfield San Francisco CentreD4 1Sights Downtown, Civic Center & SoMa oSan Francisco Museum of Modern ArtMUSEUM (SFMOMA; MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %415-357-4000; www.sfmoma.org; 151 3rd St; adult/under 18yr/student $25/free/19; h10am-5pm Fri-Tue, to 9pm Thu, public spaces from 9am; c; g5, 6, 7, 14, 19, 21, 31, 38, mMontgomery, ZMontgomery) The expanded SFMOMA is a mind-boggling feat, tripled in size to accommodate a sprawling collection of modern masterworks and 19 concurrent exhibitions over 10 floors – but, then again, SFMOMA has defied limits ever since its 1935 founding.

…

Winter may be slim pickings for salad in the fertile Central Valley, but ideal for Southern California citrus. San Francisco Bay Area For miners converging here for the gold rush, San Francisco offered an unrivaled variety of novelties and cuisines, from cheap Chinese street food to French fine dining for those who struck it rich. Today, San Francisco’s adventurous eaters support the most restaurants per capita of any US city – five times more than NYC, ahem – and farmers markets every day of the week, year-round. Some of San Francisco's novelty dishes have extraordinary staying power, including chocolate bars (invented by the Ghirardelli family as power bars for miners), ever-popular cioppino (seafood stew), and sourdough bread, with original gold-rush era mother dough still yielding local loaves with a distinctive tang.

…

Take a permanent vacation in laid-back beach towns while devouring fish tacos, or wander Balboa Park’s museums and famous zoo. San Francisco Sights Activities Tours & Courses City Walk Festivals & Events Sleeping Eating Drinking & Nightlife Entertainment Shopping San Francisco Pop 870,887 Why Go? Get to know the capital of weird from the inside out, from mural-lined alleyways named after poets to clothing-optional beaches on a former military base. But don't be too quick to dismiss San Francisco's wild ideas. Biotech, gay rights, personal computers, cable cars and organic fine dining were once considered outlandish too, before San Francisco introduced these underground ideas into the mainstream decades ago.

Northern California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, gentrification, gigafactory, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, Port of Oakland, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the built environment, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Valley Walks Many brilliant hiking trails originate in Yosemite Valley, including waterfall walks to Vernal and Nevada Falls, and the near-vertical ascent of famous Yosemite Falls. Follow the watercourses for maximum drama. San Francisco San Francisco Highlights Sights Activities Tours & Courses City Walk Festivals & Events Sleeping Eating Drinking & Nightlife Entertainment Shopping Information San Francisco by Cable Car San Francisco Pop 870,887 Why Go? Get to know the capital of weird from the inside out, from mural-lined alleyways named after poets to clothing-optional beaches on a former military base. But don't be too quick to dismiss San Francisco's wild ideas. Biotech, gay rights, personal computers, cable cars and organic fine dining were once considered outlandish too, before San Francisco introduced these underground ideas into the mainstream decades ago.

…

Greyhound (%800-231-2222; www.greyhound.com) Buses leave daily for Los Angeles ($39 to $90, eight to 12 hours), Truckee near Lake Tahoe ($35 to $46, 5½ hours) and other major destinations. Megabus Low-cost bus service to San Francisco from Los Angeles, Sacramento and Reno. SamTrans Southbound buses to Palo Alto and the Pacific coast. Train Easy on the eyes and light on carbon emissions, train travel is a good way to visit the Bay Area and beyond. Caltrain ( GOOGLE MAP ; www.caltrain.com; cnr 4th & King Sts) connects San Francisco with Silicon Valley hubs and San Jose. Amtrak (%800-872-7245; www.amtrakcalifornia.com) serves San Francisco via stations in Oakland and Emeryville (near Oakland), with free shuttle-bus connections to San Francisco's Ferry Building and Caltrain station, and Oakland's Jack London Sq.

pages: 349 words: 102,827

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum by Camila Russo

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, altcoin, always be closing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asian financial crisis, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Cody Wilson, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, East Village, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hacker house, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, mobile money, new economy, non-fungible token, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, QR code, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Turing complete, Two Sigma, Uber for X, Vitalik Buterin

In just under three short years, Vitalik had gone from Bitcoin skeptic to writing about Bitcoin to working on Bitcoin projects. After about six months on the road, his world tour ended in San Francisco. As he climbed up and down the city’s steep hills, he continued to refine the idea of a new blockchain that could become the platform enabling any decentralized, censorship-resistant application imaginable. He made his way to Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas’s studio apartment, just south of Market Street, where he would stay for two weeks, eager to get to work. He opened his laptop and started typing, “The Ultimate Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform.”

…

Like an infinite machine. 7 The First Responders Anthony D’Onofrio, more widely known by his pseudonym of “Texture,” was making the four-hour drive to see his pregnant girlfriend, like he did every weekend. She was living in Sebastopol, California, a small town near the vineyards of Sonoma County, about two hours north of San Francisco, and he was living in Merced, the city known as the gateway to Yosemite National Park, about two hours south of San Francisco. It was the beginning of winter, and the temperature had started to drop. Traffic was unusually light as Texture relaxed into the seat of his white, 2002 BMW 325i. He had started a weed edibles business and had chosen this “mom car” with the explicit goal of attracting the least amount of attention possible, as it was often loaded with THC-laced candy.

…

Those who talked to me were generous enough to help me unearth dozens of old emails, chat logs, documents, and pictures. I also dug deep into online forums, blog posts, and archived websites. I followed this colorful, idealist, brilliant crew to their conferences and hackathons in Prague, Buenos Aires, Toronto, Berlin, Denver, Paris, New York, San Francisco, and Osaka. I felt like Alice following the White Rabbit into a world of impossible dreams: banking without banks, breeding digital cats, self-organizing companies with no CEOs, and talk of flying to the moon. Shaggy, unkempt young developers, whether they had dropped out of computer science programs or had fled companies from the other side of the looking glass—these were the magicians trying to make these dreams a reality amid a swirl of internet memes, rainbows, unicorns, and lines of computer code.

pages: 394 words: 118,929

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg

A Pattern Language, AOL-Time Warner, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, call centre, collaborative editing, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, continuous integration, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, General Magic , George Santayana, Grace Hopper, Guido van Rossum, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, intentional community, Internet Archive, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, life extension, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, Mitch Kapor, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, scientific management, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, slashdot, software studies, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, thinkpad, Turing test, VA Linux, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

That was too bleak for another staffer, who erased an r, leaving a more positive biblical prophecy: “We come toward thee.” Kapor repeatedly told his programmers that the nonprofit OSAF was going to operate under different rules from the venture-capital-funded start-ups whose wreckage, in those post–Internet boom days, littered the San Francisco Bay area—leaving OSAF’s new neighborhood south of Market Street feeling like an urban dead zone. At a May meeting he reassured some of them who feared that their team was growing too big, too fast: “We’re not operating with the mythology of the Silicon Valley death march, with the deadline to ship a product and get revenue, where the product quality goes out the window.

…

Leung already knew how to do “distributed development” from his Apache work; Kapor invited him to join OSAF and work from home, with a visit to the San Francisco mother ship every few months. Today Leung is going to demo some tests he has rigged to see how well the Chandler repository can handle large quantities of data. A dedicated blogger, he devised a program that would load twenty megabytes of blog posts in RSS format into Chandler, creating eleven thousand Chandler items. There’s only one problem: While a colleague at the OSAF office runs the demo on screen, Leung is patched in by phone, and the phone link is only half working: He can hear San Francisco, but San Francisco can’t hear him. So he narrates the demo by typing his explanations into the IRC chat room, which is projected on the wall, where his colleagues can read them.

…

I thought there needed to be more variety in the game’s insurrections, so I started inventing additions—new subroutines that would plunge Sumer into civil war or introduce rival governments competing for legitimacy. I didn’t care how late it was. The F train ran all night to take me home to Queens. The revolution had to be customized! A quarter century later, in May 2000, I sat in an office in San Francisco and stared at a modern computer screen (high resolution, millions of colors). Wan ranks of half-guzzled paper coffee cups flanked my keyboard. It was 5:00 A.M. I was forty years old, a founder and now managing editor of the online magazine Salon, and in charge of a software development project.

pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

When I first met her, she was only 35, but in the hummingbird metabolism of software, that made her an éminence grise. After five years at Facebook, she’d founded her own company, sold it to Dropbox, and worked there as a vice president. After she left Dropbox, she started a venture aimed at inspiring the next generation of coders: South Park Commons. A renovated office building in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, it is a hub for young technologists pondering their future. “It’s like a salon,” Sanghvi said when I showed up for lunch on a hot summer day. Small clusters of engineers, researchers, and entrepreneurs sat at long tables, plowing through email and reading white papers, beneath a sprawling piece of art on the wall, a series of jagged wooden arches.

…

He’d been invited to many Slack groups to discuss sensitive political issues, too, where things weren’t encrypted, either. “I get it! It’s convenient! So we need to make tools that are just as convenient and easy but safe.” It’s a Friday night in San Francisco, and Phillips is presiding over a roomful of pro-privacy hackers. We’re at Noisebridge, a hackerspace in San Francisco famous for attracting everything from soldering-iron-wielding hardware tinkerers to neophyte coders who show up for free learn-to-program tutorials; there’s a giant wall of lights in the main room that tonight is blinking a Game of Life display, antique PCs from the ’70s lying about, a couple of industrial sewing machines, and whiteboards overscribbled with arrays and functions.

…

She wanted to do something like Facebook, a site that she’d joined in her last year of college. Now that was an addictive bit of software. She’d log in all the time to stay in touch with college friends who’d recently graduated, checking their pages to see if they’d updated anything. So Sanghvi bailed on Manhattan, quitting the job even before her first day. She fled to San Francisco, where she got a job at Oracle, the database company. And then, one day a college friend invited her to come by the offices of Facebook itself. It was a tiny firm, serving only college students; everyday folks weren’t yet allowed to use Facebook. When she walked up to the office on the second floor above a Chinese-food restaurant, she found a passel of mostly young white men, some who’d recently bailed on Harvard: a 21-year-old Mark Zuckerberg walking around in nearly wrecked sandals, Adam D’Angelo (the guy who’d taught a younger Zuckerberg some coding), and Dustin Moskovitz, Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard.

pages: 247 words: 69,593

The Creative Curve: How to Develop the Right Idea, at the Right Time by Allen Gannett

Alfred Russel Wallace, collective bargaining, content marketing, data science, David Brooks, deliberate practice, Desert Island Discs, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gentrification, glass ceiling, iterative process, lone genius, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, pattern recognition, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, too big to fail, uber lyft, work culture

.* Clustered A young woman was sweeping the lobby of the Park Hotel in the SoMa section of San Francisco, the neighborhood south of Market Street. The lobby had muted green walls with benches that looked ripped out of a diner. It wasn’t truly a hotel, rather it was affordable housing with shared bathrooms. As she continued sweeping, she noticed a photographer snapping a picture. Over thirty-five years later, the resulting photo appeared as part of a photo series on the gentrification of SoMa. Since that time, San Francisco, and SoMa in particular, has gone from impoverished to unaffordable. Office space in the formerly rundown SoMa neighborhood now rents for an average of $72.50 per square foot (matching pricey Manhattan), and studio apartments sell for an average of over $1,200 per square foot, which means that a small 450-square-foot studio costs more than $540,000, which is enough to buy a McMansion in many suburbs.

…

Office space in the formerly rundown SoMa neighborhood: Details drawn from “MarketBeat Manhattan Q1 2017,” Cushman & Wakefield (2017), http://www.cushmanwakefield.com/en/research-and-insight/unitedstates/manhattan-office-snapshot/; “MarketBeat San Francisco Q1 2017,” Cushman & Wakefield (2017), http://www.cushmanwakefield.com/en/research-and-insight/unitedstates/san-francisco-office-snapshot/; and “San Francisco,” RedFin (2017), https://www.redfin.com/city/17151/CA/San-Francisco. Richard Florida: Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2014). In one study: Brian Knudsen et al., “Urban Density, Creativity, and Innovation,” Creative Class, May 2007, http://creativeclass.com/rfcgdb/articles/Urban_Density_Creativity_and_Innovation.pdf.

…

If it’s true that familiarity breeds comfort, why did the name Lisa lose popularity over time? Why wouldn’t more and more parents name their daughters Lisa, until one day we all woke up living in Lisaland? Love Kills Slowly Don Ed Hardy was a tattoo artist who for years was best known for the Japanese-inspired designs he inked on bodies at Tattoo City, the San Francisco studio he opened in 1977. One day he got a call from Christian Audigier, the businessman behind the trendy Von Dutch clothing brand. Audigier had seen one of Hardy’s designs and wanted to take it mainstream. He asked Hardy about signing a license to build a brand around his art. Hardy researched Audigier and, as he later told one interviewer, “This guy is at ground zero of everything that’s wrong with contemporary civilization.”

pages: 558 words: 175,965

When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach by Ashlee Vance

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", 3D printing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, fake it until you make it, Google Earth, hacker house, Hyperloop, intentional community, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kwajalein Atoll, lockdown, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off-the-grid, overview effect, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, Rainbow Mansion, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, TikTok, Virgin Galactic

The military wanted to see just how weird it could get when it came to blasting objects into orbit and fancied the idea of being able to chuck up a satellite without anyone noticing. After a bit of digging, I discovered the name of the start-up—Ventions LLC—and its CEO, Adam London. And, sure enough, its address at 1142 Howard Street placed the company in the part of San Francisco known as SoMa, or South of Market. All of this intrigued me because the internet had precious little information about this London fella, and rocket start-ups are not meant to exist in SoMa, an area made famous during the dot-com boom for giving rise to internet and software companies and coffee shops where venture capitalists liked to display their self-confidence.

…

And so we’re also going to find a way to build a Burning Man gallery. Or, like, when we wanted a place to test rockets on the airfield, I said to the city, “We’re going to launch rockets here.” Which is insane. Obviously, we’re not going to launch our rocket twenty minutes by car from downtown San Francisco or five seconds from downtown San Francisco by rocket. But if I change it and say, “Well, how about we just test it for a few seconds? You know, we’ll hold it down. We won’t launch it.” They’re like “Okay. All right.” But if I had gone in asking to test a rocket, they would have said, “That’s crazy. No.” It’s the same thing with the art.

…

After about a half hour, word came back that the satellites had been placed safely in orbit three hundred miles above the earth. Covered in white paint, the Doves had tumbled out of the rocket’s cargo chamber one after another and created what looked like a string of pearls traveling across a black backdrop. Employees at Planet’s headquarters in San Francisco began communicating with the satellites through a network of antennas the company had placed at ground stations all around the world. The first step was to check on the Doves and make sure they were alive and functioning correctly. No organization had ever put up anywhere close to eighty-eight satellites at the same time.

USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Sights Let San Francisco’s 43 hills and more than 80 arts venues stretch your legs and imagin-ation, and take in some (literally) breathtaking views. The 7 x 7-mile city is laid out on a staid grid, but its main street is a diagonal contrarian streak called Market St. Downtown sights are within walking distance of Market St, but keep your city smarts and wits about you, especially around South of Market (SoMa) and the Tenderloin (5th to 9th Sts). SF’s most historic landmarks are in the Mission, while exciting new destinations are inside Golden Gate Park. Downtown San Francisco Top Sights Asian Art Museum C7 Coit Tower D3 Davies Symphony HallB7 Ferry Building F4 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art E6 Sights 1 14 Geary E6 2 49 Geary E6 3 77 Geary D6 4 Aquarium of the Bay D2 5 Aquatic Park BathhouseB2 6 Art Institute C3 7 Beat Museum D4 8 Cartoon Art Museum E6 9Catharine Clark GalleryE6 10Children’s Creativity MuseumE6 11Chinatown GateD5 12 Chinese Culture Center D4 13 Chinese Historical Society of America Museum D5 14 City Hall B7 15 Contemporary Jewish Museum E6 16 George Sterling Park B3 17 Grace Cathedral C5 18 Hyde Street Pier Historic ShipsB2 19 Musée Mécanique C2 20 Museum of African Diaspora E6 21Museum of Craft & Folk ArtsE6 22 Pier 39 D1 23San Francisco Maritime National Historical ParkB2 24 Transamerica Pyramid E4 25Union SquareD6 26 Uss Pampanito C2 Activities, Courses & Tours 27 Adventure Cat D2 28Alcatraz CruisesD2 29 Blazing Saddles B2 30 City Kayak G6 31Meeting Point for Fire Engine ToursB2 Sleeping 32 Golden Gate Hotel D5 33 Hotel Abri D6 34 Hotel BohèmeD4 35 Hotel des Arts D5 36 Hotel Rex D5 37 Hotel VitaleF5 38 Orchard Garden HotelD5 39 Pacific Tradewinds E5 40 Petite Auberge C5 41 San Remo Hotel C3 42 Stratford Hotel D6 Eating 43 Bar JulesA8 44 BenuE6 45 Bocadillos E4 46 Brenda's French Soul Food B6 47 Cinecittà D3 48 CoiE4 49 CotognaE4 50 Crown & Crumpet B2 51 FarmerbrownD6 52 Farmers Market F4 53 Gitane E5 Gott's Roadside (see 52) Hog Island Oyster Company (see 52) 54 In-N-Out Burger C2 55 JardinièreB7 Mijita (see 52) 56 Molinari D4 57 Off the Grid A2 58 Saigon Sandwich Shop C6 Slanted Door (see 52) Drinking 59 Aunt Charlie'sD6 60 Endup E7 61 Rebel Bar B8 62 Smuggler's CoveB7 63 Stud D8 64 Tosca Cafe D4 Entertainment 65 111 Minna E5 66 American Conservatory Theater D6 67AT&T ParkG7 68 Cat Club D8 69 Club Fugazi D3 70 Harlot E5 71 Mezzanine D7 TIX Bay Area (see 25) 72 War Memorial Opera House B7 73 Yerba Buena Center for the ArtsE6 Shopping 74 City Lights Bookstore D4 SOMA Cartoon Art Museum MUSEUM Offline map Google map ( 415-227-8666; www.cartoonart.org; 655 Mission St; adult/child $7/5; 11am-5pm Tue-Sun) Comics earn serious consideration with shows of original Watchmen covers, too-hot-to-print political cartoons and lectures with local Pixar studio heads.

…

pages: 288 words: 86,995

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

This is part of an industry strategy to keep wages low and adapt to employee turnover rates that were as high as 150 percent in 2019.37 The mechanized nature of these jobs makes it highly feasible to gradually substitute automated machines for workers. One of the most successful examples so far is San Francisco–based Creator, Inc. The sophisticated and aesthetically designed robot at the company’s first restaurant in the city’s South of Market area is able to crank out a gourmet-quality hamburger every thirty seconds. Customers customize and order their burger using a mobile app. The robot then completely automates production of the hamburger from start to finish. No human being ever touches the food during the process.

…

Many of the startup companies and university researchers working in this area believe, like Covariant, that a strategy founded on deep neural networks and reinforcement learning is the best way to fuel progress toward more dexterous robots. One notable exception is Vicarious, a small AI company based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Founded in 2010—two years before the 2012 ImageNet competition brought deep learning to the forefront—Vicarious’s long-term objective is to achieve human-level or artificial general intelligence. In other words, the company is, in a sense, competing directly with higher-profile and far better funded initiatives like those at DeepMind and OpenAI.

…

Creator allocates about forty percent of its costs to food, while a typical restaurant might spend thirty percent.38 It turns out that developing and building a machine capable of fully automating the production of gourmet-quality hamburgers is not a trivial undertaking. Creator was founded in 2012, and I wrote about the company, then called Momentum Machines, in my 2015 book Rise of the Robots. It took more than six years of hardware and software engineering, design and testing before the robot was ready to be put into production, and the San Francisco location was opened in June 2018. However, the company, which has received funding from Google Ventures and other top Silicon Valley venture capital firms, may now be poised to rapidly expand or perhaps license its technology to other restaurants. Creator, with its strategy of leveraging automation to produce high-end hamburgers, will likely soon be joined by a variety of other startup companies that are instead developing robots to produce cheap commoditized burgers.

pages: 304 words: 91,566

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption by Ben Mezrich

airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cryptocurrency, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, game design, information security, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, new economy, offshore financial centre, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, QR code, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, transaction costs, Virgin Galactic, zero-sum game

But eclipsing those thoughts, the odd email reminded Tyler of that first moment in Ibiza, when he’d felt like they’d just peered down a rabbit hole toward something the rest of the world had somehow missed. The honk of a taxicab coming around the corner broke through his contemplation, and he pulled his brother toward the curb. “We’re going to need to book an earlier flight to California.” 21 BEHIND THE DOOR May 16, 2013. Six P.M. on the dot. Rincon Hill, south of Market Street, San Francisco. A mostly residential area of wildly priced condos. Their destination appeared to be a skyscraper with a nondescript lobby and a bored-looking concierge behind a desk, who had no idea what Cameron and Tyler were looking for. It wasn’t until they were back out on the street, scanning the building’s facade, that they found it—right out in the open for anybody walking by to see: a single door, with a small sign taped to it, which read THE GENESIS BLOCK.

…

Cameron continued walking a few paces forward before realizing that he had lost his brother. “What are you doing? You’re going to get yourself killed.” Tyler waved him over, then handed him the phone. “What is this?” “It’s an invite. Something in San Francisco.” Cameron stared at the mysterious email on Tyler’s phone. The email was short, from someone they didn’t know. Probably someone who worked for someone else. But that wasn’t the only mysterious part. The invite was for May 16 in San Francisco at 6:00 P.M., the night before their keynote address at Bitcoin 2013. Other than the date, time, and location, there were no other details. The message read only: Look for the Genesis Block at 631 Folsom … photo attached.

…

Charlie gave Courtney his most confident smile, then hit send. ACT THREE All human wisdom is contained in these two words: “Wait” and “Hope”! —ALEXANDRE DUMAS, The Count of Monte Cristo 24 A PIRATE’S TALE San Francisco. October 1, 2013. 3:15 in the afternoon. Diamond Street, quiet, tree-lined, winding through a mostly residential neighborhood, sloping toward a small business district. The Glen Park branch of the San Francisco Public Library, a granite cube with oversize windows. A warm, orange-lit interior. Hardwood floors, paneled ceilings. Up the stairs to the second floor, rear corner, tucked into the science fiction section of the library, a small, brightly lit desk by the window.

pages: 2,323 words: 550,739

1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed. by Patricia Schultz

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, country house hotel, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, East Village, El Camino Real, estate planning, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Mars Rover, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, out of africa, Pepto Bismol, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, sexual politics, South of Market, San Francisco, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, wage slave, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

The dazzling collection spans 6,000 years of works from China (its greatest strength), Japan, Korea, India, Afghanistan, Thailand, and Myanmar (Burma), and explores three main themes—the development of Buddhism, how trade and pilgrimage led to cultural exchange, and how Asian artists influenced each other. Rounding out the city’s trio of museums with new homes is San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), founded in 1935 and the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th-century art. In 1995 it moved into its brand-new building designed by Swiss architect Mario Botta, located in SoMa (the South of Market neighborhood) across from the urban-cool Yerba Buena Gardens. Some argue the building itself is more impressive than the collections within, but you’ll still find works by Matisse, Magritte, Warhol, Stella, Rivera, O’Keeffe, Dalí, and Picasso.

…

., 842 San Diego Wild Animal Park, Calif., 843 SAN DIEGO ZOO, Calif., 842–43 SANDPOINT, Idaho, 601–2 Sandusky, Ohio, 568 Sandy Point Lodge, Minn., 551–52 San Francisco, Calif., 844–52 San Francisco Botanical Garden, Calif., 846 SAN FRANCISCO FERRY BUILDING, Calif., 846–47 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Calif., 848 SAN FRANCISCO’S ART MUSEUMS, Calif., 847–48 SAN FRANCISCO’S BEST ASIAN RESTAURANTS, Calif., 848–49 SAN FRANCISCO’S FINEST RESTAURANTS, Calif., 849–50 SAN FRANCISCO’S GREAT NEIGHBORHOODS, Calif., 851–52 San Geronimo Fest, N.Mex., 754 SANIBEL ISLAND, Fla., 326–27 SAN INAZIO DE LOYOLA BASQUE FESTIVAL, Idaho, 592–93 San Jose de Tumacácori (mission church), Ariz., 699 San Juan Capistrano, Calif., 807 San Juan Island, Wash., 897 San Juan Islands, Wash., 885, 896–97 San Juan Mountains, Colo., 717–18 SAN JUAN RIVER, Utah, 788–89 San Juan Skyway, Colo., 713 SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif., 852–53 Sansei Seafood Restaurant and Sushi Bar, Hawaii, 956 San Simeon, Calif., 853–54 San Solomon Courts, Tex., 778 SANTA BARBARA, Calif., 854–55 Santa-Cali-Gon Days, Mo., 452 SANTA CATALINA ISLAND, Calif., 855–56 SANTA CRUZ, Calif., 856–57 Santa Fe, N.Mex., 746–51 Santa Fe Building, Ill., 486 Santa Fe Farmers Market, N.Mex., 749 Santa Fe Museum of Fine Arts, N.Mex., 750 SANTA FE OPERA, N.Mex., 747–48 Santa Fe School of Cooking, N.Mex., 749 SANTA FE’S SOUTHWEST CUISINE, N.Mex., 748–49 Santa Fe Wine & Chili Fiesta, N.Mex., 749 SANTA MONICA, Calif., 828–29 Santa Monica Pier, Calif., 828 Santa Rosa, N.Mex., 746 Santa Ynez, Calif., 857–58 SANTA YNEZ VALLEY, Calif., 857–58 San Ysidro Ranch, Calif., 855 Sapphire Grill, Ga., 349 Sarah P.

…

GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE: www.goldengatebridge.org. BEST TIMES: early spring for cherry blossoms in Japanese Tea Garden; Sun for car-free wandering; weekdays for less crowded visits to park museums and Japanese Tea Garden. Foodie Paradise on the Waterfront THE SAN FRANCISCO FERRY BUILDING San Francisco, California The crossroads of all things delicious, the historic San Francisco Ferry Building is a place to congregate and worship the region’s culinary delights at shops, restaurants, and 200 outdoor market stalls that make up the country’s finest farmers market. The imposing 1898 structure with its signature clock tower has long been the hub for ferries arriving from Sausalito, Tiburon, Larkspur, Vallejo, and Alameda, but was reimagined as a food mecca after the earthquake of 1989.

pages: 365 words: 120,105

Why Do I Love These People?: Understanding, Surviving, and Creating Your Own Family by Po Bronson

Asperger Syndrome, estate planning, South of Market, San Francisco, working poor, young professional

It came back when she got to know her father, James, but not as her father, just as a man, a human being with feelings. She found herself loving him again, with a respect she'd not had in twenty years. This is their story. I had actually met Jennifer before. “Do you remember?” she asked. “I still have your old business card,” I recalled truthfully. We would bump into each other at a South of Market club where my best friend and I used to swing-dance. What I remembered about Jen was that she spoke very directly about her emerging career as a television producer. She was ambitious and sharp. And this was memorable, because we were in a club where (1) businessy career conversations seemed out of place, not to mention hard to hear, and (2) Jen was working as a Lucky Strike cigarette girl, in costume, giving away cigarettes.

…

I consider the style of my work “social documentary,” and these are some of the most powerful stories I've ever recorded. I wrote this book because I fell in love with these stories, and I fell in love with these stories partially because I have been on a similar journey myself. Today I have two healthy young children and am happily married. We live in San Francisco and our extended family is spread out over both coasts of the United States and three continents. We visit all of our relatives, often, and it is not a duty or a chore—we like it. My mom lives with us about six weeks a year, and my dad and I have a special connection that I would still feel if he were on Mars.

…

Jennifer remembers fretting about whether this American ice skater's haircut would be sufficient to allow her to fit in, but her father seemed confident in what he was doing. In their culture there was no such thing as questioning your father. “Your cousins will teach you,” he promised. His own father, sister, and brother had gone to San Francisco twenty years earlier. By now they were thriving. The family would smooth their transition. They didn't. The family was caught up in their own lives. They treated the new Louies rudely, mocked them for not speaking English, and overlooked them at Christmas. The new arrivals were never “emotionally claimed,” to use James's phrase.

pages: 411 words: 80,925

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, Community Supported Agriculture, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global village, hedonic treadmill, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, information retrieval, intentional community, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Simon Kuznets, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, South of Market, San Francisco, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, web of trust, women in the workforce, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

What’s Mine Is Yours THE RISE OF COLLABORATIVE CONSUMPTION Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers For my nana, Evelyn Amdur —Rachel For Bernie, Ruby & Mei —Roo Contents Cover Title Page Introduction: What’s Mine Is Yours Part 1 - Context Chapter One - Enough Is Enough Chapter Two - All-Consuming Chapter Three - From Generation Me to Generation We Part 2 - Groundswell Chapter Four - The Rise of Collaborative Consumption Chapter Five - Better Than Ownership Chapter Six - What Goes Around Comes Around Chapter Seven - We Are All in This Together Part 3 - Implications Chapter Eight - Collaborative Design Chapter Nine - Community Is the Brand Chapter Ten - The Evolution of Collaborative Consumption Interviewees Collaborative Consumption Hub Selected Bibliography Index Acknowledgments About the Authors Copyright About the Publisher Introduction What’s Mine Is Yours In October 2007, designers from all over the world traveled to San Francisco to attend the annual industrial design conference. The city’s hotel rooms had been sold out for months. Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, old friends and product design graduates from the Rhode Island School of Design, were among the ten thousand people planning to attend. The classmates had recently moved into a big loft in South of Market, San Francisco, or SoMa, as it is known, to start a business. During a conversation Gebbia and Chesky had about making some quick money to help pay their rent, they asked themselves, “Why not rent our extra room and advertise it on the conference Web site?”

…

The key difference is that people generally charge for stuff on craigslist. It’s not usually free. Newmark, just like Beal, created one of the Internet’s most popular sites almost by accident. He started it in 1995 by sending his friends and coworkers a list of cool art and technology events in San Francisco. Gradually, it spread into the wider community. “People started sending me more and more stuff, such as job listings, stuff to sell, and apartment rentals to add to the list, and more and more people asked to be added to it,” Newmark says. Within two years, he had thousands of readers, most of whom he didn’t know.13 From there it has grown into the world’s most popular Web site for classified ads, with more than seven hundred local sites across seventy countries from Romania to Kenya to Canada.

…

As Rob Forshaw, a Zopa lender, puts it, “It makes me feel like I am part of something bigger and seems to trigger a sense of belonging. With belonging comes pride and passion.” Working Alone and Together In 2005, Brad Neuberg was a thirty-one-year-old freelance open-source software programmer living in San Francisco. He had just left a tech start-up to work for himself. Neuberg enjoyed working from home, yet the experience was also isolating. He tried the de facto techie office, a coffee shop, but found it too noisy and distracting and devoid of meaningful interactions. Despite his complaints about the monotony and conformity of the nine-to-five cube-working culture, Neuberg discovered that he missed the social camaraderie of an office.

pages: 314 words: 83,631

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum

air freight, cable laying ship, call centre, digital divide, Donald Davies, global village, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, inflight wifi, invisible hand, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, messenger bag, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, packet switching, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, undersea cable, urban planning, UUNET, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

But what about the networks themselves, and their places of connections? In a business that’s always been obsessed with the next new thing, who was still around to tell that story? I went back to California—only to hear about Virginia. On a characteristically damp and gray San Francisco day, I met a network engineer named Steve Feldman at a café a few blocks from his office, in the heart of the cluster of Internet companies located south of Market Street. He looked like a high school math teacher, with khaki pants, sturdy brown walking shoes, and a big beard. His office ID hung around his neck from a lanyard embroidered with NANOG, the North American Network Operators’ Group—the clubby association of engineers who manage the biggest Internet networks, and whose steering committee Feldman chairs.

…

For the twenty-five thousand customers who relied on Auer’s company to connect to “the Internet,” this machine was the on-ramp. Its job was to read the destination of a packet of data and send it along one of two paths. The first path went upstairs to an equipment room belonging to Cogent, a wholesale Internet provider that serviced cities from San Francisco to Kiev. A yellow wire passed through a utility shaft, came through a wall, and plugged into Cogent’s equipment, itself connected to electronic colleagues in Chicago and Minneapolis. This building was Cogent’s only “point of presence” in all of Wisconsin, the only place Cogent’s express train stopped; that’s why Auer’s company was here, and all the others.

…

Feldman responded to the government request for bids with an idea for a fancy new exchange—but the National Science Foundation, which ran the process, said they’d rather just give MFS money to keep MAE-East going. Contracts were eventually awarded for four access points, run by four major telecom players: the Sprint NAP in Pennsauken, New Jersey, just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia; the Ameritech NAP in Chicago; the Pacific Bell NAP in San Francisco; and MAE-East. But Feldman likes to say there were really only three and half, “because we already existed.” (And MFS would soon open MAE-West, at 55 South Market Street, in San Jose, California, to compete with the Pacific Bell NAP.) That geography was deliberate. The National Science Foundation knew that to succeed the network hubs needed to serve distinct regional markets, spread evenly across the country.

pages: 289 words: 99,936

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age by Virginia Eubanks

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, call centre, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, desegregation, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, game design, global village, index card, informal economy, invisible hand, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, microcredit, new economy, post-industrial society, race to the bottom, rent control, rent stabilization, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social contagion, South of Market, San Francisco, tech worker, telemarketer, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban planning, web application, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Though my vision was limited by my privileged social and economic position, I was not blind. It was clear to me at the time that I was part of the massive wave of gentriﬁcation that swept through San Francisco neighborhoods like the Mission, South of Market, Hayes Valley, and the Western Addition. Public housing began to disappear, replaced by coffee shops, Internet cafes, and the kind of stores that display two items of clothing in a big white room. In the three and a half years I lived in San Francisco, the vibrant diversity of the city waned visibly and rents in my neighborhood tripled. In the mid-1990s, in the circles I was running in, it was not unusual for people to ask you at parties, only half ironically, “Have you made your ﬁrst million yet?”

…

I discovered feminism when a women’s studies class gave me language to articulate long-held beliefs about sex and gender inequalities. I engaged in antiwar and anti-imperialist organizing after the ﬁrst invasion of Iraq. I took my ﬁrst steps into antiracist and civil rights work after hitchhiking to San Francisco to hear Angela Y. Davis speak at the Western Regional Organizing Conference Against the War in 1991; it was a profoundly life-changing experience. While my college campus was diverse in terms of race, nationality, sexual orientation, and beliefs, it was not terribly economically diverse, and though I met a few Marxists and anarchists, and sought out collectives and co-ops in town, there wasn’t much of a conversation going on about economic inequality.

…

And then came the rumblings of the information revolution. There in the heart of the Silicon Valley, while working as the development director for a community radio station, I discovered this fascinating new thing called the World Wide Web. I hacked my way through HTML, started making Web sites (for the Mosaic browser!), and moved up the coast to San Francisco to start my post-college life in 1995. Those were strange days in the Bay Area. For a young woman like me with racial and economic privilege, a college degree, no family obligations, and some working knowledge of computers, it was a remarkable time of freedom and excitement. I set myself up as a freelance Web site developer, found a $300 per month room in the Mission District, and started one of the ﬁrst cyberfeminist ‘zines, a short-lived snarky online periodical called Brillo.

pages: 706 words: 202,591

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

As a student of Jobs, Dave Morin had seen Apple go to market with a strictly focused product that later took on new powers, hitting competitors with a delayed punch. The iPod was out for two years before the iTunes store. So Facebook set an ambitious May 24 date to unveil and ship. And it rented the San Francisco Design Center, a large venue in the South of Market neighborhood where start-ups abounded, so that it could invite almost a thousand people for what would be its first developers conference. It called the event F8, a reference to its frequent all-night hackathons where engineers would spend eight or more hours blasting away on a blue-sky idea.

…

“I wanted to be part of fundamentally setting the DNA of the organization with Mark. It’s hard, and not as rewarding,” she says, “[but] I want to be able to have the path to changing lives of those that I care about.” In September 2016, CZI had made its biggest announcement at an auditorium in the sprawling Mission Bay medical complex in San Francisco (which includes the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, whose reconstruction benefited from a $75 million donation). Zuckerberg came onstage promising that CZI would be spending $3 billion to “cure all disease” during the life span of his two daughters, roughly by the end of the century. (The Zuckerbergs’ second child, August, was born in 2017.)

…

I’m just going to keep doing what I’m doing and as long as I create something of massive value, the money will follow.” Parker had a superpower when it came to detecting the next big thing. In 2004, he sensed it would be based on the power of networks, like Napster and Plaxo were. Parker had even gotten tight with Jonathan Abrams, who headed Friendster, and he was hanging around a small group of people in San Francisco who believed that social media would take over the world. So, when the girlfriend of one of Parker’s roommates pulled up Thefacebook on her computer one day, in the spring of 2004, Parker rubbernecked. He was struck that it looked a lot like Friendster or MySpace, but used only people’s real names.

pages: 339 words: 103,546

Blood and Oil: Mohammed Bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power by Bradley Hope, Justin Scheck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boston Dynamics, clean water, coronavirus, distributed generation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, financial engineering, Google Earth, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, MITM: man-in-the-middle, new economy, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, young professional, zero day

He worked for Mohammed personally. But as an employee of the crown prince’s son, he could gain access pretty much anywhere. On June 13 of that year, Asaker traveled to San Francisco to meet Twitter’s head of Middle East partnerships, an Egyptian American named Ahmad Abouammo. It was framed as a routine visit by an important figure from an important Twitter market. Abouammo showed Asaker around Twitter headquarters in San Francisco’s South of Market district. Asaker explained that he worked for an important prince who used Twitter extensively. The men exchanged contact information and arranged to follow up in London in the fall.

…

But sometimes they come across things that clearly deserve an examination by prosecutors. A US company’s employees taking cash from a foreign government to access user information is one example. So intelligence officials passed the information on to the Justice Department, where it found its way to the San Francisco FBI office. Late in 2015, an FBI agent walked downhill from San Francisco’s Kennedy-era federal building in the squalid Tenderloin, down a block littered with syringes, to Market Street, where Twitter has its headquarters. The agent sat down with company lawyers and broke the news: Twitter had a mole. By that time Abouammo had left the company, but Alzabarah was still active.

…

Abouammo had limited technical skill, and a single mole was hardly a reliable way of ensuring consistent access to Twitter users’ private information. Asaker wanted a better spy. As luck would have it, Twitter had hired a young Saudi named Ali Alzabarah, who was educated in the United States on a Saudi scholarship. Living in San Francisco, Alzabarah struck his friends as a typical software engineer—a “nerd,” one friend called him admiringly. He didn’t seem interested in things other than software and didn’t speak much until the conversation turned to programming or the future of technology. Away from work, Alzabarah seemed to spend most of his time at home or socializing with a small group of expat Saudis who worked at tech firms in the Bay Area.

pages: 415 words: 119,277

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by Sharon Zukin

1960s counterculture, big-box store, blue-collar work, classic study, corporate social responsibility, crack epidemic, creative destruction, David Brooks, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, mass immigration, messenger bag, new economy, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Though it didn’t affect cities with declining populations and little opportunity for economic growth, this same metamorphosis did extend the success of big cities with dynamic corporate financial and media sectors to rundown neighborhoods outside the center. Nouveau grit not only describes Williamsburg’s revival; it also applies to the rebirth of San Francisco south of Market Street during the dot-com boom and the Seattle of Starbucks and grunge, as well as to the revival of a small number of industrial neighborhoods in Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Gritty’s appeal was in the postindustrial spirit of the times and in the symbolic economy’s ability to synthesize dirt and danger into new cultural commodities.

…

Some ex-hippies became entrepreneurs, selling drugs, psychedelic posters, and used clothing, and gradually the consumer products and spaces that went along with the hippies’ looser lifestyle became visible symbols not just of a more interesting way to live, but of a more interesting place to live. Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco and the East Village in New York marked spaces of social diversity and cultural experimentation; they also indicated how the counterculture’s conflict with modernization could create excitement around a city’s old neighborhoods. In a curious and unexpected way, the counterculture’s pursuit of origins—by loosening the authentic self and bonding with the poor and underprivileged—opened a new beginning for urban redevelopment in the 1970s, alongside gentrification and gay and lesbian communities.19 The allure of newly hip neighborhoods spread through the power of alternative media.

…

In London, said the Financial Times, “the gritty post-industrial wasteland climate” of the South Bank is now “a powerhouse for growth” fueled by theaters, trendy shopping, and a modern art museum.28 In the following years critics praised gritty novels, plays, and art for their honest aesthetic qualities, their ability to represent a specific space and time, and identified “gritty” with a direct experience of life in the way that we have come to expect of authenticity. “Photographs [the artist Ben] Shahn took of life on New York sidewalks in the ‘30s have an unmediated, gritty spontaneity,” said the New York Times. The media also admired the “gritty urban aesthetic” of gentrifying neighborhoods from Philadelphia to San Francisco, where “gritty bars” and warehouses were now joined, paradoxically, by new restaurants, boutique hotels, and expensive condos. In all cities housing prices in gritty neighborhoods rose faster than elsewhere. Today the use of “gritty” in the media depicts a desirable synergy between underground cultures and the creative energy they bring to both cultural consumption and real estate development, not as an alternative to but as a driver of the city’s growth.

pages: 468 words: 233,091

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apple II, Apple Newton, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business cycle, business process, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, don't be evil, eat what you kill, fake news, fear of failure, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, game design, General Magic , Googley, Hacker News, HyperCard, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Larry Wall, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, nuclear winter, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, proprietary trading, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, software patent, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine, web application, Y Combinator

and this Internet thing started to smell kind of like it. So John During had a lot of experience in that. Livingston: So you said, “Let’s do it”? Kahle: Yes, and moved out to San Francisco, started the company in a Menlo Park mansion, sort of on the Thinking Machines model. That was as far north as I thought I could put the company and still be connected in with the Apples and the Suns and the other technology companies. In 1992, San Francisco wasn’t the place for companies. That happened in the mid ’90s, with the whole South of Market rebuilding. That was another sort of “learn the lesson of going someplace where people don’t call you crazy.” I really needed the help of those that were in Silicon Valley, though I knew that as this industry built up, it was going to work more with the creative people.

…

I didn’t make enough money to go and make a nonprofit and fund it myself, and I didn’t know how to ask for money in a nonprofit, but I knew how to build products. Alexa Internet was a navigation system for the Internet. Bruce Gilliat and I started it out here in San Francisco, in a house in the middle of a park—in the Presidio. We’re in a 1500-acre park in the middle of San Francisco. We’re the second lease-holder here. Livingston: You started both companies simultaneously? Did you have different people running each one? Kahle: Everybody worked at Alexa. The idea was that everything that Alexa ever collected would be donated to the Internet Archive.

…

Kahle: Maybe you can do that now in Cambridge; maybe it’s changed. But there’s a more institutional idea that you have to be more proven. San Francisco is full of dreamers. It’s the people with the new ideas. It may be bad, they may be inappropriate, they may fail, but I love the idea that we can do something new and different—something that hasn’t been done before, something that’s going to affect a lot of people. There’s an idea that you can pull something off here. That sort of uplifting nature to San Francisco and the Bay Area in general really lives on. This is a city of dreamers, and that’s what makes it just a wonderful place to live and to work.

pages: 970 words: 302,110

A Man in Full: A Novel by Tom Wolfe

Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, global village, hiring and firing, New Urbanism, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, South of Market, San Francisco, walking around money

Conrad drove his jack over to the foreman's desk. Kenny was standing there beside his jack studying a printout he had just picked up. "Shit," he said to nobody in particular. Then he caught sight of Conrad and held up the sheet and said, "Nat'n'Nate's," and made a face. Nat'n'Nate's was a big old delicatessen in San Francisco just South of Market Street. The pickers hated Nat'n'Nate's orders because of the heavy cases of processed meat. Conrad pulled a printout from the wire basket Morden Rehabilitation, up in Santa Rosa . . . He scanned the sheet ... Shouldn't be too bad an order. He got up on the pallet jack and drove into the canyons amid the ice cliffs.

…

Chapter 5 The Suicidal Freezer Unit HE CROKER GLOBAL FOODS WAREHOUSE IN THE SAN FRANCISCO Bay Area is not in any part of the fabled Bay Area that ever stole the heart of a songwriter. Or, as far as that goes, a travel writer, not even a travel writer desperate for something different to write about. No, the Croker warehouse is on the wrong side of the bay, the east side, not the San Francisco side but the Oakland side, up toward El Cerrito, in Contra Costa County, just off the marshes, in the flatlands. On those magical evenings in San Francisco when the fog rolls in from the Pacific Ocean and people emerge from the hotels on Nob Hill and go for brave walks down the staggeringly steep slopes of Powell Street and shiver deliciously in the chilly air and listen to the happy clapper clangor of the cable cars and the mournful foghorns of the freighters heading out to sea, and all at once life is a lovely little operetta from the year 1910 - at that moment, likely as not, barely five miles to the east, a brutal sun has been roasting Contra Costa County for thirteen or fourteen hours, and the roof of the Croker warehouse is still swimming in caloric waves, even though the stars are out and the mercury remains swollen up to 90 degrees, down from 104 at 3 p.m., and the employees' parking lot, which is dirt, has been cooked to cinders until it's as parched, pocked, dusty, and godforsaken as the surface of Mars.

…

—The Times Magazine (London) "Wolfe has come through with yet another corking example of the "big realistic fictional novel' (700-plus pages in this case) that he holds so dear." —Vanity Fair "Brave, flamboyant." —The New Yorker "A big ol’ American novel... Dazzling... Blessed with full-throttle momentum." —The Boston Sunday Globe "Ambitious . . . propulsive." —San Francisco Chronicle "A Man in Full nails the sensibilities and frailties of today ... the quickest 742-pagc read you will ever find.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch "EVERYTHING YOU WANT A NOVEL TO BE. It has complex characters, a storyline that keeps you guessing, and the kind of writing that makes you want to take your TV out in the back yard and pulverize it with a sledgehammer."

How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight by Julian Guthrie

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cosmic microwave background, crowdsourcing, Dennis Tito, Doomsday Book, Easter island, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, pets.com, private spaceflight, punch-card reader, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

Shortly after the reunion, Todd suffered a collapsed lung and was hospitalized. Peter’s last visit with the man he called his closest brother was in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. Even under heavy sweatpants, Todd looked gaunt. The two went for a walk and Todd had a nasal cannula and pulled a small oxygen tank. The experimental treatments in Russia had failed. Peter and Todd, only a month apart in age, had spent countless hours walking together, talking about everything from space governance structures to the development of new economic systems. On this foggy day in San Francisco, they walked slowly. Todd, a Francophile and a student of history, loved Peter’s idea and inspiration for the XPRIZE.

…

The Rutans were strict Seventh-day Adventists, observing the Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Burt couldn’t play team baseball, basketball, football, or any other sport requiring weekend practices or games. He couldn’t see movies, chase girls, or race hot rods. Instead, he flew, chased, and crashed airplanes. He and his mother would drive to San Francisco, about four hours north of Dinuba, to shop at a small hobby store. Burt wanted parts, but he didn’t want planes built from a kit. He had no interest in building something that he already knew would fly. At age eight he designed and built a model of an airplane that had engines under swept wings, looking a lot like the Boeing 707 years before it took flight.

…

There were family members, professors, and ISU loyalists. Peter, wearing suit and tie, touched the moonstone and closed his eyes. He had seen Todd twice in the months before his passing: for an ISU founders’ reunion in April, where he, Bob, and Todd had their last photo taken together here in the Milestones of Flight gallery, and later in San Francisco, where Todd was living with his partner. The founders’ reunion had been held in part to draw up an “ISU Credo,” crafted and signed by Bob, Todd, and Peter on April 12—the day before Todd’s thirty-fourth birthday and on the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s 108-minute orbital flight. More important, the reunion had brought together the Gang of Three, Peterbobtodd.

PostGIS in Action by Regina O. Obe, Leo S. Hsu

business logic, call centre, crowdsourcing, database schema, Debian, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, functional programming, Google Earth, job automation, McMansion, Mercator projection, Network effects, null island, openstreetmap, planetary scale, profit maximization, Ruby on Rails, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, SQL injection, traveling salesman, web application

The output of listings 15.15 and 15.16 is the same and is shown in the following listing. Listing 15.17. Output of ranking results using self-join or window ank | nei_2 | dist -----+-----------------------+----------------- 1 | Downtown/Civic Center | 0 1 | Financial District | 0 1 | Nob Hill | 0 1 | North Beach | 0 1 | Russian Hill | 0 6 | South of Market | 1726.01750301085 Another kind of correlated subquery is the LATERAL clause. We’ll examine laterals next. 15.5.4. Laterals PostgreSQL 9.3+ introduced the LATERAL construct, which is used in the FROM join clause. LATERAL allows you to create correlated subqueries in the FROM clause of an SQL statement or to use a set-returning function in the FROM clause that takes input from another table in the FROM clause.

…

Proj4Text Differences in PostGIS 1.5 and PostGIS 2.0/2.1 The way the proj4text value is presented is different in PostGIS 1.5 than it is in PostGIS 2.0/2.1. The details behind the coding logic of this change are beyond the scope of this book, but you can find more information on the PROJ.4 site (http://trac.osgeo.org/proj/wiki/GenParms#towgs84-DatumtransformationtoWGS84). Exercise 2: San Francisco Data (Reading from .prj files) For this second exercise, we grabbed a zip file of San Francisco data that included a .prj file. The .prj contents look like this: PROJCS["NAD_1983_StatePlane_California_III_FIPS_0403_Feet", GEOGCS["GCS_North_American_1983", DATUM["D_North_American_1983", SPHEROID["GRS_1980",6378137.0,298.257222101]], PRIMEM["Greenwich",0.0], UNIT["Degree",0.0174532925199433]], PROJECTION["Lambert_Conformal_Conic"], PARAMETER["False_Easting",6561666.666666666], PARAMETER["False_Northing",1640416.666666667], PARAMETER["Central_Meridian",-120.5], PARAMETER["Standard_Parallel_1",37.06666666666667], PARAMETER["Standard_Parallel_2",38.43333333333333], PARAMETER["Latitude_Of_Origin",36.5], UNIT["Foot_US",0.3048006096012192]] You can surmise from this that the units are feet, it uses the NAD 83 datum, and the projection is some California state plane.

…

The buffer is created by picking a specific point and drawing a circle polygon around it with a 10-meter radius centered at the point, generated from code in chapter 8. Table 3.4. Ten-meter buffer areas in different regions of the world City utm geog wm diff_utm_geog diff_utm_wm Honolulu 312 312 362 0.13 49.48 San Francisco 312 312 500 0.22 188.03 Boston 312 312 572 0.02 260.22 Paris 312 312 722 0.24 409.54 Oslo 312 312 1240 0.18 927.74 Saint Petersburg 312 312 1241 0.09 929.03 Helsinki 312 312 1260 0.15 947.76 Bergen 312 312 1272 0.11 959.40 Arkhangelsk 312 312 1681 0.20 1368.54 Murmansk 312 312 2412 0.25 2100.22 Why is a PostGIS 10-meter buffer of a point 312 and not 314 sq m?

PostGIS in Action, 2nd Edition by Regina O. Obe, Leo S. Hsu

business logic, call centre, crowdsourcing, database schema, Debian, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, functional programming, Google Earth, job automation, McMansion, megacity, Mercator projection, Network effects, null island, openstreetmap, planetary scale, profit maximization, Ruby on Rails, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, SQL injection, traveling salesman, web application

The output of listings 15.15 and 15.16 is the same and is shown in the following listing. Listing 15.17 Output of ranking results using self-join or window ank | nei_2 | dist -----+-----------------------+----------------1 | Downtown/Civic Center | 0 1 | Financial District | 0 1 | Nob Hill | 0 1 | North Beach | 0 1 | Russian Hill | 0 6 | South of Market | 1726.01750301085 Another kind of correlated subquery is the LATERAL clause. We’ll examine laterals next. 15.5.4 Laterals PostgreSQL 9.3+ introduced the LATERAL construct, which is used in the FROM join clause. LATERAL allows you to create correlated subqueries in the FROM clause of an SQL statement or to use a set-returning function in the FROM clause that takes input from another table in the FROM clause.

…

The details behind the coding logic of this change are beyond the scope of this book, but you can find more information on the PROJ.4 site (http://trac .osgeo.org/proj/wiki/GenParms#towgs84-DatumtransformationtoWGS84). Licensed to tracy moore <nordick.an@gmail.com> www.it-ebooks.info Determining the spatial reference system of source data 79 EXERCISE 2: SAN FRANCISCO DATA (READING FROM .PRJ FILES) For this second exercise, we grabbed a zip file of San Francisco data that included a .prj file. The .prj contents look like this: PROJCS["NAD_1983_StatePlane_California_III_FIPS_0403_Feet", GEOGCS["GCS_North_American_1983", DATUM["D_North_American_1983", SPHEROID["GRS_1980",6378137.0,298.257222101]], PRIMEM["Greenwich",0.0], UNIT["Degree",0.0174532925199433]], PROJECTION["Lambert_Conformal_Conic"], PARAMETER["False_Easting",6561666.666666666], PARAMETER["False_Northing",1640416.666666667], PARAMETER["Central_Meridian",-120.5], PARAMETER["Standard_Parallel_1",37.06666666666667], PARAMETER["Standard_Parallel_2",38.43333333333333], PARAMETER["Latitude_Of_Origin",36.5], UNIT["Foot_US",0.3048006096012192]] You can surmise from this that the units are feet, it uses the NAD 83 datum, and the projection is some California state plane.

…

The buffer is created by picking a specific point and drawing a circle polygon around it with a 10-meter radius centered at the point, generated from code in chapter 8. Table 3.4 Ten-meter buffer areas in different regions of the world City utm geog wm diff_utm_geog diff_utm_wm Honolulu 312 312 362 0.13 49.48 San Francisco 312 312 500 0.22 188.03 Boston 312 312 572 0.02 260.22 Paris 312 312 722 0.24 409.54 Oslo 312 312 1240 0.18 927.74 Saint Petersburg 312 312 1241 0.09 929.03 Helsinki 312 312 1260 0.15 947.76 Bergen 312 312 1272 0.11 959.40 Arkhangelsk 312 312 1681 0.20 1368.54 Murmansk 312 312 2412 0.25 2100.22 Why is a PostGIS 10-meter buffer of a point 312 and not 314 sq m?

pages: 372 words: 89,876

The Connected Company by Dave Gray, Thomas Vander Wal

A Pattern Language, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, folksonomy, Googley, index card, industrial cluster, interchangeable parts, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, loose coupling, low cost airline, market design, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, power law, profit maximization, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Vanguard fund, web application, WikiLeaks, work culture , Zipcar

The rapid expansion proved too much for the company, and it was merged into Continental Airlines in 1987. In 2007, Yahoo launched an innovation studio called Brickhouse, in order to better compete with nimble startups. Yahoo opened a 14,000-square-foot office far away from corporate headquarters, in the South of Market Area (SOMA) of San Francisco, a hotbed of startups and innovation, and seeded the effort with entrepreneurs such as Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake. Basically, Brickhouse was an innovation pod, set up to rekindle the startup flame and encourage experimentation and the exploration of new ideas. The Brickhouse team moved quickly, developing products in a third of the time it took at Yahoo proper.

…

Buzzsaw is now called Building Collaboration Services, and Buzzsaw CEO Carl Bass is now the CEO of Autodesk. Disrupting Full-Service Telecom at O2 In 2008, Gav Thompson, Head of Brand innovation at UK telecom provider O2, came up with an idea for a pilot pod while sitting in a Web2.0 conference in San Francisco, doodling in his notebook. He envisioned a company that was designed and run mostly by customers, and a new service called giffgaff—an ancient Scottish word for “mutual giving”—was born. O2 started the pod by launching a community first, so prospective customers could talk about what they wanted in a service.

Lonely Planet London City Guide by Tom Masters, Steve Fallon, Vesna Maric

Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, Crossrail, dark matter, death from overwork, discovery of the americas, double helix, East Village, Edward Jenner, financial independence, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, gentrification, ghettoisation, haute cuisine, Isaac Newton, James Bridle, John Snow's cholera map, Mahatma Gandhi, market design, Nelson Mandela, place-making, Russell Brand, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, young professional

Return to beginning of chapter INFORMATION City Cycle Hire ( 365629; www.citycyclehire.com; 61 Newnham Rd; bikes half-day/day/24 hr from £5/8/10 plus a £40 deposit; 9am-5.30pm Mon-Fri year round, 9am-5pm Sat Apr-Sep) Scudamore’s ( 359750; www.scudamores.com; Granta Pl, Mill La; per hr £16-18, 45-min chauffeured rides £14 per person) Has punts for hire and chauffeured rides. Tourist office ( 0871 226 8006; www.visitcambridge.org; Old Library, Wheeler St; 10am-5pm Mon-Sat, 11am-3pm Sun May-Sep, 10am-5.30pm Mon-Sat Oct-Apr) Just south of Market Sq. Staff can arrange accommodation and two-hour walking tours (adult/child including entry to King’s College £10/8.50), leaving at 1.30pm year-round, with more departures during summer. Trinity Punt Hire ( 338800; www.trin.cam.ac.uk; Trinity St, Trinity College; punts per hr £12) Has punts for hire and chauffeured rides.

…

Return to beginning of chapter GAY & LESBIAN LONDON * * * SHOPPING DRINKING & NIGHTLIFE THE WEST END CLERKENWELL, SHOREDITCH & SPITALFIELDS THE EAST END & DOCKLANDS NORTH LONDON SOUTH LONDON FURTHER RESOURCES * * * * * * top picks Duckie Circus Joiners Arms Gay’s the Word Barcode Heaven Ghetto G Spot Orange XXL What’s your recommendation? www.lonelyplanet.com/london * * * The city of Oscar Wilde, Quentin Crisp and Elton John does not disappoint its queer visitors, proffering a fantastic mix of brash, camp, loud and edgy parties, bars, clubs and events all year round. A world capital of gaydom on par with New York and San Francisco, London is home to enormous gay and lesbian communities that fan out throughout the city. There’s also a superb film festival Click here, one of the world’s largest annual gay pride events (Click here) and a simmering activist movement to boot. Things have improved immeasurably in the past decade for gay and lesbian rights and recognition: protection from discrimination is now enshrined in law, and civil partnerships now allow gay couples the same rights as straight couples, even with respect to adoption.

…

Return to beginning of chapter TIME Wherever you are in the world, the time on your watch is measured in relation to the time at Greenwich in London – Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). British Summer Time, the UK’s form of daylight-saving time, muddies the water so that even London is ahead of GMT from late March to late October. To give you an idea, San Francisco is usually eight hours and New York five hours behind GMT, while Sydney is 10 hours ahead of GMT. Phone the international operator on 155 to find out the exact difference. Return to beginning of chapter TIPPING Many restaurants now add a ‘discretionary’ service charge to your bill, but in places that don’t you are expected to leave a 10% to 15% tip unless the service was unsatisfactory.

England by David Else

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, country house hotel, Crossrail, David Attenborough, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, sceptred isle, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

Today the city’s rich past is blighted by some nasty examples of postwar town planning, although there are a few remaining buildings of architectural note. The town is also famous for footwear and was once the heart of the boot and shoe industry. Orientation The town is centred on Market Sq, with the main pedestrianised shopping route, Abington St, running east from it, where it becomes Kettering Rd, with its hotels and bars. To the south of Market Sq are the guildhall and the tourist office. The town’s infamously ugly bus station is to the north. Information The helpful tourist office ( 01604-838800; www.explorenorthamptonshire.co.uk; The Guildhall, St Giles Sq; 10am-5pm Mon-Sat) was in a temporary home next to the Derngate Royal Theatre at the time of writing but will move to Sessions House on George Row during 2009.

…

TIME Wherever you are in the world, time is measured in relation to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT, or Universal Time Coordinated, UTC as it’s more accurately called), so a highlight for many visitors to London is a trip to Greenwich and its famous line dividing the western and eastern hemispheres. To give you an idea, if it is noon in London, it is 4am on the same day in San Francisco, 7am in New York and 10pm in Sydney. British summer time (BST) is Britain’s daylight saving; one hour ahead of GMT from late March to late October. TOURIST INFORMATION Before leaving home, check the informative, comprehensive and wide-ranging websites VisitBritain (www.visitbritain.com)and EnjoyEngland (www.enjoyengland.com), covering all the angles of national tourism, with links to numerous other sites.

Great Britain by David Else, Fionn Davenport

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, credit crunch, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mega-rich, negative equity, new economy, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

Today the city’s rich past is blighted by some nasty examples of postwar town planning, although there are a few remaining buildings of architectural note. The town is also famous for footwear and was once the heart of the boot and shoe industry. Orientation The town is centred on Market Sq, with the main pedestrianised shopping route, Abington St, running east from it, where it becomes the Kettering Rd, with its hotels and bars. To the south of Market Sq are the guildhall and the tourist office. The town’s infamously ugly bus station is to the north. Information The helpful tourist office ( 01604-838800; www.explorenorthamptonshire.co.uk; The Guildhall, St Giles Sq; 10am-5pm Mon-Sat) was in a temporary home next to the Derngate Royal Theatre at the time of writing but will move to Sessions House on George Row during 2009.

…

Return to beginning of chapter TIME Wherever you are in the world, time is mea-sured in relation to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT, or Universal Time Coordinated, UTC as it’s more accurately called), so a highlight for many visitors to London is a trip to Greenwich and its famous line dividing the western and eastern hemispheres. To give you an idea, if it is noon in London, it is 4am on the same day in San Francisco, 7am in New York and 10pm in Sydney. British summer time (BST) is Britain’s daylight saving; one hour ahead of GMT from late March to late October. Return to beginning of chapter TOURIST INFORMATION Before leaving home, check the informative, comprehensive and wide-ranging website VisitBritain (www.visitbritain.com) or the more specific sites www.enjoyengland.com, www.visitscotland.com and www.visitwales.com.