The Best Events in SF Are Not on Luma | Breaking Into SF
Breaking into SF as an outsider: hacker houses, hackathons, Luma events, cold DMs on X, and how people actually get access to VCs, frontier labs, and jobs in San Francisco. We recorded this straight after two weeks in the city with Kian, a Canadian engineer who moved to SF in January with no job and no plan, won several hackathons, and got hired inside two months.We cover what a hacker house actually is and what living in one is like, why the best events in SF are never posted on Luma or Partiful, why lying is socially acceptable in tech, how to answer when someone asks if you live in SF, what to do when a stranger hijacks your conversation with a LinkedIn QR code, and why Kian put his LinkedIn on hibernation. We also get into Cerebras and the CS4, Hot Chips, next generation semiconductor companies, Cognition and Devin, and using coding agents to do cold outreach to executives.If you are planning a trip to San Francisco, thinking about moving there, or trying to build a network in tech from zero, this is the episode.Chapters00:00 Meeting Kian in San Francisco02:19 What breaking into SF actually means05:45 The types of events in SF06:41 Paper reading clubs, Mox, and the 90/30 ML club08:54 Kian's background: Alberta, RL, Finland, Zurich, SF13:01 What is a hacker house15:10 Living at the Residency and what came out of it17:14 Why Americans ask what you are working on20:16 How to answer "do you live in SF"21:20 Luma, Partiful, and nationality meetups23:48 Lying is socially acceptable in SF25:22 Why hackathons are bullshit29:35 Winning hackathons and getting VC meetings32:14 The LinkedIn QR code problem34:55 How to leave a conversation without being rude39:47 Exclusive hackathons, XAI, Cerebral Valley, NGMI45:17 Cerebras CS4, Hot Chips, and next gen chips48:16 Why nobody at Anthropic or OpenAI replies51:15 The best events are not on Luma52:21 What Cognition, Devin, and DeepWiki actually are55:47 Using agents to mine contacts and book meetings58:00 How Niels got VC access in two weeks01:01:05 X versus LinkedIn01:02:36 How to become relevant on X01:04:20 Delete LinkedIn, build a home page01:06:51 YouTube, the Feynman technique, and freeCodeCampKian's linksX: https://x.com/neuralkianYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@neuralkianWebsite and booking a call: https://kiankyars.github.io