Going to California

I'm doing a work trip to the Bay Area next week

Next week, I travel to the Bay Area, for a 2-3 week work trip. My main intention for the trip is to meet prospective customers, partners and other collaborators for my company Babbage Insight.

I’m feeling irrationally (?) excited about this. This will be my first trip ever to the Western side of the United States - to be precise, this will be the first time ever I’ll be going to anywhere in the US apart from New York City (OK I did one day trip to Edison NJ on my first visit to the US in 2010).

I’ve been trying to temper my excitement by telling myself that this is primarily a work trip, one that I am doing on behalf of the company that I started. And every other day I keep getting the jitters that I’m not sufficiently prepared for this, and that I need to set up many more meetings than I already have.

I’ve booked my hotel for the first two thirds of the trip (the same hotel was expensive for the last bit, and I wanted some optionality, so I’ve kept that bit flexible), and I’ll be staying in San Francisco City. I toyed with a few other places elsewhere in the Bay Area, and was about to book one of them, when a closer look at the map suggested that that hotel was in the middle of nowhere.

I’m a fundamentally big city boy (always stayed in big cities), and so for this first trip to that part of the world, it made sense to stick to these priors, and hence I’ve booked in SF. Maybe once I go this time and figure things out, I’ll figure out a more efficient place to stay for any subsequent trips.

I’m using my Bangalore priors to plan the trip - which is to collate meetings in the same part of “town” on a given day. So, when I get one meeting request, I mark that entire day for that particular geography.

So, for example, Jan 31st (or should I say “1/31”? My big learning so far in planning this trip is in the way that Americans write dates) is “Palo Alto Day”. Feb 7th (2/7, sorry!) is “San Jose Day”. And so on. This way, while I have to travel within the Bay Area, I will still minimise my commute. Marking out days like this (so far I’ve been using a Greedy Algorithm) also gives me a good framework to suggest dates to people who I want to meet (based on where they are).

Anyway, I still have a few holes in my calendar. If you want to meet me, drop a note. If you think there is someone who I need to meet, again drop a note. You can either reply to this email (in case you’re getting this on email), or leave a comment here.

Also welcome suggests on things to eat (this time I’m representing a frugal and poor startup, so keep that in mind), places to walk around, places to go to and all that!

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