San Francisco 2025

Visiting San Francisco was one of my big goals for 2025. I’m deeply interested in building products and businesses, and I’d heard many times that SF is the best place in the world to do it. I wanted to experience that energy for myself.

On the last night of NeurIPS 2025, I bought a ticket to San Francisco. I didn’t have any plans for what I would do there. I booked my hotel just before boarding the plane. But I loved that feeling—it felt like an adventure.

I did something similar when I moved to Switzerland, arriving without any connections and even without internet. Once you settle into a new place and find comfort, you look back on those early days with pleasure and a smile. I’ve noticed that many of the best things in my life happened when I didn’t plan them at all—decisions I made quickly, without overthinking, guided by gut feeling. That’s how I started doing math olympiads, how I moved to Switzerland, and even how I met my wife.

The same thing happened in San Francisco. I met amazing people completely by chance. Maybe I’m lucky, but I’m starting to believe more in the idea that we attract good things in life. There is something like a law of attraction: when you have a positive attitude, are honest, and try to give first, good things tend to come back.

So, back to SF. Before boarding the plane, I wrote in several chats that I was in San Francisco and wanted to meet people. Almost every day, I had one or two meetings with different people.

Overall, the impression was incredible. I experienced a real mindset shift. Everything in SF feels bigger—from buildings and cars to ideas and ambitions. It’s much easier to make connections and to build things there.

In just one week, I made my first angel investment, met founders who had raised millions, went to a sauna where I met researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, and NVIDIA, and visited a hacker house. x Now I truly understand why being in San Francisco is an unfair advantage if you want to build a big company or do frontier research. It’s easier to raise money—people are open-minded and deeply interested in investing in startups. For researchers, it’s easier to meet top talent, build connections, and eventually work at leading labs.

And one final thought for my friends outside the USA: the people building companies in San Francisco are not smarter than us, and they are not working harder than us. The difference is that they had the courage to move there and go all in.

That’s the only difference.