But the progressives of San Francisco have too much of a voice. These people are so unproductive. They don’t want anything. They don’t even want more housing, no more cars. They want a whole bunch of people to leave and make room for low-income people. They want the city to go backwards. And these are the super left-wingers who you would think would realize they are being pretty selfish. So I actually think it’s really healthy if we shut them out.
This happened in the first bubble, in 1996. Silicon Valley was a bunch of semiconductor companies, computer companies, and software companies. Then along came Netscape, and it changed everything. The browser made the internet a commercial entity, and there was an explosion of internet software companies. All of the issues that we’re having with gentrification now, we had back then. There were protests and everything back in ’99 and 2000. Same types of protests, same aggression. The very same issues: cost of housing. “What are you doing, displacing us?” Yada, yada, yada.
I speak for the natives, and there’re very few natives left. I was born in San Francisco. I love the city. I love the architecture, I love the bay, the hills, I love the views. It’s not necessarily the people. I wouldn’t want to advertise the city for its people.
One of the things that I deal with is just how busy some of these CEOs are getting. I was at a dinner just the other night, and I asked the guy if I could do my “One City” civic-responsibility pitch. And he said, “Sure, go ahead.” But you could see some of their eyes glassing over.
Two of the guys came up to me afterwards and were describing catastrophic problems they were dealing with in their businesses. It occurred to me, these guys are so busy, this business is so volatile, things are changing so fast, they can’t be expected to pay attention to this. They can’t prioritize philanthropy.
One or two of them hire someone in HR who deals with community engagement, but that’s a low man on the totem pole. He’s not really able to get much leverage. It needs to come from leadership, it needs to come from CEOs.
I don’t know how to solve that problem. We have a long way to go, which is why tonight I’ll be harping on it again.
SAAD KHAN
He is part of a new generation of venture capitalists. He worked at some of Silicon Valley’s most innovative firms and got to see how companies were built from the ground up. He was one of the first to invest in Kiva, Change.org, the SETI Institute, the Grow Local Project, ClassDojo, Upworthy, and IBM’s Watson—tech projects tackling some of society’s biggest challenges. His email signature reads, “Be Excellent to Each Other.”
If you just read TechCrunch all the time, you get the sense that money is always flowing, and a billion dollars seems small. Watch The Social Network, and it’s like this stuff is happening left and right. There’s this narrative of a get-rich-quick story that is far from the actual truth. What’s lost is that people suffered a lot of scars.
My old firm invested in a start-up called the Music Genome Project, back in the late ’90s. It was started by a struggling composer who had been in Hollywood trying to do film stuff. He wanted to figure out a way to get personalized recommendations on songs based on his taste in music. That turned into a company called Savage Beast, a music-recommendation technology pointed towards business-to-business applications. But when all the e-commerce companies went away in the 2000s, post-bubble, these guys didn’t really have much of a business model left. They pivoted again—not paying all their employees for two years—into something called Pandora. And Pandora became this internet music phenomenon. Fast-forward ten years, it became a multibillion-dollar personalized radio company, based here in Oakland. Of course, it took them over ten years to become an “overnight success.” That guy had been doing it since the late ’90s, and that’s a long slog.
Now people find their way here who aren’t in it because they love the technology. And they feel like they are entitled to a piece of the “future,” this economy that other people created.
There’s this feeling that if you’re not nineteen and dropped out of college, if you’re later on in your career, then you’ve already missed the boat. It’s not really representative of how stuff actually happens. The data shows, it’s actually the opposite. It’s people in their forties who are really building a lot of the value. But that’s not usually reported on.
Of course, the new generation is also super important for the economy here. But it’s because people coming out of school will work 24/7. It’s the engine on which a lot of the value is built, this incoming talent cycle. So it’s important that they find it desirable to go and join these massive companies. It’s all part of the ecosystem. The whole complex feels vertically integrated: someone finishes undergrad, they have a path, they go straight to a big company, graduate school, then a firm. These institutions keep them insulated from much of the world, and the next thing you know, they’re a senior person in their field. They have resources. They have influence. But they’ve never actually worked outside of a pretty sheltered context.
Google is like Stanford. They recruit a lot from Stanford, but they also re-created a college campus. People are there late at night. There are beanbag rooms, there’s Segways, there’s free food—it’s awesome. You can be there 24/7. They constructed an environment where people don’t have to leave. I know a lot of people who went from Stanford straight to Google, spent seven, eight years at Google, so now twelve years of their life going through what feels like extended college.
And that’s their whole career. They’ve done really well financially, so, Hey, you must be doing something right. They live this life going from Google to Facebook to Twitter to whatever. They hop around these really interesting companies doing cool stuff. But these environments are not representative of the rest of the world. And so they can end up with a skewed view of what the world looks like and what kind of problems they’re really capable of solving.
Meanwhile, there’s a much bigger structural shift happening in the labor market. It’s going away from employment to this notion of liquefying work. The sharing economy: project-based, as-you-need-it stuff. Now, you can execute on your passions: you earn your income, in a flexible way, with a flexible schedule, so you can go work on the project that you’re really excited about or bootstrap the business that you always wanted to start.
I take Lyft into work, and I’ve had some of the most amazing conversations on my morning commute: a Tibetan refugee, or an artist who’s working on something on the side, or people building their own companies. I had the most interesting metaphysical conversations with a jazz musician who broke down what the world is all about. All in my fifteen minutes crossing the Bay Bridge in the morning.
The flip side is there’s no job security. It’s treacherous if you’re looking for one career at one company. And the change is going to be very challenging for a certain class of people. I struggle with it a lot. I try to think about what’s really going on here and does it make sense.
It’s scary. It’s also very different than the model before. My dad worked for one company in Silicon Valley for fifteen years. There’s no analog for that anymore. Certainly not in tech. There’s a different mind-set now. Even on the employee side, there is an ambition to do something that’s more than a job. Part of it—if you take the cynical view—is instant gratification expressed in a career context.
We’re also living in an ownership society where wealth accrues disproportionately to the owners. It’s hard to understand how it got this way. The best explanation I can think of—and it’s a stretch—is that people here place a huge premium on risk. Being the first person to get naked and jump out on that ledge. It’s a lot more risky than being the fourth person. . . . This city was built off the back of treachery, the Traitorous Eight leaving National Semiconductor. The industry rewards risky behavior.
I guess it makes a certain kind of sense. All the great lessons come from failure. People don’t learn a lot from success, they just know that it happened. But surviving is the biggest lesso
n.
LEON FIKIRI
He sits by the window of a café on Polk Street, between Nob Hill and the Tenderloin, looking down the street at an old strip club, now flanked by shops and restaurants, hipster barbers, all intended for the young professionals ambling by in the afternoon sun. Born and raised in the Democratic Republic of Congo, he moved here looking for opportunities, a better life. He had studied computer science, got a degree in networking systems. And he dreamed that he would be one of the young and lucky, strolling down this street in sunglasses and athletic wear.
I didn’t speak English at all. The first time I went to Starbucks—I had my dictionary with me, French-English—and I ordered a coffee. I was hoping the person would just say yes, and give me the coffee, and I’d pay and leave. But somehow, she asked me, “Do you need room for cream?” Based on the dictionary, “room” is a space that you find in an apartment, a house, something like that . . . So I learned to say no.
Or when I used to go to a burger place, and the person would go, “How do you like your meat to be cooked?” I go, “The way you like it.” Sometimes I found someone who likes his burger rare, and it was very bad, or very well-done, but I had to deal with that. That’s how survival instincts work.
I came here in 2008. The economy was going very bad. So I took the path that a lot of immigrants take. Work hard, work hard, work hard. I sold sunglasses. I was a waiter. There is nothing easy. You start working very early, and then you get to bed very late. You don’t know any better. Just need to work hard. Many people went through even worse than me, and they kept going. They kept going, so I kept going.
It reminds me of that proverb—from Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat. That every morning in Africa, the sun comes up, and a lion has to run faster than the slowest gazelle. Otherwise, he will starve to death. Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, and it knows that it must outrun the fastest lion. So it doesn’t matter if you’re a lion or gazelle in Africa. When the sun comes up, you better start running.
A friend of mine told me about Uber, “Why don’t you try and see if you’re gonna like it?”
I knew the city because, from time to time, I used to work with a limo service doing pickups for extra money. So I said, “Why not?”
It was about five years ago—the beginning of Uber. They had a small office on Ellis. I found, like, six kids trying to make it happen.
They were completely lost, didn’t even know the city. They had a test, just one of the boys trying to ask me some sneaky ways around the city. He goes, “If you’re taking Turk towards downtown . . . ” And I go, “Turk is a one-way. It goes to the other side. Are you talking about Golden Gate?” He was trying to give me a test and didn’t know the answers himself. He got lost between the Parc 55 and the Clift Hotel.
I was one of the earliest Uber drivers in the world. They learned from us, everything.
There was only one service at the time—black town cars, nothing else. Uber never advertised at the beginning. It’s town cars who made Uber what it is now. We knew customer service. We knew how to build business long-term. Every client to us was an account.
It exploded. All of a sudden, everyone knew about Uber, everyone wanted to use Uber. Even that word became so popular that it became part of our language. It’s like “Google.” I’m gonna Google it. I’m gonna Uber home.
Uber gave me the opportunity to work, and the freedom of time. I worked twelve, fourteen hours a day, working hard to make it happen. I got my own car, and I got my own commercial registration, my own licenses, my own everything. I have my own company now, two other drivers, three cars.
They made a lot of promises to us, their “partners,” that they want to help us. They’re gonna make sure that if we invest money, we’re gonna get a lot of money back. They used to send us text messages, “Can you please sign in? Because there is high demand.”
But when you work with Uber, you have to understand that you’re responsible for every single penny and expense. “We are middlemen. We connect you to the passenger. So you have to pay all your expenses, everything.” They take a cut, first 20 percent, now 25.
You pay your own insurance. Besides that, you have maintenance. Especially in a city like San Francisco, with all hills. Can you imagine how many times I change the brakes, shocks, transmission? Cost me $8,000 once. You have to pay for gas. When the gas hits the ceiling, here in San Francisco we start paying over four bucks. You have to pay your own health care.
All these expenses, they add up. At the end, you find yourself paying more than 50 percent of what you’re making, just expenses. Just expenses!
Then they added UberX. So many people joined as drivers. They thought that UberX is the future. So they bought a car with a loan—they’re paying a mortgage, they’re paying a lot of fees—and they make almost what they could make if they work at Starbucks. The only difference is, at Starbucks, they will get health-care benefits.
But UberX drivers don’t know where they’re going. No training, no experience. They have no understanding of the city, no knowledge. Driving the wrong way on a one-way street, or driving completely wasted. I used UberX myself once. Someone tried to sell me weed.
San Francisco was a cake, and we used to be ten thousand people eating from that cake. Now we’re up to a hundred thousand or more, eating from the same piece of cake.
Because Uber’s goal is to cash out big money, big dollars, big bucks—make the maximum they can make. And, no, they don’t care what they leave behind them. They don’t care whether they have one driver or a hundred thousand, they just want a billion dollars.
I have nothing back home. One day, I went to my parents’ house, and I found my mother lying on the ground. She had an aneurysm, multiple strokes.
Because my brothers were able to sustain financially everything medical, I felt like I had an obligation towards my mother, to take care of her. So I stayed with her at the house, twenty-four hours, seven days a week, trying to do all things, the bad things, the medicines, to take her to the doctors, everything. I did that for almost two years.
When she passed away, I buried her with my hands . . . I’m the one.
I took it as a failure towards life in general, because we didn’t . . . we didn’t have a lot of options. In San Francisco, for instance, she would have survived that thing. But the fact that we lived in a country so fucked up, so corrupted, with so many people living under a certain kind of political system that they learn how to be sneaky, to lie . . . They learn how to treat other people as animals and not as human beings.
I was in a kind of coma: my brain had stopped working, I stopped working. Nothing attached me there; I felt disconnected and unplugged. It’s not worth living in a country where there is no future. That’s not my home.
My sister was the one who told me about San Francisco. She owns a shop here. We were talking on the phone, and she goes, “Maybe if you come here, you will enjoy life again. Maybe you will live again. Maybe the flame will come back.”
“So how do you like Uber?” We get this question a lot from people. I don’t know why. We’re not talking about cappuccino. “Do you like cappuccino?” It’s like someone steps in your office, “How do you like working here?” And what, “A hundred percent, I love it. It’s beautiful. It’s amazing.” That should be the answer?
Drivers, we talk about this. Some people, the first question is, “Where are you from?” One guy, he goes, “I’m from here.” The lady, she goes, “You have an accent.” He answered, “Because I drink a lot of coffee.”
I told someone, “I was out of milk. That’s why I moved here.” The ride is only ten minutes, they want to have answers beyond their imagination. I should tell my life story between the Marina and North Beach?
It’s arrogance more than ignorance. People nowadays see an Uber driver as an object. He has no value. He just comes with the service. Picks you up at the push of a button.
That’s the sharing economy. They think they can use you as an ob
ject for a certain specific time—that they can do whatever they want with you. It’s not sharing cars, it’s sharing people.
One day maybe human beings will be obsolete. The self-driving car is almost done. It’s not only drivers who will disappear. Brokers of insurance—who’s gonna get insurance when no one is driving? Soon all the people who are so lazy they need a car to pick them up at the push of a button—all these people, they’re gonna find themselves jobless too.
This is how it goes now. People don’t value human beings; what matters is making money. Most of the time, the people I drive, they’re not from here, and they weren’t even here in 2008 when we had that crash. New people, they see San Francisco as a company. The city is a big Google: I got hired, I’m gonna make some money. If I see another crash, I’m gonna move somewhere else. Or the city is a mall: I’m going to shop and leave. What do they know? They don’t care about the city. They have no respect for the people here.
I get so many complaints about homeless people. That never used to happen. But now they don’t fit in people’s image of the city. You don’t like him sitting there or sleeping there? You think you should kick him out? He’s a human being. He is not an object. He has the right to live. We cannot just take him in a garbage can and throw him somewhere else because you don’t like it.
Try to do something about it. What about giving some time to read about why those people are there? Some people have issues. Some people were better than us, but they didn’t have the luck. And our society here—I have to be honest with you—it doesn’t give people the ability to restart from scratch, not like it used to.
At a certain time in my life, I almost committed suicide. If I had crystal meth, maybe I would have tried it. Maybe I could have been homeless now. There is a thin, very thin line between people who have a decent lifestyle and people who are on the street. Sometimes a matter of a fraction of a second.
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