I’d like to share the lessons I’ve learned since I arrived in the Bay Area from Helsinki. Unlike other posts that talk about the ecosystem, the culture and all that, I wanted to write about how it is to actually live here and get your life going.

I first lived in San Francisco. I was in the Mission district, next to IO Ventures. Paul Bragiel was kind enough to let me use their co-working space. I had done most of my work from home before, but I didn’t want to stay locked in my hotel room. IO was a great space: half of it is a café, and it’s nice to be surrounded by other people who work in startups as well. The Mission is an interesting area. There’s some nice graffiti around there, plenty of lively bars. I wouldn’t go too far in Mission St. though, it gets pretty shady. As for most foreign startupers, my first week’s meals consisted mostly of burritos. I was feeling hot all the time after the Finnish winter, so I decided to shave my head. People kept mistaking me for a Mexican and speaking to me in Spanish, that was awkward!

I decided to explore the city. I bought myself a Clipper card: that’s your equivalent of an HKL card. You can use the Muni (that’s the bus and tram), the BART (local subway) and Caltrain (long distance train that goes to Silicon Valley). It costs $60/month, but you need to charge it with money for the Caltrain trips. That said, public transportation in the USA is terrible. The busses are slow, don’t run very often, and it takes approximately 3x the time it would take to get somewhere by car. I tend to prefer the taxi when downtown, most trips are below $10.

However, this can add up, so I decided to buy a bike, which I found through Google Maps. The service is a lot more evolved here than in Europe. You can reliably find stores near you, and it even tells you the times of public transports! You don’t really need a GPS here. San Francisco is not very big, so it’s realistic to get around town by bike. So I bought myself a one, parked it across the street from the local police station, with a nice big lock. It got stolen in 24 hours. Don’t park your bike in public, especially at night.

I got myself a bank account at Wells Fargo. You need to go to the bank office if you want to transfer money to a different bank or abroad. They also gave me a checkbook, and assured me people really use those. Setting up a bank account wasn’t difficult, you just need to give them an address. I was lucky enough to have a local social security number already though, so don’t take my word for it.

Getting a local mobile number is a pain. First of all, the connectivity is very low. Often, if you’re in a home or a parking lot, you won’t have any reception. As a result, you’ll get a lot of dropped calls. Mobile data is slow too. In Finland, I was able to use my phone’s 3G as a replacement to my home modem, and get speeds of 4Mbps reliably. Don’t count on that here. I went looking for a good operator. I wanted to keep my European phone, using a US sim card. Not all phone companies in the US use sims: Sprint and Verizon use CDMA, which simply activates the phone you’ve bought from them.

My experience with AT&T was terrible. They told me the only way to get a 3G unlimited data + calls plan would require a 1 year contract, at $80 per month. They also claimed to not have any shorter offering, and that their prepaid cards wouldn’t work on a smartphone (I read the opposite online). When I lied and said I’d need it for my Nokia, they said they need to do “complicated things in the store to activate it”. So basically they refused to sell me a prepaid card. You can get one from Fry’s or similar shops though, but I don’t know how well it will work. I went to 3 AT&T shops, until I decided to give up on them.

I then went to T-Mobile. the first person I met understood my situation right away, gave me an unlim 3G data + call/sms plan for $60/month without a contract, so I can cancel it at any time. If you have an iPhone, I do not recommend this though: you will only get Edge speeds, because their network uses different frequencies, and you need to cut the sim card manually in a way that the left part of the metal is cut more…

I looked around for a flat I could rent. A good place to look is Padmapper. It shows you the latest listing on Craigslist on a map. It’s very common to have roommates here, even if it’s people you don’t know. I asked a few friends if they knew someone who was looking for a roommate. Turned out that Chris Mccan was looking for one, in Palo Alto. I asked my friends what they thought of moving there. In general, I’d strongly recommend living in town. The social life is vibrant, it’s easy to go out with people without planning ahead, there’s many small events every day if you want to meet new people, great choices of foods, clubs, etc. Palo Alto is to SF what Espoo is to Hki: a nice, quiet neighborhood, great if you’re married, have kids and a big car. I’m living with 4 other guys (Chris & Brendan work on Startup Digest, Brian and Kyle on Slidepad), so we’re all working on our startups under the same roof, buying the same food, and we even have a pool! So I like this a lot better than being alone in a flat in SF. There’s not much to do downtown: you can grab drinks at a few bars, there’s a night club, a bunch of restaurants. It’s not the most social place on earth. Most of the people from SF won’t come visit here, because they consider the 45 minute trip too long. You’re near Stanford, some of the VCs, and it’s easier to get to Menlo Park, Mountain View, Sunnyvale etc.

There’s a lot more things I’ve learned here. I’ll write about networking and socializing here in another post. In the meantime, if you’re thinking of doing a startup here, have a look at my previous post on challenges for Finns in the Valley.