Asher's Blog

I spent close to 60 days in San Francisco in early 2025, and the experience changed how I think about entrepreneurship.

It was my first extended stay in the city, and I immersed myself in its founder community. I attended startup events, hackathons, private gatherings, open events and several Y Combinator activities. I met founders at different stages, spoke with experienced technology leaders and encountered people who had contributed to products and standards used around the world. I also met Garry Tan, the president and CEO of Y Combinator.

However, the experience that helped me understand San Francisco most clearly did not happen on a conference stage. It happened inside the home of two young founders named Jack and Jon.

They were both barely 25 years old, about ten years younger than I was, and they offered me a room for a significant part of my stay. We had met at a founders’ house event. They did not know me before that meeting, yet they welcomed me into their home in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

Living with them allowed me to observe something deeper than the public performance of startup culture. I saw what building looked like after the events ended.

That experience helped me answer a question I have continued to consider: what do founders in San Francisco have that remains rare in Lagos?

The answer is not intelligence. Lagos has extremely intelligent founders. It is not creativity or the willingness to work hard. Nigerian founders regularly build through difficulties that many entrepreneurs elsewhere never have to consider.

What San Francisco has is a remarkable concentration of founders, engineers, investors, experienced operators, infrastructure and permission to experiment. Each advantage strengthens the others. A founder there is not merely working inside a city; the founder is participating in an environment organised around the possibility that something new can be built.

Two Young Founders Who Showed Me the Culture

Jack and Jon were building a marketplace for second-hand goods. They had created the software themselves because they did not yet have the money to hire a team. At night, they coded. During the day, they collected and delivered the items moving through the marketplace.

Their work was not glamorous. One day, I went with them to collect some cushions, and we took a photograph together. I like that picture because it captures the reality beneath many startup stories. Before the funding announcement, impressive office and large team, somebody has to carry the cushions.

They would work late into the night, sleep, wake up and return to deliveries. On some weekends, they went running, hiking or mountaineering early in the morning. They attended church in the evening and then returned to the life they had designed around building.

What impressed me was not merely the number of hours they worked. Long hours alone do not prove that a business is making progress. I was impressed by the combination of effort, technical capability and experimentation. They had thought through the idea, built the product, worked directly inside the operation and kept trying different ways to make it succeed.

They were close enough to the work to learn from reality. When you write the software and also perform the delivery, customer behaviour cannot remain an abstraction. Every operational difficulty becomes product information. Every collection reveals something about supply. Every delivery teaches you about timing, trust, pricing and customer expectations.

Before this business, they had also built a product while in college and licensed it to students who came after them. I do not remember enough of the details to describe the product accurately, but the important thing was the pattern: they had already learnt to turn a problem around them into software that somebody else would pay to use.

That pattern—notice, build, test, learn and try again—was everywhere in San Francisco.

The First Advantage Is Density

Paul Graham once wrote, “Great cities attract ambitious people.” Different cities communicate different kinds of ambition. New York may tell you to make more money. Washington may tell you to gain influence. In San Francisco, the message is difficult to miss: build something that could become very large.

There are founders in many cities, but San Francisco has an unusual density of people trying to create technology companies. At a dinner, coffee shop, house gathering or run, you can meet someone who has built a company, funded one, sold one, scaled a technical system or watched several startups fail.

Density changes the speed of learning. A founder can describe a problem and quickly hear from someone who has already encountered a version of it. A hiring question may lead to an introduction. A product challenge may produce feedback from an engineer with relevant experience. An investor may be only one trusted relationship away. Even when the advice is not correct, the founder gains several hypotheses to test.

AnnaLee Saxenian’s Regional Advantage explains how Silicon Valley’s networked culture helped knowledge move across company boundaries. People changed jobs, shared information and formed new companies inside a regional system that was more open and interconnected than a traditional, vertically integrated corporate environment.

This is one of the deepest advantages I observed. San Francisco does not simply contain smart people. It repeatedly brings smart people into contact with one another.

Lagos has brilliant founders, investors and operators, but they are embedded in a city serving many different centres of power—banking, entertainment, commerce, government, real estate and traditional industry. The startup community is meaningful and growing, but it does not yet dominate the identity of the city in the same way.

In San Francisco, it often feels as though the whole city is part of one long startup conversation.

Vulnerability Makes the Network Useful

Density by itself is not enough. Thousands of intelligent people can live near one another without learning together if everyone protects information and performs success.

What made the San Francisco community useful was the willingness of many founders to talk openly.

They discussed what they were building, what they had tried, what had failed, why they believed a new approach might work and where they were stuck. We bounced ideas back and forth. The objective was not always to prove that one person was right. It was to expose the idea to enough intelligent minds that its weaknesses and possibilities became clearer.

Early-stage founders have to become vulnerable enough to share unfinished thinking. If you speak with many intelligent people, you may discover what to change, whom to call, where to go and which assumption you have failed to examine. One person gives you a question. Another provides an example; a third person knows someone you should meet. You combine these fragments and produce an insight none of the conversations contained alone.

This is not an argument for disclosing confidential information carelessly. Founders must protect personal data, security details, trade secrets and commitments made to customers or partners. But excessive secrecy can prevent an early idea from receiving the criticism it needs.

Ed Catmull describes Pixar’s Braintrust in Creativity, Inc. as a group in which candid feedback helps creators see problems they can no longer see clearly themselves. The group does not take ownership of the solution; the person responsible for the work remains responsible. That is the kind of interaction founders need.

You do not need only a room of people who agree with you. You need intelligent people capable of interrogating one another’s assumptions.

This has become part of how I work. Where possible, I bring different smart people into the same conversation so that the ideas do not pass through me one at a time. They can question each other, challenge the evidence and produce a stronger collective view.

The value of the network is not the number of people you know. It is the quality and honesty of the thinking that can happen between you.

They Had Tried More Things Before Asking What to Try

Another difference I noticed was the amount of experimentation many founders had already done.

When I speak with founders, I naturally begin suggesting possibilities: have you tried this? Have you approached this customer? Have you changed the proposition? Have you tested another channel? In Lagos, I sometimes find that several obvious experiments are still waiting to be attempted.

Many of the founders I met in San Francisco had already tried a surprising number of things—and not only random things. They had run thoughtful experiments, learnt from the response and returned with more specific questions.

That resonated deeply with me because it reflects one of my values as a founder: before giving up, you should be able to say that you explored the intelligent possibilities available to you.

People sometimes stop because they have become tired or lost motivation, not because the opportunity has been properly tested. They have exhausted their emotional energy, but not the strategic options.

Of course, “keep trying” cannot mean burning money indefinitely or refusing to accept evidence. A founder cannot literally attempt every imaginable idea. Experiments require hypotheses, measures, deadlines and limits. The purpose is not to remain busy; it is to produce information.

The strongest founders are persistent about the problem and flexible about the solution. They do not give up after the first method fails, but they also do not repeat the same method and call it grit.

Infrastructure Gives Founders Back Their Attention

The advantages of San Francisco were not only cultural. Basic infrastructure made a significant difference.

Jack and Jon each had access to a vehicle, and they also owned a van for deliveries. They told me how they found the van through Facebook Marketplace for around $3,000. The seller assured them that the engine was in good condition. They remained sceptical, understandably, but the van turned out to be reliable.

Three thousand dollars is not a trivial amount of money for an unfunded founder in San Francisco, especially while paying rent in such an expensive city. But for a young Nigerian graduate, accumulating the naira equivalent for a dependable commercial vehicle could require a substantial period of work, while the vehicle itself may cost much more relative to income.

The important difference was not simply ownership; the road network existed. Travel time was sufficiently predictable for them to plan the operating day. They could estimate when they would leave for collections, complete deliveries and return to coding. Their vehicle operated within a wider system that made it useful.

In Lagos, a founder in logistics may have to build around traffic volatility, poor road conditions, vehicle maintenance, fuel disruption, inconsistent addressing and customers whose own schedules are affected by the same system. These problems do not make success impossible, but they impose what I think of as a friction tax.

Every hour spent solving an infrastructure problem is an hour unavailable for the product, customer or strategy. Founders in Lagos often have to build both the company and part of the environment the company requires.

That pressure can produce extraordinary creativity. Nigerian founders learn to improvise, operate across uncertainty and make progress with limited resources. But we should not romanticise avoidable difficulty. Grit is valuable; reliable electricity, roads, internet, credit and public institutions are also valuable.

An ecosystem becomes more productive when founders can spend less ingenuity compensating for basic failures and more ingenuity creating new value.

Capital Is Not Everywhere, but It Is Nearby

San Francisco is expensive, and many founders there struggle. High purchasing power is accompanied by high rent, salaries and operating costs. Jack and Jon had not raised outside funding, and their daily life made that constraint visible.

Still, capital is unusually close to the founder community. Investors attend the same events, employ people from the same networks and follow companies emerging from the same institutions. A founder may still receive dozens of rejections, but the route to relevant capital is more legible. There are more people around them who understand venture financing, know which investor funds a particular stage and can explain how the process works.

The scale difference is considerable. Partech reported that African technology startups raised approximately $3.2 billion in equity and debt funding across the continent in 2024. Separately, PitchBook data reported by the San Francisco Chronicle indicated that the Bay Area attracted close to $70 billion of the world’s $134.6 billion in AI funding during 2024.

Those numbers are not a like-for-like comparison: one covers African tech equity and debt, while the other concerns global AI funding concentrated in one region. They should not be used to produce a precise funding multiple. They do, however, illustrate the extraordinary concentration of capital currently surrounding technology in the Bay Area.

Being near money does not guarantee that a founder will receive it. It does mean that capital, advice and ambition encounter one another more frequently.

The City Makes Technology Feel Normal

San Francisco looks like a place where startups are happening. You see Waymo vehicles moving through the city without a human driver. By June 2024, Waymo had opened its autonomous ride-hailing service to everyone in San Francisco, so the sight was no longer limited to a closed experiment. You see Teslas everywhere. You encounter products that would still feel futuristic in many places already operating as part of ordinary city life.

These sights communicate something psychologically important: new technology is not only discussed; it is deployed around you.

The environment makes it feel normal to be a founder. Building a company may still be irrationally difficult, but it is socially intelligible. People understand the vocabulary. They know why somebody might leave a secure job to pursue an uncertain product. The founder is not required to explain the category before explaining the company.

London has an excellent technology and financial ecosystem, but central London carries several identities at once: finance, government, professional services, culture, tourism and global commerce. Lagos is also many cities inside one city. Technology is important, but it competes with entertainment, banking, trade, real estate, politics and the daily work of navigating infrastructure.

San Francisco felt different to me because startups appeared to be the main organising story of the environment I entered.

I recognise that my experience was shaped by where I went and whom I met. I deliberately attended founder events and spent time with founders, so I was naturally seeing a filtered version of the city. A resident working in healthcare, education or hospitality might describe San Francisco differently. Still, ecosystems are partly experienced through the networks available to a person, and the founder network I encountered was unusually dense.

Not Every Founder Event Is Designed Only to Help Founders

There was another side of the ecosystem that I noticed. America is a deeply commercial society. Some events and organisations presented as resources for founders were also customer-acquisition channels for the organisers. A law firm wanted future clients; a software company wanted product adoption. A service provider wanted to sell access, advice or infrastructure.

That does not automatically make the event dishonest or useless. A founder can receive real value from an organisation that also hopes to earn revenue. The important thing is to understand the incentive.

The Y Combinator events I attended did not feel like product sales exercises. At several other events, however, the commercial objective was more visible. I learnt to ask: who is organising this, what are they offering, what do they want from the founders in the room, and is the value exchange fair?

I also learnt to ask directly for access. When I found an exclusive founder event close to the date, I would sometimes call and explain that I was a YC founder visiting from Lagos and would like to attend without paying. Often, the organisers took my name and allowed me to come.

Being a Y Combinator founder helped. It carried credibility and gave people a quick reason to believe that I belonged in the room. I am grateful for that advantage.

But there was another lesson beneath it: ask. An opportunity that appears closed may become available when you make a clear, credible request. Do not assume the answer before giving the other person a chance to respond.

What San Francisco Has—and What Lagos Has

It would be a mistake to turn this reflection into the conclusion that San Francisco founders are inherently better than Lagos founders.

San Francisco offers:

• a dense community of technology founders and experienced operators;
• proximity to venture capital and people who understand how to raise it;
• technical talent with experience across multiple generations of startups;
• infrastructure that reduces everyday operating friction;
• a culture of open feedback, rapid experimentation and ambitious company-building;
• social permission to devote your life to an uncertain technology idea.

Lagos offers different strengths:

• founders who understand enormous and underserved markets;
• creativity produced by operating under constraint;
• deep knowledge of informal systems and complex customer behaviour;
• the ability to build for low purchasing power and inconsistent infrastructure;
• resilience shaped by currency, policy and operational volatility;
• proximity to problems whose solutions could improve millions of lives.

The goal should not be to make Lagos imitate San Francisco in every respect. Context matters. Lagos needs an ecosystem built around African realities, not a copy of another city’s culture.

But there are features worth learning from: greater openness, faster sharing of knowledge, more founder-to-founder support, better access to early capital, stronger links between universities and companies, and more spaces where technical people, operators and investors can interrogate ideas together.

What Lagos Founders Can Build Without Waiting

Founders cannot personally repair every road, stabilise the currency or create an entire venture capital market. But we do not have to wait for perfect institutions before strengthening the culture around us.

We can talk more honestly about what is and is not working. We can share useful operating knowledge without turning every insight into a secret. We can invite several intelligent people into the same room and allow them to challenge one another. We can create founder houses, technical gatherings, small dinners, office hours and working sessions that produce practical help rather than only photographs.

Experienced founders can make introductions. Investors can explain their criteria more clearly. Service providers can disclose their commercial interests. Universities can make it easier for students to build and license products. Founders who have succeeded can remain accessible enough for the next generation to learn from their mistakes.

We can also become more experimental. Before declaring that an idea will not work, run the smallest responsible test. Before asking a mentor what to do, arrive with what you have already tried and what you learnt. Before giving up, examine whether you have exhausted the opportunity or merely exhausted your present motivation.

Ecosystems are not created only by government policy or large funds. They are also created by the repeated behaviour of the people inside them.

Brad Feld writes in Startup Communities that healthy startup ecosystems require a long-term view and must be led by entrepreneurs. The point is important: founders cannot behave only as consumers of an ecosystem, asking what the city will provide for them. We also have to become producers of the relationships, knowledge and generosity we wish had existed when we began.

The Real Advantage Is Compounding Interaction

What San Francisco founders have is not one secret ingredient. It is a system in which several advantages interact. Infrastructure saves time. Time allows more building. Density produces conversations. Conversations create feedback and introductions. Capital funds experiments. Experiments produce experienced people. Experienced people start, advise and finance new companies. Successful outcomes attract more ambitious builders, and the cycle repeats.

That is why simply copying a hackathon or creating a venture fund will not reproduce Silicon Valley. The advantage exists in the connections between the parts.

My close-to-60-day stay gave me something more useful than a romantic picture of San Francisco. It showed me both the benefits and the costs of its culture. The city was expensive. Some parts of the founder economy were highly commercial. Many companies would still fail. Yet the overall environment made building feel possible, urgent and normal.

Jack and Jon embodied that environment for me. Two young founders wrote software through the night, collected furniture during the day, used a cheap van to run their operations, shared their ideas openly and continued believing that the difficult thing they were attempting could work. They also offered a room to a founder they had only just met.

That combination of grit, competence, openness and generosity stayed with me. Lagos does not lack ambitious people. What remains rare is having enough of those people, enough useful capital, enough reliable infrastructure and enough candid exchange concentrated in the same places, operating repeatedly enough to compound.

The opportunity is not merely to complain about that gap. It is to help close it.

Every founder who shares an honest lesson, makes a thoughtful introduction, creates a useful gathering, supports another builder or turns experience into accessible knowledge makes the ecosystem slightly stronger.

San Francisco taught me that founders do not build only companies. Through how we work with one another, we also build the environment from which the next companies will emerge.

References

• Brad Feld, Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City
• AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128
• Ed Catmull with Amy Wallace, Creativity, Inc.
• Paul Graham, “Cities and Ambition”
• Partech, 2024 Africa Tech Venture Capital Report
• Waymo, “Waymo One Is Now Open to Everyone in San Francisco”
• San Francisco Chronicle, “Bay Area’s Dominance in AI Funding Fuels Real Estate Boom”, reporting PitchBook’s 2024 data