Techie Poet Is Continually Amazed By San Francisco
First impressions are important. For those who've only just moved to San Francisco, they often find themselves smitten with the city's fog-swept valleys, Victorian architecture, curious eccentrics, alluring hills, and adorably incompetent bus system. But not for hacker-maker Keith Horwood: he's just stoked that it's a hotbed of techno-libertarian capitalism.
Horwood fired off his love letter to the San Francisco Chronicle's Letters to the Editor section, eschewing the techie's choice publication platform, Medium. In his note to the dying 149-year-old newspaper, he expresses that he's "humbled to be at the center of the single largest tech hub in the world." To Horwood, San Francisco is the home of the future.
If I can romanticize it, it's that the future seems more real here. It is not a dream. It is not something that passively rolls in, soothing waves lapping up against our toes. It is menacing. It is fierce. And it ours to conquer.
The letter communicates an attitude we see from tech time and time again: San Francisco is a place you come to conquer, not to participate in, explore, or contribute back to.
Fortunately for Horwood, if his startup career ever tanks, he can always fall back on penning motivational Hallmark cards.
