Why I left San Francisco for Tucson
Why I left San Francisco for Tucson
Finding myself as a tech entrepreneur in the desert wasn't career suicide. It made me whole.
“Sure, San Francisco people are ambitious, but when we recruit locally, we lose sight of how everyone else is.”
That’s the view, roughly speaking, of a San Francsico tech startup founder. Specifically, it’s the view of a founder I became friends with over the past few days as we soft-pitched each other the idea of me relocating from Tucson, my home for the past three years, back to Silicon Valley, where I lived for five.
But why did I, as a software developer and startup entrepreneur, leave the center of the tech universe for this godforsaken desert in the first place? It wasn’t for lack of ambition.
I want to address my new friend, and I want to address other entrepreneurs and engineers who might feel like something is missing in their lives. As much as I love San Francisco, what I learned out here is so much more valuable to me as an entrepreneur—and as a human—than what I could find when I lived in tech mecca.
This is the story of how I ended up nowhere.
It was the summer of 2017 and my life was falling apart.
I was just another sexually-repressed, overpaid 20-something drunkenly roaming around the streets of San Francisco, like so many other software engineers I knew.
I made six figures as a Senior Software Engineer at Instacart, a company that I quit before I could vest, so their recent IPO means jack squat for me. Today, that company has a halo: recruitment-happy founders’ eyes go wide when I mention that I worked there. As I look at photos from their recent Nasdaq IPO event, all I can think is, “I used to get shitfaced with these guys in a supply closet.”
It wasn’t until this year that I came to terms with how toxic Instacart’s culture at the time was for me. There, I met some of the best people in my life, and they thrived. Yet my anchor memory from my time there was spending months launching a major new feature and being screwed over by the product manager whom I was paired with. My leaders were helpless to protect me and the psychopaths seemed empowered.
Moneyed babies running around with scissors pretending to be deep thinkers with no sense of history. I imagined they would gaze doe-eyed at the mushroom cloud once the world they wrought went boom-boom.
My personal affairs that summer were even worse. I desperately clung onto a marriage in crisis, partly out of love and partly out of fear, immiserating myself in the process. I was also at my deepest point in therapy, working through intergenerational trauma. My relationship with my family ruptured soon after and never recovered, which fills me with melancholy to this day.
On top of all this suffering, there was the disdain I felt for my community of Bay Area tech people. I carried a caricature of them in my head: hapless, delusional, confused, and coddled. Moneyed babies running around with scissors pretending to be deep thinkers with no sense of history. I imagined they would gaze doe-eyed at the mushroom cloud once the world they wrought went boom-boom.
Years later, I realized that my tribe isn’t so bad—in fact, we’re pretty great. Some of them are the humblest, most thoughtful, and most genuine people you’ll ever meet. A few showed me great kindness during that dark time. But I don’t think any measure of kindness could have saved me back then.
I was isolated in a dark hole surrounded by misery at work, at home, and in the street. Somehow, I had to change my life.
Ersin. Ersin. Ersin.
I came up with a brilliant idea that summer: a roadtrip to Austin to clear my head. I went there once as the captain of my middle school robotics team to compete at nationals, and I remembered thinking, “this place would be way cooler as an adult.” Also, many Bay Area tech workers seemed to be moving to Austin for warmer weather and better vibes. Maybe I would discover something special there, too.
San Francisco to Austin is too long for one sitting, so I’d need to break up the trip. I turned to Paul Simon’s Under African Skies:
I said, “Take this child, Lord
From Tucson, Arizona
Give her the wings to fly through harmony
And she won’t bother you no more”
Tucson. 14 hours away, the perfect first stop. I didn’t need anything but a childhood song to hop in the car and disappear.
The first Tucsonan that I met was my Airbnb host, Jenny, who also became my first friend in the city. She had a parakeet named Nacho who took gentle poops when perched on your finger and she played harp in a Celtic punk band. Jenny’s husband, an opera singer with a resonant baritone voice (who turned out to be an excellent human being when I met him years later), was away on tour. I was worried that Jenny might feel put off by this single male straggler sleeping down the hall in her home.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. Even though we had just met, Jenny made me feel more welcome than almost anyone back in San Francisco. We stayed up into the small hours that first night drinking beer from Borderlands Brewing and talking about everything: politics, love, money, video games, the desert, finding friends in one’s 30s.
I care about the 24 year old video game devs working 9 PM to 5 AM, the ones who pop over the backyard fence when I’m throwing a rager. I care about my sexy oddball girlfriend as we belt Bohemian Rhapsody in the morning and dance all night.
That’s when I started to unravel. Suddenly, I became aware of just how exhausted I was, followed by what felt like my soul exhaling a sigh of grief.
I opened up to my host with an epiphany:
“I compromise on everything in my life,” I confessed. “I compromise on my job, I compromise on my woman, I compromise on where I live…
“I even compromise on my own name. I introduced myself to you as UR-sin. That’s not how you say my name.”
For the first time in public, I introduced myself using my name in its original Turkish pronunciation: “It’s Ersin. Ersin. Ersin.”
Those kinds of realizations happen a lot in Tucson. This place is an authentic conversation with a new friend while her parakeet gently poops in your hand, reminding you that you’re alive. Here, you can let go of the six-figure salary, the billionaires exhorting legions of programmers to “change the world” through $9/mo. SaaS subscriptions, and the warehouse rave revelers claiming enlightenment, lost in the dark. No one here cares about any of that. Neither do I.
I care about losing myself with companions among the scorpions and saguaros on a moonlit hike through Sabino Canyon. I care about embracing my best friend when he comes to visit from Berkeley as we scream into a monsoon on the top of Mt. Lemmon. I care about the 24 year old video game devs working 9 PM to 5 AM, the ones who pop over the backyard fence when I’m throwing a rager. I care about my sexy oddball girlfriend as we belt Bohemian Rhapsody in the morning and dance all night.
Tucson is the first place where I gave myself permission to build a life around these moments.
Coming to Tucson
Tucson was meant to be a pit stop on the highway, but I loved it so much that in 2020 I moved to the city, which is where I’ve lived ever since.
As much as I love it here, leaving San Francisco for southern Arizona as a tech entrepreneur was, how shall I put this—a quixotic choice. Some people would call it career suicide. Silicon Valley has all the talent, finance, and culture. Tucson has lots of…cacti. I found personal fulfillment here, but what about work?
In my time here, I’ve discovered that the most fundamental thing as an entrepreneur is to know why you’re working on something. The “why” boils down to what you value, and you don’t get to pick what you value because it’s simply who you are. To be a truly effective entrepreneur, you must embrace who you are and build your business around it. And to embrace who you are, first you must recover yourself.
Sounds like [Dustin Moskovitz’s] Tucson is actually San Francisco. For others still, their Tucson isn’t even a place, it’s a mindset.
Recovering ourselves is what “coming to Tucson” is about. Trust me, it isn’t easy work. My life came apart, not once but a few times. It took many missteps before I could claim the love that I deserved from friends, community, and a romantic partner. And it took several failures to finally claim a vision for what business means to me: taking care of the people I love, and building the most exquisite, most joyful, most wonderful little products you’ve ever used.
Let me be explicit. I don’t care if I never scale to a zillion MAUs. If you work with or for me and you feel genuinely cared for; if you pull up one of my apps and feel the love and care; if you can’t stop fiddling with it, like a beautiful pen or a perfectly springy pair of pliers in your hands: then I’ll know that I’ve done my job.
But my values might not be the same as yours.
I heard that when Dustin Moskovitz launched Asana, his goal was to make everyone in the world 1% more productive. Good on him. Sounds like his Tucson is actually San Francisco. For others still, their Tucson isn’t even a place, it’s a mindset.
The point is that the most important work we can do as entrepreneurs is the inner work to become whole. Then the business isn’t about business anymore, it becomes about living. Which is exactly what we’re here to do.