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Before the Dream Dissolves - Travels through American West - 1

This morning, I had left the beachy environs of Ventura, CA and after what is almost 1000 kms, I am here in Cottonwood, AZ. Ventura stood out in its youthful excesses while driving through this very different America – This is the America of endless ranches, farms and hard-working Americans. It is the America that Taylor Sheridan generally writes about. Going through such variety of landscapes makes me feel dazed.

And I have a mild anxiety of a strange kind. I worry that all these impressions that I picked up today will slowly dissolve into a dream tomorrow or maybe next month or next year and that eventually I’ll end up in the same place where I started and, in this process, I will lose something. Without pondering on the absurdity or the profundity of this mild anxiety, I want to proceed to documenting this journey so far. If nothing else, I think it will amuse a future version of myself reading through all this. Writing is, in fact – or any form of creativity or creation – is an act of time travel.

 

SF vibes

This trip started essentially as a work trip – to participate in the Dreamforce conference as a Salesforce employee. When I showed up, the scale of the event overwhelmed me – 40000 people showing up for a tech conference. I also felt vaguely perturbed by all the kool-aid getting passed around – all the trend-baiting, marketing hype etc. But eventually I got caught up in it as well. I almost saw a certain practical wisdom in all the hype and the marketing noise. It was different to show up in a suit and demo/sell the product to our customers/partners. It was also nice to meet in person all the people who showed up as nice little square tiles in Google Meet.

But for me, SF means San Francisco first and Salesforce later. The main thing that hits me whenever I revisit SF is the audacity of human ambition/human dreams. One visceral moment was when I was visiting the Golden Gate bridge park and I saw a few people windsurfing – somewhere close by there is a company which makes one of my favorite products – Windsurf. Windsurf in fact has an ad where someone vibe-codes while doing actual frickin windsurfing. On a more pedestrian level, I get reminded of this ‘ballsiness’ whenever I see a Waymo taxi or the Cyber Truck. All of this makes me feel uplifted as a human being and inspired by what Humanity can do. There is this sense of irrational exuberance/optimism that I want to lean in on. To me this inventiveness and cleverness in doing things/solving problems is quintessentially American.

SF is also the very epicenter of what I consider as the greatest breakthrough of our lifetimes – the intelligence explosion – I feel it is just an awesome time to be alive. So much so that I don’t have to artificially pump myself to show up for work – as the Claude ad says, it is such a great time to have a problem. I almost feel a Dharmic duty to show up with intent and purpose and wear myself away with work. In this awesome potpourri, Being curious is a virtue and partaking in the latest Dwarakesh podcast is the sangha.

Endless booth duties and multiple immigrant drivers later, I took the Interstate 405 and was on my way towards Southern California.


Me selling the Agentic AI future @Dreamforce


Berkeley Marina for some much needed post-Dreamforce decompression

Hotel room was next to the Bay trail...







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