Drugs and 20-hour workday: how to survive in Silicon Valley - ForumDaily
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Drugs and 20-hour working day: how you will have to survive in Silicon Valley

Entrepreneur from Germany рассказал, why no longer wants to be based in Silicon Valley. He realized that he could not sustain such a lifestyle on an ongoing basis. To promote his startup Shop.co, Jay Habib currently lives in two countries: he works in San Francisco every month for two weeks and in Düsseldorf for two weeks.

Jay Habib. Photo gruenderszene.de

He founded the company in Düsseldorf more than three years ago, and a year later he moved his headquarters to the Bay area, which also includes Silicon Valley. There he works up to 20 hours a day, including weekends to attract investors and as many users as possible.

Speaking to Business Insider, Habib says: "I have a family and two daughters, so I can't carry this load forever." That's why he wants his company to grow as quickly as possible.

The Silicon Valley is the easiest to start a business

The principle of Shop.co is simple: it should facilitate online purchases on Amazon, eBay and other marketplaces. The user installs a browser extension that allows him to view products from different suppliers and put the goods he likes in one basket. As a result, he can pay for all the products at once with one click.

The idea came to Habib in Germany, but he soon realized that in order to grow, Shop.co had to enter the largest e-commerce market in the world - the United States.

Differences in language, legal issues and customer needs in different countries make it costly and time consuming to enter a large market in Europe. Development in the US is much easier. This is one of several reasons why he chose San Francisco.

In addition, in the USA it is possible to quickly and easily find the so-called Early Adopter - people who will be the first to use the new product.

In Germany, compared to the United States, there is much more skepticism about new solutions in the field of payment systems and remittances. Anyone who wants to use Shop.co, namely, to pay all the products of online stores with one click of the mouse, should entrust their bank details to the startup.

“It smells of work everywhere”

In the USA, not only the mentality of users is different, but also the mentality of investors. In Silicon Valley, hundreds of meetings take place every day, at which the founders meet with potential contributors. Raising funds is the only way young startups can financially stay afloat.

You can't make money from day one, you have to grow first, says Habib. — And getting money from investors to implement an idea in Silicon Valley is much easier than in Germany.

Habib quickly acquired connections — perhaps the most important thing that a startup needs is in Silicon Valley.

Here everyone loves to talk with others. For information you need to go out and contact people. Many important data can not be found in books and on websites. Habib understood this, so he uses every minute in San Francisco to communicate.

“I never eat alone,” he says. A typical day in San Francisco for Habib begins at 7 a.m. with communications. In bed, he reads emails and exchanges information with his employees in Germany, where it is already 16:00.

In the morning, the majority of internal meetings are held, lunch is also a business meeting. Then in the second half of the day external meetings take place, in 19 hours, Habib usually goes to the main dinner - again, a business lunch.

Even urgent work - contracts, documents, Excel-files - he does in the bar. The entrepreneur rarely goes to sleep until 4 hours of the morning and sleeps 3 hours.

“San Francisco has a lot of talent and knowledge, and it's easy to make connections here. But it smells like work everywhere,” says Jay Habib.

Los angeles wins

Two years ago, Habib thought that he could grow his project only in Silicon Valley. However, today he will probably start doing it in Los Angeles.

The startup scene in recent years is gaining momentum here, and Los Angeles offers more work-life balance than San Francisco.

Although the lifestyle of the San Francisco Bay Area is gradually shifting toward the growth of free time, but technical experts and experienced managers benefit from this. The creator of a start-up needs to work more than 8 hours in order to use investors' money with maximum profit, until they are exhausted.

In addition, there is one thing that scares Jay in Silicon Valley:

To be completely honest, in San Francisco, many industries are permeated with drugs. And a small part of what happened in recent years comes up.

The fact that Steve Jobs frequently used the psychedelic drug LSD is one of the most innocent of these stories. In February, Bloomberg reporter Emily Chang published her book "Brotopia," in which she writes about secret sex parties with MDMA and other hard drugs. Even Elon Musk is said to have stumbled upon one of these white powder and group sex events, convinced it was a costume party. While stories like these add to Silicon Valley's appeal for some, Jay Habib is rather put off by it.

In the meantime, there is a main reason why he works 20 hours a day, 7 days a week for two weeks, which he spends in San Francisco. His startup should eventually become so large that he can spend most of his time in Germany with his family.

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