TheOpenForce.com

I moved from the Bay Area about five years ago to live in Michigan. However, I am still back in the Bay Area routinely working with software companies and it's breaking my heart. When I was at Zendesk I lived near our first office (510 Townsend) near Caltrain. When Zendesk moved to Market and Sixth street, it was a kind of a sketchy area at night, but I got used to the chaos of being near the Tenderloin district. There were routinely fights in the alley behind our building. I saw a woman servicing a guy in a doorway as I left work. Another time a woman ran naked screaming running down the street. Someone got shot one time late at night outside our office in what we learned was a drug deal gone bad. An employee got mugged one evening and chased the mugger, which is not really best practice, but he was Ukrainian and he didn't take shit from anyone. My wife and I were on a muni going home one evening and a guy stole the entire role of bus transfer tickets and ran off the bus. The bus driver ran after the guy. When he returned ten minutes later, he said the guy had done the same thing a week earlier. 

My point of this, is there's been a homeless problem for a long time. Long time residents know that this goes back to the 1980s. Hell, maybe earlier than that. But you could walk down Market street during the day and it was okay.  Market and Sixth was crappy, and the Tenderloin was sketchy, but that was it.  The financial district was pretty good. Downtown was fine. North Beach was cool, Embarcadero was ok. I used to run along China Basin and that was fine too. If you squinted San Francisco was still a nice place.

I don't think that's true anymore.

This isn't Times Square in the 70s or Detroit in the 90s. It's far worse than that. It is epidemic. 

I've been helping out a company located and Fourth and Market, one block from Moscone Convention Center. It's a shit hole. Market and Fifth is worse. Market and Sixth looks like a third world country with people selling random stuff, iphone cords, CDs, mouthwash, razors set out on a piece of carpet on the street. You can't walk down Market more than a hundred paces any time of day without finding a body on the ground. Drunk, drugged, whatever. There are tents on sidewalks, people sleeping in doorways. Human feces on the street, needles, you name it.

Today I was meeting with a colleague at Peet's on Market. It's pouring rain and a young man comes in, thin, somewhat scruffy in appearance, likely homeless, bleeding from his ear and sits near us. I offered him some ibuprofen and gave him a wad of cash. He spoke broken English and didn't seem to want either, but I left the cash in front of him. Sometimes I give homeless people food, but rarely money.

I don't know what to think of SF anymore.

I realize I'm late to the party on this, but I happened to catch the documentary "General Magic" recently and it's an amazing piece of work. It had been on my list of films to watch since earl 2019, but somehow never bubbled up to the top. So it was fortunate that it was available on a Delta flight I had recently. For anyone who wants to understand the ups and downs of what it's like to be in a high-tech startup, this is an in-the-trenches documentary that captures startup reality better than anything else I've seen.

The film documents the rise (and fall) of Apple spinoff General Magic, a company that embarked upon the audacious goal of producing the first connected, handheld personal digital assistant (PDA), predating such devices as the HP 95 LX, Psion 3, Palm Pilot. General Magic was founded in 1989 by Marc Porat, Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson, the latter two among Apple's most famous engineers for their work on the original Apple Macintosh. The company became a hotbed of innovation and secrecy. No one quite knew what they were up to, but given the pedigree, it was going to be big. The company attracted dozens of other prominent engineers and up and comers including Susan Kare who designed the UX, Tony Fadell who went on to help create the iPod, the iPhone and Nest, Andy Rubin who created Android, Pierre Omidyar who created eBay.

The documentary includes a large quantity of historic footage. The team at General Magic knew they were working on something important and they hired a team to film all of it. So there are team meetings (bean bags on the floor), demos, late night sessions, press conferences, nerf-gun fights and more. The historic footage is interspersed with contemporary interviews with key executives, press and analysts looking back on what they accomplished and why the company failed. 

It's a heartbreaking story. Here's a company with vision, financial backing, genius engineers, and a huge market opportunity and its obliterated to the point of obscurity. I doubt that today's startup engineers have even heard of General Magic, the Magic Cap operating system or any of the tools from that era. But the irony is that all of the technology became widespread within 20 years. That includes technology that later surfaced in the iPhone, Android, Twitter, Amazon. Ultimately, the people behind General Magic created multiple billion dollar technologies and arguably entirely new industries. It was the hard lessons of General Magic's failure that ultimately resulted in the triumph of its many brilliant engineers.

Having worked in the software industry since the late '80s, this film captures the essence of Silicon Valley better than anything else I've seen. It's a powerful tribute to what it takes to succeed in the valley and asks the question: is it worth it? 

Here's the trailer:

• General Magic: The Movie, Amazon 
• Wikipedia: General Magic, HP 95 LX, Psion 3, Palm Pilot
• Reviews: The Verge, NY Times