A Year of Making Friends
I moved to New York a year ago, and I didn’t know what to expect.
I was looking for a change of scenery after spending most of my adult life in San Francisco. I knew I’d miss the food and the nature and most importantly my friends, but my gut was telling me I needed to move back to the East Coast.
I began last year in the startup idea maze. Lots of reading, long walks, and podcasts. What they say is true, you genuinely need to find a problem you’re interested in spending at least a decade trying to solve. You should work on an important problem1 if you want to produce important work. Your interest will keep you going during the low points, the times of uncertainty, and the loneliness of discovering a new path.
I don’t think I truly understood what living in the moment meant until last year. Every day is a unique experience when you’re navigating the idea maze. It feels more like an artistic practice you sit down to every morning than clocking into into a 9-5. I don’t think I had more than a week or two planned in advance. I wanted to be nimble and spontaneous. Some directions will lead to dead ends but eventually a path will reveal itself that takes you further into the labyrinth, and you need to be ready to meet that moment. The freedom is nice, but this lifestyle is not easy. It takes courage and mental fortitude to keep exploring after reaching so many dead ends and ignoring the detours and distractions that come your way.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an interest with the consumer social industry. The social apps on our phones set the stage for modern culture, influencing commerce, geopolitics, and our daily lives – what a privilege it must be to build software that impacts the lives of so many people. Yet I’ve always dismissed trying to start a company here because the industry has seemed so difficult to break into. Not only do you need to create a product with organic network effects, build an iconic brand, and time the market perfectly around changing consumer behavior, you have to find a way to fund your ambition in a sea of free applications.
But I couldn’t seem to shake how many important problems there are to solve here and how deeply they resonated with me. Maybe it was the recency bias of that acute loneliness you feel when moving to a new city and don’t know anyone yet that compelled me to revisit this space.
Never let a crisis go to waste.
I leaned into the discomfort. I treated making friends as a full-time job. I studied the loneliness epidemic. I downloaded the friend matching apps. I went to meet ups and book clubs and parties. It took effort. It took time. But I started making friends.
Your goal is to find people aligned with your values and to build trust. First impressions matter. You won’t connect with everyone. Remember it’s just the beginning of hopefully rich and lasting relationships.
This year of making friends gave me the opportunity to study the process and overanalyze what seemed to work in our hypermodern digital age, particularly where technology aided the process or fell short of its claims.
And now this year, I’ll be channeling this learning into new projects – building software that helps us be more human and writing about my journey last year.
Thank you to everyone who made last year a great one. Special shoutouts to Lola, Carly, Nicole, Ruby, and Lucas for being such welcoming hosts. I hope to pay it forward this year.
https://blog.samaltman.com/you-and-your-research