Growing up in Taiwan, SF felt like a place full of imagination and possibilities. On my commute, I listened to All-In, Invest Like the Best, Uncapped, and No Priors. On Twitter, investors and founders kept saying "SF is back." It felt like a magical chocolate factory on the other side of the Pacific -- bright, loud, impossible. I could only imagine what it smelled like.
When I finally landed, the airport was covered with AI banners. It felt like someone opened the factory doors and said, "Go ahead."
So I ran in.
I spent my time awake trying and gobbling up every flavor of the chocolate. A buzzing agentic browser beta-testing event, demo nights where people shipped wild ideas in a week, founder coffee chats where I tried too hard to impress, even the sting of getting rejected by a 20-year-old dropout for a full-time role. And on top of all that, knowing that two of the largest foundational model labs were within a 20-minute walk from my place made me feel like I was standing in the center of the future. I was inside the factory. Everything was colorful. Everything was sugar.
But after a while, the sweetness turned heavy.
One night, leaving an event full of cracked founders with millions of ARR, the emptiness hit. People asked what I was building, and all I had was, "I used to be at McKinsey." I kept chasing job postings, fundraising news, "rocketships," anything that looked like the next rare flavor. My brain spun nonstop, terrified of missing something. And the more chocolate I grabbed, the less I tasted.
One day my wife told me to try meditating. I sat down, closed my eyes, and realized how frantic my mind had become -- like a kid lost between machines, stuffing everything in without knowing why.
And then it clicked: I'd been talking about being "AI obsessed" but never actually building. So I downloaded Claude Code. After watching dozens of videos about it, opening it felt like touching the machinery for the first time.
That small act broke the spell.
I started following my intellectual curiosity again. Solving my own problems. Making instead of chasing. And I learned something I should've known all along: you don't network your way through the factory. You understand the machine. You make your own chocolate. And people naturally wander over.
I began sharing my work publicly. Founders and recruiters reached out. They found my background interesting, but they found what I was building even more interesting. For the first time, the conversation was about what I was creating now, not what I did years ago.
I still don't know where I'll end up this summer or full-time. But I feel calmer. I'm more patient with my wife, with myself. I can sit for hours and focus without panic. The colors are still bright, but now I'm tasting them instead of grabbing everything at once.
I came here like a kid walking into a chocolate factory -- wide-eyed, overwhelmed, trying every piece. Now I'm learning how the machines work, and life feels better when I'm building.