Northern Nevadans know what a pain in the ass it is to get from here to the Bay Area for a couple of days for business or to attend a meeting, show or game.
We have to navigate the traffic through Sacramento and Oakland via Vallejo on Interstate 80, or head down Interstate 680 through Walnut Creek and west over Highway 24 into Emeryville. It can take four to eight hours. When we get there, where can we park in San Francisco without getting our windows smashed or paying $50 per day to protect our car? If I bring the family, I need to think about where not to take them, plus consider what I do and do not want them to see.
Last summer, I drove back from Mountain View on a Saturday, believing I was foiling that insidious traffic by avoiding weekday travel. Oh, how wrong I was. I had purchased a classic car from a friend and found out quickly that the air conditioning wasn’t charged. It was bumper-to-bumper almost the entire way until I hit Roseville, and 108 degrees between Fairfield and Sacramento. The drive to Reno took seven hours. The car was beautiful, waxed and perfect for being 40 years old—and almost overheating after going only 5 mph for 80 miles. I dripped sweat like a pig for hours. I lost about 10 pounds on that drive, but I was still looking very cool in my new ride.
Yes, we can fly to Oakland or San Francisco, but with security and bags, it’s four to five hours. Last-minute flights are $350 each way, and then it’s an $80 Uber to get to where you need to go anywhere in the Silicon Valley. It can be quite a headache.
I can honestly and sheepishly say, after 25 years here, I have found a better way. I wish I had done this years ago. What is it, you ask? Amtrak. Yup, Amtrak. It takes $80 and seven beautiful hours from Reno, climbing through the Sierra, down through the Sacramento Valley, then over to Emeryville. The train has a viewing car, a snack bar and a restaurant that serves a full $25 lunch. There are no long lines or security scans. There are a ton of retired folks coming across the country from the Chicago hub, seeing the land. The seats are way more comfortable and roomier than the crappy airplane seats, too. I brought my own jug of hot tea and snacks. My liquids were not in a bag.
Once at the Emeryville station, you hop in a $30 Uber and pop over to the Waterfront Hotel in Jack London Square—very safe (within three or four blocks) and a lot less expensive than waterfront rooms in San Francisco. The best part is that the ferry to SF docks right outside of the hotel and comes hourly during the week. It’s another relaxing and scenic 30-minute ride under the Bay Bridge over to the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero. From there, you can walk, scooter or Uber around the city. It’s just as easy going back to Oakland and Reno.
There are two caveats: 1) You need a day on each end of the trip for the Amtrak train, but the views going over Donner Pass through the snow tunnels and high above the American River Canyon are worth it. 2) If you want Wi-Fi, you’d better have your own hotspot—and expect to lose it completely from Truckee to Auburn. It forced me to stop working, relax and enjoy the ride.
I’m taking the fam over this exact way over the holidays. It is a hoot!
The reason for revealing this well-kept traveling secret is because I recently had to go to TechCrunch at the Moscone Center in San Francisco to meet our Polish government delegation, including our friend, the marshal of Lubelskie (equivalent to our Nevada governor), whom I’ve mentioned in this column before. We met clients from Poland, Lithuania, India and Germany. TechCrunch is an annual startup conference featuring what’s known as “disruptive technologies.” For those who don’t know exactly what this is, but are afraid to ask, disruptive technology examples in the last 30 years include Amazon for books (and now everything else). AirBnB and Booking.com have both disrupted the longtime hotel and hospitality business models, which had been in place for centuries. Uber did the same thing to the livery business, disrupting taxi and limousine services.
At the 2024 Techcrunch Disrupt 2024 event, more than 200 companies from around the world pitched in three-minute increments all day long for three days straight. As you can guess, this year’s theme is everything AI. Here are a few examples:
From Japan: 3rdBrain, “a human-centered AI technology company developing a series of advanced management decision-making software.” Perhaps it can run one or two of my three companies so I don’t have to!
From Belgium: Ingram, “the AI R&D lab behind the Fabrile chatbot platform. We offer a B2B platform for companies to create and deploy support, sales and niche knowledge chatbots that can integrate across many different knowledge bases and be deployed to a wide variety of chat and messaging platforms.” Maybe this one can increase my outgoing sales, then leave respectful voice messages that sound like me, so I don’t have to!
From the U.S.: PherDal Fertility Science “offers the only (Food and Drug Administration)-cleared sterile insemination kit as an at-home fertility treatment for anyone struggling to conceive.” I saw this pitch (among 20 others); the founder is a Ph.D. medical researcher. This was a classic case of a person determined to solve her own problem and then creating a replicable solution for others experiencing the same rollercoaster struggle. I don’t need this one, as my wife and I are done with that stuff.
I have been in cutting-edge tech for more than 30 years, when I helped bring virtual reality out of the Department of Defense and created early real-world apps in the first-generation VR systems from 1992-1997. Back then, there were VR companies popping up everywhere, as the venture capital money was flowing into VR early on. Then it was Amazon, eBay and the new age of internet companies also known as dotcoms, one of which lured me from Seattle to Reno to launch in 1999. We then saw the funding implode for that. In the early 2000s, it was the social media boom with the Facebook of this and the MySpace of that. (Look it up.) In the mid-2010s, it was the “internet of things,” and in the late 2000s, blockchain and cryptocurrency, then new and improved VR, followed by AR. The Facebook guy even changed the name of his company a few years ago to represent the “new era of ‘VR.’” So do you have your $3,000 Oculus Rift headset yet? No? Huh, me neither.
Now it’s the AI of this and the AI of that, because that’s where all of the VC money is now. Check back with me a couple of years, and I’ll fill you in on the fallout from the AI crash and the next cool new tech investment play.
Stay tuned, everyone—and happy holidays