So we just moved here 5 weeks ago and I’m recognizing that local, regional and national news always seems to come back to one truism – San Francisco is the place to be. Sure, sure, I know what you’re thinking – this is classic egocentricity because we just moved here. And while I won’t disagree that plastic surgeons have a penchant for egocentricity, that’s not what’s at play here. And keep in mind that when I moved to Cleveland or moved to Baton Rouge, I did not get the same feeling as I’m getting here in San Francisco.
From tech news, the Supreme Court decisions to overturning bans on gay marriage and the America’s Cup, it all comes back to San Francisco. And even when San Francisco isn’t trying to be in the limelight with the latest billion dollar purchase of a company that has no revenue, San Franciscans are still the focus of random, if not positive, character traits. If you missed it, Travel + Leisure magazine named San Francisco the snobbiest city in the country. Aside from an aloofness and having many artisanal coffeehouses, the other factors that helped to award this ignominious honor to San Francisco can be viewed here.
And if you pay attention, you’ll start to notice that commercials across the country reference San Francisco in some way. Aside from Mrs. Doubtfire, San Francisco is highlighted in the more mundane, such as this Verizon commercial.
Even since I’ve been here this very short time, I’ve personally been affected by this center-of-the-universe feeling. First off, look at the loquacioius and abstruse verbiage I now use! The words artisanal, ignominious, penchant, egocentricity…these are the words of a newly sanctimonious San Franciscan. Look, I can’t stop (sanctimonous, really?!).
But it can’t be denied that everything is here. For example, I use Dropbox to store patient information. This is a secure server in “the cloud” that is more affordable than an electronic medical record (EMR) which can cost up to $38,000 for a reliable, well-suited EMR for a plastic surgery practice. And while Dropbox is secure, it’s not technically HIPAA-compliant in and of itself. So I googled “how to make Dropbox HIPAA compliant” and one of the first links that popped up was Sookasa.
So I downloaded their application and installed it to secure my files in a HIPAA-compliant manner. I received some online support from “Lior” on Sookasa’s chat portal in the process of installing the software. After I was done installing the software, I received an email from “Asaf”, the Founder of Sookasa. He wanted to see if I was available to chat about how I would use their software and ways to improve it. For whatever reason, it quickly became apparent that their company was based in San Francisco and to his surprise, I was also here. We scheduled a meetup the next day to discuss the software and how best to implement it into my practice. How often does that happen to you?!
This is an example of an urban collision as described by Michael Kimmelman in an unrelated story in the New York Times. These chance encounters in your workplace, on the street or online in the case above, lead to collaboration on the fly and San Francisco is an incubator for this type of high-level, tech savvy, innovation. Things happen here that don’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t happen anywhere else.
From the perspective of the website/app company, BuildMyBod.com that I developed, I’ve already received more attention from other apps and companies that are interested in some sort of synergy between our products.
Bottom line, this place is amazing and you should move here…unless you’re a plastic surgeon. It’s saturated and we don’t need the competition!
