Touring San Francisco’s Start-Up Scene

San Francisco is a city full of technological wonders. With Silicon Valley at its helm, San Francisco has the world’s largest start-up scene, along with the headquarters of many of the biggest companies in the world. You can throw a pebble in any direction at Silicon Valley and it’ll probably land up in the headquarters of some start-up or the other.

But, with an exponentially growing list of start-ups, it can be difficult to navigate around this huge city, especially if you’re a techie looking to make a pilgrimage to all the hip and happening start-ups in the city.

So, here is a list of things that you need to take care of to make your start-up tour of the Silicon Valley a successful one:

1. Plan your transportation

With traffic being a huge nuisance all day long, it is important that you book your transportation in San Francisco carefully. And, if you’re planning on touring these start-ups with your classmates, student club, or other larger groups, you might want to charter a San Francisco tour bus rental. That way, your driver can worry about directions and fighting traffic while your entourage relaxes and enjoys the sites along the way. This also makes it easier for you to get around as the driver knows the city and saves you a lot of time in the traffic and navigation departments alone.

2. Choose your destinations

With an ever-expanding list of companies setting up their offices here, it might be hard to choose which ones to actually include in your tour. Before beginning your journey, make sure you have narrowed down your list of places to visit here so that you can explore and learn more from the ones you do visit.
For instance, you can tour Twitter’s and Uber’s headquarters, both of which sit side by side. Then, you can head to South of Market Street or SOMA, as it is often called, for a tour of many giant start-ups like Yelp, Dropbox, Airbnb and even Pinterest. However, no tech-tour in San Francisco can ever be complete until and unless you visit the headquarters of Google, the company who literally shaped the lives that we live today.

3. Choosing your pitstops

With a city this huge and with so many places to visit, it is important that you figure out places to stop for refreshments beforehand. San Francisco has a booming economy and, hence, it is nigh on impossible to find places here that offer food and drinks at rates that won’t burn a gaping hole into your pocket.

So, after you’re done deciding on which places to visit, do your research to figure out which places you can stop to get refreshments that fit within your budget. Your driver can probably help you out with that. Since drivers are usually locals, they might know some very good budget places where you can make a pit stop to rest and eat before continuing on your tour.

4. Having a budget

As you have obviously guessed by now, San Francisco is not a cheap city to be in. With many tour agencies offering group and individual tours, you will already be spending a lot on the start-up tour itself. Whether you’re doing it on your own or via an outside source, you must also account for extra expenditures and emergency money.

5. Planning your stay

Many start-ups here like Twitter and Google have headquarters so big that it takes at least half a day to tour them. With so many places to see and explore here, it is important that you plan your schedule to fit these tours as well as several others while accounting for time spent being stuck in traffic as well. You can take the help of several websites to better plan your stay here. Again, it is best you do the planning and booking beforehand so you don’t end up spending too much money on them.