That is weird that people couldn't understand that it would be very easy for them to learn a lot about you and how you could work with them, long before any face to face meeting.
In fact I've had several contract projects where I never even met my clients in person - or met them at a conference after the project was finished.
And yes, of course, if there is anything of value in how I approached things, please feel free to lift any ideas. My LinkedIn and other links are in my profile here.
My email is in my profile too - if you'd like to meet up while you're here, or just run any ideas by me, please feel free to give me a shout. Since you have the travel expense, lunch or dinner is on me. And I can't claim any promise of expertise. If nothing else, I can be a pretty good rubber duck:
Also let me share a personal stereotype. I can't be too far off on this even if it is a stereotype, since I've lived here for over 40 years.
When you say SF, if you mean the city of San Francisco, my feeling is that it is very youth-oriented up there. 20-somethings who work at Google way down here in Mountain View live in SF because that's where the hip culture is. (I don't mean that as a term of disrespect, I think hip culture is cool.)
As you travel down the Peninsula, people get older. By the time you get down to Silicon Valley in the far South Bay, you're in the land of hardware hackers where no one really cares how old you are.
Here in the Menlo Park and Palo Alto area, you've got a real mix. Little hardware/biotech shops where young and old all work together, and of course Facebook down at the end of Willow Road, where a 35-year-old developer would stick out like a sore thumb!
As I said, this is a total stereotype, but I think there's some kernel of truth in it. :-)
That is weird that people couldn't understand that it would be very easy for them to learn a lot about you and how you could work with them, long before any face to face meeting.
In fact I've had several contract projects where I never even met my clients in person - or met them at a conference after the project was finished.
And yes, of course, if there is anything of value in how I approached things, please feel free to lift any ideas. My LinkedIn and other links are in my profile here.
My email is in my profile too - if you'd like to meet up while you're here, or just run any ideas by me, please feel free to give me a shout. Since you have the travel expense, lunch or dinner is on me. And I can't claim any promise of expertise. If nothing else, I can be a pretty good rubber duck:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
Also let me share a personal stereotype. I can't be too far off on this even if it is a stereotype, since I've lived here for over 40 years.
When you say SF, if you mean the city of San Francisco, my feeling is that it is very youth-oriented up there. 20-somethings who work at Google way down here in Mountain View live in SF because that's where the hip culture is. (I don't mean that as a term of disrespect, I think hip culture is cool.)
As you travel down the Peninsula, people get older. By the time you get down to Silicon Valley in the far South Bay, you're in the land of hardware hackers where no one really cares how old you are.
Here in the Menlo Park and Palo Alto area, you've got a real mix. Little hardware/biotech shops where young and old all work together, and of course Facebook down at the end of Willow Road, where a 35-year-old developer would stick out like a sore thumb!
As I said, this is a total stereotype, but I think there's some kernel of truth in it. :-)