Sorry for the long absence; Xobni has moved to California! I’m writing this article overlooking the San Francisco Bay and Alcatraz Island from the balcony of the Kiko founders’ new apartment. Having friends to stay with while searching for Xobni’s west coast headquarters has been invaluable.

We left Boston over two weeks ago. According to Google maps we drove over 3,100 miles. It is appropriate to add an extra 10 miles per day to account for Adam’s daily search for the closest Dairy Queen off Interstate 80.

We spent one week in my home town of State College, PA. My mom’s cooking fueled long hours of coding. The week of undisturbed coding in State College, save a few hours for clay pigeon shooting, proved that product development can often progress quickly by getting away from the city.

Our trip across the country involved a Guatemalan wedding in rural Indiana; a two hour Greyhound bus conversation with a recently incarcerated Chicago gang leader and drug dealer; the largest collection of wind turbines I’ve ever seen; 80% Ford, Chevy, and Dodge pickup truck market penetration in Laramie, Wyoming; and nearly running out of gasoline between the 100 mile distant gas stations in the salt flats of Utah.

We also made an observation that other startup founders might find useful should they decide to switch coasts; the straight roads of Iowa, Nebraska, Utah, and Nevada allow for near optimal passenger programming. Somewhere between Wyoming and Nevada Adam made Xobni’s first query parser. We’ll discuss the value of those lines of code at some future date.

We arrived in the Bay Area and were welcomed by friends. We want to thank the Kikos, Shoutfits, Likebetters, and Scott for their help. Things should get really fun out here when the Kikos begin their weekly startup dinners.

If our first days in San Francisco are any indication of the months ahead, Xobni is heading into exciting times.