So I stayed visited a friend last summer in San Jose. I decided that during that week, while he worked, that I would go out and see for myself how "dropping by" startups would work out. I was surprised by the reactions of some of the companies. Here is what happened when I did this, but remember this was not in San Francisco, but south (IE Mountain View, San Jose, etc.).
Established startups that were > 20 employees were very hard to talk to. They had recruiters working for them to find and hire people. Those recruiters were pretty much booked and didn't have any openings in their schedules. I was often referred to their website to apply and then wait to be contacted.
The smaller startups, those who had only a few cubicles / people, took my contact information and were going to pass it along. They didn't have recruiters (they are expensive) so they did their own recruiting. They also had places to apply online in which they referred me to.
In all I found it very difficult to just stop in and grab someone's attention. I will be moving out there at the end of this summer and hope to work on my startup. If that goes sour then I will definitely do things differently to find a job, more along the lines of what devs1010 suggested. I found more opportunities just talking to people with similar interests than just showing up in person to random startups.
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So I stayed visited a friend last summer in San Jose. I decided that during that week, while he worked, that I would go out and see for myself how "dropping by" startups would work out. I was surprised by the reactions of some of the companies. Here is what happened when I did this, but remember this was not in San Francisco, but south (IE Mountain View, San Jose, etc.).
Established startups that were > 20 employees were very hard to talk to. They had recruiters working for them to find and hire people. Those recruiters were pretty much booked and didn't have any openings in their schedules. I was often referred to their website to apply and then wait to be contacted.
The smaller startups, those who had only a few cubicles / people, took my contact information and were going to pass it along. They didn't have recruiters (they are expensive) so they did their own recruiting. They also had places to apply online in which they referred me to.
In all I found it very difficult to just stop in and grab someone's attention. I will be moving out there at the end of this summer and hope to work on my startup. If that goes sour then I will definitely do things differently to find a job, more along the lines of what devs1010 suggested. I found more opportunities just talking to people with similar interests than just showing up in person to random startups.