Why not just do it from home? I don't really see the benefit of moving to SF. You'll reach Ramen profitability a lot more easily if your costs are $0. You might even start college with something that most students can only dream of: income.

I've found job and contract opportunities are 3-4x more plentiful so you could probably earn a decent income on the side.

I don't think you can live on $1,000/month in SF. The absolute lowest I was able to live on for 1 month was $1,500. I think $2,000/month would be a much better min to shoot for. If you're here for 2.5 months, then you only need to make $2k on the side to have that.

I would recommend trying to get a job or internship and working on your project at night. If it's a website, it will take time to get users and crystallize anyway, and you really can't speed that up by spending 60-100 hours a week on it. So why not spend ~20 hours a week on the site and spend the rest getting paid for things people need right now?

my 2 cents.

I think you can, if you really want to, and it sounds like he does, so I say: go for it.

You can get a room share for $600. http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/roo/

That leaves $13 per day to spend, which is tight, but livable if you really want it. Suggestions: bring a cheap bike, so transport costs nothing; make your own lunches; $5 burrito dinners, etc; work from the public library and/or work from coffee shops and spend as little as possible/nothing; go to all the free events (there are lots, and some are free for the first x visitors) - some even feed you for free (saves $5), and give you booze.

And if you do come to SF, I'll stand you one Chicken Shawarma for dinner, because I think moving to SF for the summer when you're 18 is ballsy, so I'll put $8 behind that. (I spent the summer I turned 18 alone working in Scunthorpe, UK - believe me, SF will be better..)

If he was out of uni, then fair enough, go startupping or freelancing and avoid getting a regular job if you can... but at 18, seriously, just go enjoy university life, have sex, take drugs, take philosophy classes, and all that...

I don't really see the point of sacrificing your university life to go freelancing. If your start-up is taking off big time, AND it requires you to stay on it full time, then fine... but to give up uni to "make some contacts"... that's silly. The contacts can still be made 4 years later, there's really no need to go there right this minute.

It is wrong to say "go to uni to do X" if there is nothing stopping you from doing X outside of university. Also, avoiding the infantilizing effects of university would do lots of people good.

It certainly requires dedicated to learn as an autodidact, but I'd bet many people could get a better applied computer science education in 4 years by trying to become an active developer.

The exception is stuff like math (and math needed for CS like machine learning and graphics).

For personal context, I want to undergrad & grad school, and learned a lot of math required for the CS areas I specialized in.

I'd say perhaps a better applied programming education. Programming != CS. The things which I learned in my CS education and the things that I learned in real-world hacking have a relatively small overlap, however, having that CS background did open up some possibilities for working on interesting problems.

That's not to say that you have to go through formal education to get a good grounding in the theoretical elements of CS, but it does facilitate it.

Well, there is, because you won't have all the free time that you have as a student (which, btw, can also be used to start your start-up and acquire all that experience).

It is wrong to say "go to uni to do X" if there is nothing stopping you from doing X outside of university. Also, avoiding the infantilizing effects of university would do lots of people good.

There is also nothing to stop you from doing Y while you're also doing X at uni... So why not do both?

It certainly requires dedicated to learn as an autodidact, but I'd bet many people could get a better applied computer science education in 4 years by trying to become an active developer.

I'll agree with you on CS - I did physics, however, and I certainly wouldn't have learned all that outside of uni. I personally don't advise studying a computing-related subject if you want that to be your career - as you say, you'll self-teach all the useful computing stuff when you need it.

You're planning ahead a lot more than most kids that move to SF for a summer. Most end up homeless on haight street before calling their parents for a ticket home (I've hosted two separate street kids who moved here with starry eyes and ended up on the street before they went home...) -- so kudos for planning ahead a bit more than them :)

I moved here with $7,000 + a $2,000/month contract gig and settled in nicely. You're cutting it close, but it's possible. My $0.02x4:

(a) It's possible once you have the network and people who will vouch for your skills. Be aware that CL is full of red herrings; people are not hiring as many contractors in the downturn, but it still happens. Expect to see far less C++ than RoR/python/PHP.

(b) It will be challenging, mentally and physically, but it's possible if you're strategic about it. $700 can get you a sublet __if_you_look_long_and_hard__, but $100 for food is tough. You probably won't have much of a kitchen to prepare your own food. When I went through YCombinator I lived off of Vietnamese sandwiches and Dim Sum for days at a time; you'll get sick of it but $3 sandwiches and $4 for a plate of dim sum is hard to beat. $7 mission burritos are also a good bet, El Farolito's has burritos that'll easily feed you for a whole day.

c) SF is going to be cold during the summer. You should have been able to find this out, it's no longer 1968 ;)

e) You're in high school, you get to be crazy. :)

I want to chime in and say DON'T move to the east bay or one of the cheap places on the peninsula. The 'savings' are misleading. There's a good chance you'll spend as much in transport as you'll save in rent.. For example, from downtown Berkeley to 16th and Mission is $3.55 each way. If you go back and forth every day, it's $210/m. Thus if you find a $500/m room in Berkeley but you still go into the city all the time, it's the same as having a $700 room in the Mission. Also, there is little chance of finding a cheaper room in the east bay that is within reasonable walking distance from BART. The east bay is way more spread out and chances are that you'll have to walk quite a ways to get to the BART. In fact I'm going to risk criticism and say that anyplace you find a shared room cheaper than $700 in the east bay is going to be a sketchy neighborhood. YMMV, but the shady parts of berkeley are the only places in the bay area I've ever been mugged or physically threatened by people.

I speak from experience. When I moved here in 2001 I paid $700 for a place in Berkeley, which was about as cheap as it got. I worked on 17th and Harrison in the outer mission. I had to walk almost 30min to get to Ashby BART each way. If something happened late into the evening I'd have to crash on a friend's couch or take a $40 cab ride back to Berkeley cuz the BART stops running at midnight. It mostly sucked.

I don't want to hate on the east bay, it has it's charms. But unless your job and social life is all on that side of the bay, it's better to live in the city. You can definitely find a $700 room somewhere in SF. That's what I paid for a room in the mission until 2006 (then moved into my own place).

Also don't drive here, having a car is a huge expense in SF. My car was paid for and it still cost me around $400/m for parking, gas and parking tickets. You almost always get a virgin america flight from SEA to SFO for $49 if you travel on any day besides friday or sunday.

If I were doing this I'd bring nothing except a backpack with a few clothes (you can buy more stuff here if you need it) and a laptop. Then I'd just float around different cheap places on AirBNB until I figured out what I was doing.

Also, in a city, you're always having to move your car even when you don't need to drive it anywhere for street cleaning days. If you're lucky enough to have a garage for it, it will be hundreds of dollars a month. You're already cutting it pretty close with your budget. Really, really, really don't bring it.

Otherwise, I think your plan sounds amazing, and I hope you post here from time to time about your experiences.

Bringing a car full of computer stuff is a liability; unless you're doing lots of graphic design I'd drop the display and rock a cheap laptop.

Good luck dude.

But that's not quite the same dream as "reach ramen profitability on my web project". In fact, the two dreams may conflict. Moving to and learning a new area takes a bunch of time and money, and the bay area (especially SF proper) is expensive -- compared to Seattle or living with family.

For a young techie, the biggest benefit I could imagine being in the bay area versus Seattle is a larger job market and scene of potential collaborators. But are those what you need to make your project ramen-profitable -- or do those opportunities represent other paths entirely?

This, and "I-really-want-to-try-to-live-Cali-and-get-out-of-my-parents'-bedroom" reason. I think this is enough to spend $3000.

Basically, I'm making myself a little YC experience :)

One thing might be to consider a shorter trip down there to see if you can connect with some people in the course of a couple weeks, scout out places to live, and so on, and then do a more permanent move at a later date.

BTW, Berkeley might be a better option in some ways - with students leaving for the summer, maybe you could swing some cheaper housing there. It's not a bad place, either.

I won’t lie. In my opinion the chances of success are slim to none. But this is the best time of your life to take a chance. The more adult you get the less able you are to take huge chances. So as long as you hang on to enough money to get yourself home should things go bad I don’t see a down side (where as if you don't you could end up regretting it for the rest of your life)

That said, two pieces of advice....

First, get this book: http://www.amazon.com/Ask-Moon-Get-Percy-Ross/dp/0722529465/...

Percy Ross went from nothing to being a millionare and he attributes most of that to getting help from the right people. In that book he gives his 10 rules on how to ask for people's help and get it. The most important thing to remember if you do this is that 90% of the people in the bay area tech scene have been where you are (aka chasing a dream). If you need help and you ask right I suspect most will do what they can to help you succeed.

Second, look into hostels: http://www.hostels.com/us.ca.sf.html

Hostels are basically cheap dorms for anyone to stay in. They’re not very popular in the U.S. but in Europe there are tons of them and they serve young people with little money very well. The bay area has more than just about any U.S. city so you should be able to find a cheap place to sleep (and most have free wifi)

Anyway, hope it helps.

Downsides/danger include attractive people of both sexes, easy availability of booze and weed, failure to complete coding projects because you stayed up until 3am the previous night. The main benefit is that the place is low turnover, so your friendships there aren't transient like at a lot of bigger hostels. Mind you, I haven't kept in touch for about 4 years, and lots of places go through different phases.

Those people who are telling him to do it probably have done it themselves (that includes me). After moving in the Bay area, I asked myself why I didn't do it earlier.

I have lived in 4 US cities and no city comes close to the startup environment in SF. It's like watching the Superbowl in person versus watching it in your own house. The energy is just different.

He's 18. If he fails, so what. Sometimes, it's better to regret things you have done than regrets things you didn't do. (Ok that doesn't include committing crimes.)

(a) Freelance work is heavily dependent on contacts. If you don't have contacts then it's a crapshoot. Maybe you'll luck into something, maybe you won't.

(b) For housing, scan http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/sub/ ; $700 is not impossible, but you'll be living in a spare room of someone's house, and even then that's the low end & you should expect compromises. SF housing is much more expensive than Seattle, as in 2x the cost for equivalent space. I don't know where you got the idea that the costs are comparable (are you mistakenly including East Bay or South Bay prices instead of SF city prices only?). $100 for food is doable if you know how to buy cheap food in bulk and cook it yourself. As for "everything else", heat/electric/broadband can easily consume close to $200 if you're living alone. In a share it should be less, but you should ask about utility costs in your housing situation. On that budget, you should not count on spending any money on entertainment. There's some free entertainment to be had if you're scrappy, but expect to get most of your entertainment from walking around the city or riding your bike through the parks.

(c) Summer SF weather is colder than summer Seattle weather. Bring sweaters.

(d) [you skipped (d)]

(e) SF is an expensive place to live. If this is your 2.5 months of adventure before college, then you just have to weigh whether you're willing to pay $3k for that experience. (Not a bad way to spend it actually.) If you're really trying to bootstrap into a sustainable living situation, SF isn't the best place to go with as little savings as you have; there's too much danger of burning through your seed capital before you get revenue-positive ;). I get the sense that for you it's more the former than the latter --- that is, there's not much downside if you fail --- so what the hell, go for it.

But if you're dead set on coming out here, I would recommend looking in the east bay or the peninsula. Stay close to a BART or caltrain station so you can get into the city easily for networking events & to meet with clients.

If you really want to live in SF proper i would recommend looking for a room in the Tenderloin (despite its rep, its a great place to live, i loved it... lots of cheap food and close to everything) or in the southern or eastern part of the mission.

- Your freelance gigs not paying you in time - Finding that your new roommates are impossible to live with - Getting tossed out of your new place when your housemate wants his girlfriend to move in - Some unexpected expense (car accident, hospital visit)

Also, you will not believe what some people are offering for those $700/month apartments. On Craigslist at that price, you might find generally terrible places with sketchy roommates and your "room" may literally be a former closet. Believe me, I have seen them. I am very frugal about rent so I have investigated those sorts of listings. There are $700/month rooms that are halfway decent but those don't tend to pop up on Craigslist. Working your friend network in SF might be the best option.

And, your estimates of expenses are too low.

Still, if you are looking to just break even, it might be worth a try. Just be prepared to go home or try to get a parental loan (if that's possible) if it doesn't work out.

Ditto on the false economy of living in the peninsula. Unless you are trying to get a job at one of the Palo Alto or Mountain View area startups.

There are a lot of cool things going on in Oakland so I would consider that as a possibility, but it's also more complex for a newcomer to figure out a decent place to live, and transit is considerably more expensive.

The SF bay gets its summer later than Seattle, but it lasts longer, and the rest of the year is massively more enjoyable. Everyone here complains about the chilly weather in the spring, but a bit of springtime chill is far better than 10 months of gloom.

As someone who lives in Atlanta, this sentence about made me spit coffee out my nose... =)

(FWIW, I'd love to move to Seattle area, but it's just not in the cards for me.)

If I were you, I would not move here to do the solo founder thing without having plenty of connections; you need a good support network (which will hook you up with contract gigs too.) Bring a co-founder or hook up with some people who are already here and can introduce you.

That said, just being young and having the balls to move out here and give it a shot will open doors for you. Network aggressively, who knows?

As far as tips go: You can get a room for $500-$700 a month with varying levels of sketchiness; there are enough hacker houses around that you might find something helpful if you trawl CL long enough. Food is a matter of how gnarly you're willing to get :)

Don't bring your car and don't bring a bunch of gear; parking will cost you upwards of $150/mo and it's never included, and gearwise there's a non-trivial possibility you'll need to move fast if you're doing a cheap sublet or hosteling it.

-Rent was under $500 - you can still get these prices. Sublet a room in a house with some other young people. - Electricity/internet bill - $35. - Cell phone - $50. - Bring down your bicycle and bike for transport - Free - If you cook every day, and eat mostly vegetarian and rice - not just MSG-infused ramen - you can live on $5 a day - that's $150 for the month. - Give yourself $250 for very infrequent meals out, beers, or BART/Caltrain trips - and surprises.

I'm guessing most of the people who said you can't do it for $1000 never tried. If you have to, you make it work.

Summer's a great time to live in SF for cheap - lots of free outdoor activities. 2 months isn't that long to tough it out. Come back again and enjoy the great city when you hit it big :)

--Probably. As a rough lithmus test, you could run searches on startuply/ craigslist for both cities and compare the number of returns.

"b) Is it possible to live on $1000/month in SF? I subtract $600 for transit gas, emergency, etc."

--It's possible. 100 for food seems low ($3 per day). A big expense is rent; if you could cut that down you'd be better off.

"c) How is the weather down there? Is it much hotter than Seattle?"

--Not sure, I'm from NYC =)

"e) Am I fucking crazy?"

--No. And keep us in touch!

In particular, a lot of events happen on the peninsula in the Palo Alto/Mountain View area. For example, SuperHappyDevHouse is something you probably want to attend, and it's recently been at places like Sun. While getting there by CalTrain is possible, you can't stay late without being badly stranded. So if you find yourself wanting to visit places in that area, you will want access to a car. Bringing your own is an option, there's also car sharing services like ZipCar or CityCarShare.

You might also find it fun to drop by Noisebridge, a hacker space near 16th and Mission, to see what's happening. Circuit hacking every monday! http://www.noisebridge.net (disclosure: I'm the secretary and a member)

Overall, you are not crazy, but do some prep work by reaching out to potential contacts, setting up meetings, and figuring out the right events now. While the Bay Area _is_ the kind of place where you can walk into a cafe, meet someone random, and then walk out with an incredible conversation that leads to your next opportunity, you will get a lot more out of your summer if you work it ahead of time. Posting here is a good start, but you probably want to do some investigation more closely targeted to your web project idea.

That being said, another student programmer and myself are working on a startup in Ruby. Interested angel, that kind of thing. If you think you can contribute, I'd be willing to pad your ramen budget. Added bonus: one of our early target markets is Seattle, maybe something will come of that.

email is dp4man@gmail.com

I think you should just plan on the 2.5 months though and go to school afterwards.

I'm in a very similar situation. I'm taking a break from school (college), I have a bunch of savings built up, and I have a business that makes about enough for me to live off of.

I'm sharing a place now with some other hackers (we were in Palo Alto for a few months) and it's come down to $500-$900/month for rent depending on who gets a roommate. Not too shabby.

Coming from Boston, I thought it was really lame that there wasn't a central, unified subway system. But the busses here are just as good. There's one route that comes by my place every 5 minutes.

Also, I never realized how much the weather affected my emotions. I love how sunny it is out here.

B) I don't know what your transit costs are going to be, SF has wonderful transit. You could make the investment in a Muni pass and be able to explore one of North America's most beautiful cities.

Many SF apartments include some of the utilities in the rent, just be savvy. SF, being an incredibly choosy market often forces 6-month or 12-month leases: this doesn't apply to you. You probably need to plan on getting a room in a house with some like-minded hackers

C) As Mark Twain said: The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. Think LAYERS.

D) Where's D go?

E) Absolutely not. Take a risk, work hard, and meet dangerous fun people. You can live a lot of fun in SF on the cheap because, well, not everyone can be rich as Lergei.

I landed a job in New York City, where I'm currently living at. The city is awesome and my job is fun. But in reality, the Bay Area was my first choice, and it's still dream of mine to be able to land a job over there. I'm in the process of getting more information to further my skills so I can begin actively searching for work over there.

I was doing well in Puerto Rico (earning more money than most people I knew, living close to beach with constantly great weather, all my friends and family living there, etc.) and I'm certainly doing well in New York City. But if I had the chance to move to San Francisco, I wouldn't think twice about it. Maybe I'm wrong, but the Bay Area is kind of like the Mecca for developers and aspiring entrepreneurs like myself.

Like I said, I certainly can't speak for mannicken. I'm sure he has his own reasons, perhaps even similar to my own reasons. But if he's really willing to do it, that should be reason enough, regardless of where he is now.

EDIT: I think that the advantage that moving down there will give me will outweigh the $200.

Also, I generally found while looking for a place on craigslist, that while there are a lot of cheap places listed, they're heavily competed due to rent control. Places with a room for 500-600 will get hundreds and hundreds of responses, and you'll have to do an awkward interview for the room, which is like a combination date/job interview. It will take time to find a room. Nearly everyone I know that has moved to the bay area has crashed on a friend's couch for 2-3 months, or take an expensive, short term sublet.

Depending on your motivations, it could completely defeat the purpose of heading here though.

Maybe yes, but taking a leap into the unknown is the kind of crazy thing that more people should do. Progress, unreasonable man, and all that. Go for it!

If you're looking for summer sublets around universities, have you considered Davis? It's an hour and some away with no traffic, but cheaper, and uh, a lot hotter. I don't know anything about the department but I've been impressed by UC Davis recent grads in CS /EE i've worked wtih.

people start hacker houses at random intervals

http://searchyc.com/hacker+house

Besides, the point of moving to a cool city at the age of 18 is to get into trouble, no? Look after your property, don't be too trusting, practice safe sex and and avoid over-friendly strangers whether on the street or behind a desk etc. etc.. Don't assume that coming to Sf will launch your career or you'll find a pot of money, treat the $3000 as the price of a useful learning experience and if you do luck out regard it as a bonus.

I lived in the mission for a little more. Definitely try the east bay for cheap rent- if you don't mind getting the bus/bart into the city the rent is a lot cheaper.

i'd recommend avoiding treasure island.

somewhat related, scratch the north bay off your list. i never was able to find a cheap way to commute from there.