After a decade in Silicon Valley at two startups — one venture backed, one that my partners and I founded, bootstrapped, and sold — we packed up our apartment in SOMA, rented it out and moved to Paris for a six month sabbatical with my wife, cat, and what I guess are my favorite objects:
- 1 Kyocera black blade ceramic chef’s knife
- 1 Kyocera white blade ceramic paring knife
- 1 Thermapen
- 1 folding digital scale in metric and “standard”
- 1 pair of really nice chopsticks
- 1 Amazon Echo
- 1 original Dropcam
- my constellation of personal devices – phone tablet watch laptop with Sublime Text electric toothbrush PAX 2 etc
- 1 pair of suede Vans that I got in Tokyo
- 8 shirts: 1 oxford, 3 polos, 4 Ts
- 2 jeans
- 2 pants
- 1 Paul Smith three-button narrow lapel grey suit
- Agnes B. soft navy blazer
- 1 3/4 length black wool winter coat from The Archive
- 1 hip length grey wool winter jacket (also from The Archive)
- 1 Timbuk2 backpack. The ones in the Hayes Valley store say “San Francisco” on them, which I like.
- 1 Rimowa Salsa Air in white.
We packed everything into a total of three suitcases, two backpacks and a cat carrier.
The amount of stuff we sold, donated, or recycled was absolutely extraordinary. I think it was 70-80% of our total stuff. The whole process was nearly marriage-ruining. Yet looking back at it all, I’m hard pressed to remember the specifics: what was all that stuff?
Fewer, better, things.
