Fourth Time’s a Charm: a Polish-Dutch Bootstrapping Solopreneur Practicing InnoTourism in the Bay Area

By Natalia Bielczyk, PhD

By Natalia Bielczyk, PhD

My First Time in Silicon Valley

I had my first contact with the startup culture of the Bay Area during a vacation trip in the spring of 2017. I was a Ph.D. student in Computational Neuroscience visiting my sister, who just started her Postdoctoral position at Stanford University. Blind to the charm of Californian landscapes and architecture, I got hooked by local entrepreneurship and spent the whole month attending meetups in the Valley. This was my first ever InnoTourism experience.

The Pandemic Experience

A few years later, the COVID pandemic broke out, which made me spend two years developing my business, Ontology of Value, behind closed doors. During the pandemic, my work was focused on developing new tools to help individuals self-navigate in the job market — and in particular, an aptitude test that I called the Ontology of Value Test.

The job market is not uniform; it's a complex galaxy composed of tribes with unique working cultures and varying written and unwritten rules. So, I studied the tribal cultures in various environments occupying the job market. I conducted hundreds of informational interviews, read many books, and watched many documentaries.

In the process, I developed a particular interest in the tribe of entrepreneurs. They were characterized by the ever-lasting drive for innovation and the tendency to jump out of their comfort zone and risk it all in the name of a so-called “mission.”

It was the most fascinating tribe among them all. At first glance, startup founders seemed like a bunch of lemmings: light-hearted, easygoing creatures walking toward the cliff. And yet, once in a while, one of these lemmings changed the world.

And then, I started daydreaming about returning to the Bay Area one day and mingling with these people again.

My Second Time in Silicon Valley

After the lockdown had finally ended, I decided to reward myself for solitude and resilience. And so, I gifted myself with a trip back to the Bay Area to explore the startup culture again — no longer as an adept of neuroscience but as a bootstrapping solopreneur. So, I departed from the Netherlands on August 1st, 2022, and arrived at the Rainbow Mansion, Cupertino, to live in the intentional community of NASA employees for another two months.

This time, I took a closer look at the local entrepreneurial culture. My trip made me realize there is more than just one type of business culture and more than one way of building businesses.

There are at least a few striking differences between the American and the Dutch business culture, from the overall attitude to innovation through networking strategies to the overall business dynamics. After my trip, I wrote a chapter dedicated to this subject, entitled “Startup Culture in Bay Area vs. Startup Culture in Amsterdam.”

I also had an opportunity to visit the famous and beloved Burning Man festival, where the Bay Area startup culture mixes with the world of arts and culture of freedom and reciprocity. After my trip, I wrote a chapter dedicated to this subject, entitled “Let It Burn! I went to Burning Man and Here Is What Happened.”

From then on, my Bay Area visits have become regular.

My Third Time in Silicon Valley

Earlier this year, I came to the Bay Area once again, except now, I have become much more pragmatic. Since I don’t have a car, I decided to live in the city where all roads cross anyway.

San Francisco is an explosive combination of innovation, wealth, hedonism, crime, and extreme poverty — a Gotham City. Instead of Batman and his Bat-mobile, we have Elon and his Tesla… and he is more concerned about renaming his companies than saving the city.

During my two intensive months in San Francisco, I developed many techniques to network efficiently and explore this maze. I shared my findings in the chapter entitled “If You Are Going To San Francisco… My 22 Tips and Tricks on Networking in the City.”

My Fourth Time in Silicon Valley

I am in the Bay Area for the fourth time, having returned to San Francisco at the beginning of September. Did this InnoTourism improve my business? For sure — but not in a direct way. Local entrepreneurs and investors think big and are fearless, and this mindset certainly keeps me going, dreaming bigger and delivering more.

But one thing I learned in the process: don’t over plan. Bay Area provides, but not necessarily in the ways you assume it would provide.

When I came here in August of 2022, I had big plans to adopt my career development workshops to team development for startups, only to learn that, for multiple reasons, this was undoable. And in general, my company — mainly based on consulting services — does fit the market in the Bay Area. I noted this problem in the chapter entitled “The Temple: How To Survive as a Consultant in the Bay Area?”

On the other hand, I got many valuable contacts and friendly collaboration options that I had never planned for, as I wasn’t even aware of their existence in the first place. Sometimes, one phone call can be worth tens of thousands of dollars. But you need to know the right people — and the right people are here.

The Future

One might ask: is San Francisco your place on Earth?

Well, it is not all that simple. The Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has multiple levels. In daily life, I am a Polish person living in the Netherlands. I feel safe in the Netherlands, loved in Poland, and inspired in the Bay Area. So, where should my home be located?

At this moment, I’m trying to think about home in another way. God, family, company — in this order. The rest is negotiable, although I cannot imagine my journey as an InnoTourist would ever end.

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Natalia Bielczyk, Ph.D., is a Computational Neuroscientist turned Career & Business Strategist helping individuals and teams navigate, build value, and subvert all expectations in times of AI. She is also a bootstrapping solopreneur, speaker, author, podcaster, and blogger.

In 2019, she founded and developed a career incubator and accelerator, Ontology of Value^®: an R&D, EdTech, and consulting company that conducts independent research on the fast-changing job market. Natalia and her team build tools and practices to help professionals self-navigate in the job market, craft their dream careers, and help businesses create synergistic, healthy, and happy teams in times of AI. 

Within the company, she developed the flagship project: Ontology of Value^® Test, a robust aptitude test built using a combination of psychometrics and machine learning that helps professionals and students discover their competitive advantage in the job market and find optimal career paths and assists teams in developing synergy and bringing performance to the next level.

Even though she chose to work in the open job market, Natalia remains a researcher at heart and believes in the compatibility of science and entrepreneurship. Besides her work, she also authors books, leads a YouTube channel and creates educational blogs. In her free time, she documents her journey at nataliabielczyk.com / nataliabielczyk.substack.com.