MBA Voices: The City That Stays Open – My San Francisco Global Experience

Three locations were on my Global Experience (GE) shortlist: Riyadh, Tokyo, and San Francisco. The first was somewhere I’d never been. The second was somewhere I knew, but had never seen through a corporate or new-economy lens. The third was home.

I chose home.

Global Experiences at London Business School are one-week, faculty-led immersions where students leave campus to test ideas against real companies, founders, and markets on the ground.

The pitch is that the city becomes the classroom. For most of my classmates, picking a GE meant going somewhere unfamiliar. For me, picking San Francisco meant returning to a place I hadn’t lived in years, with new eyes, a different professional brief, and – quietly – the chance to knock out two birds with one stone given my work in digital infrastructure.

A small voice asked the obvious question: what could you possibly learn somewhere you grew up?

Quite a lot, as it turned out.

THE BAY, FROM A DIFFERENT ANGLE 

I grew up in Southern Marin, just over the Golden Gate. Tech was in the air. My aunts and uncles built parts of the industry: NeXT, Apple, Silicon Graphics, Oracle, and Cisco. By the time I graduated university, friends were founding companies, and the social media giants were moving from the Valley into the city. I’ve spent most of my career in growth roles at venture-backed startups. So Silicon Valley isn’t a destination for me. It’s a backdrop.

What I hadn’t done was walk through it as an LBS student, sitting beside classmates from every corner of the world. The Bay through their eyes is not the Bay through mine. That alone made the week worth the flight.

THE THESIS: A CITY THAT STAYS OPEN

The San Francisco Global Experience was built around the theme of ‘Digital Disruption’, and the course was led by LBS’ S. Alex Yang, Professor of Management Science and Operations. The week opened with a panel of three Bay Area venture capitalists. Among the threads they pulled was one I wasn’t expecting to hear so plainly: the Bay’s defining advantage, in their view, is that it stays open. People land here from everywhere – Iran, India, China, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the American South – and they innovate, build, and stay. That openness is not incidental to the Valley’s success; it is the success.

That framing reorganized the rest of my week. It is the story of the Amidi family (who I’ll get to in a moment). It is the story of my own family, the Barmands. It is the story of nearly every founder we sat with. And it is the story of a thousand engineers, operators, and “tech warriors” whose names don’t make headlines – but whose work shows up in every product we used during the week. The Bay’s openness is a competitive moat, and it’s one of the few moats in tech that doesn’t depreciate.

SEEL: A FOUNDER’S PATH, NOT A FOUNDER’S TRACK RECORD

We opened the company visits with Seel. It is a San Francisco-based post-purchase infrastructure platform that helps over 5,000 retailers deliver Amazon-level return, delivery, and resolution experiences without having to build it themselves. It was backed by firms like Lightspeed and Foundation Capital. I had the privilege of moderating a fireside chat with Bill Liu, Seel’s Co-founder and COO thanks to my longtime mentor and recent LBS Global EMBA alum, Laura Huddle, who coordinated the visit.

Bill holds dual degrees in Philosophy and Information Science from UNC Chapel Hill and has been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30. The public record on him is thinner than on his co-founders, which turned out to be the gift of the conversation. It wasn’t a track-record story, it was a path story. What landed hardest for me, and what I’ll carry into my own work, was his relentless discipline around product-market fit. Six years in, the language he uses about customers, the willingness to keep narrowing focus until the wedge becomes a category, the readiness to throw out what isn’t working – it’s the kind of clarity that’s easy to admire and hard to do. I came out with notes.

PLUG AND PLAY: A FAMILY FRIEND TURNS SURPRISE HOST

Wednesday took us to Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale. PNPTC is a 20-year-old institution: more than 30 unicorns through its venture portfolio, a global accelerator footprint across dozens of countries, and – newly launched – a Community Foundation aimed at the next generation of founders. The Amidi family, who founded and lead it, have been close family friends since before I was born.

I hosted a fireside chat with Sanam Amidi, Chief Brand Officer at PNPTC and Chief Operating Officer of the Plug and Play Community Foundation, who was recently named to the Silicon Valley Business Journal‘s 40 Under 40 list. Sanam and I grew up together. This was the first time we’d been on stage together as professionals.

The surprise of the day came from her father, Saeed – the founder of Plug and Play. He is, without exaggeration, one of the busiest people in the Valley. After he arrived, he walked our cohort through the full history of the company – the pivot from desk space to global venture ecosystem, the investment thesis, the university partnerships they’ve built around the world – and then sat front-and-centre for the fireside, taking photos and videos throughout. By the time I came off stage, those photos had already landed on my parents’ phones. It’s a moment I won’t forget, and our cohort felt it.

The Amidis arrived in California from Iran in 1979. My own family, the Barmands, made a similar journey. Sitting on that stage with Sanam – two children of immigrant families, doing serious work in a place that welcomed our parents – was the clearest illustration of the VCs’ point I could have asked for. We left the visit with the beginnings of an LBS–PNPTC collaboration that is now in motion.

COREWEAVE: A GLIMPSE OF THE AI-NATIVE STACK

Thursday took us to CoreWeave. It is a company that in my own field – digital infrastructure – has gone from a 2017 crypto-mining outfit to the AI-native cloud that Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and Mistral all work with. We visited the day before they announced quarterly results. Several classmates were surprised to learn the company isn’t yet profitable; as anyone in this space knows, the GPUs are extraordinarily expensive, the build-out is brutal, and the margin is earned over years (not quarters). NVIDIA holding an equity stake in CoreWeave tells you most of what you need to know about the underlying bet.

What I took away wasn’t a balance-sheet view. It was a landscape view. Sitting with their team and hearing how the AI compute stack is actually being assembled – workload-by-workload, customer-by-customer – gave me a sharper picture than any earnings call ever has. I flew straight from San Francisco to a work trip in Las Vegas and Denver the following week, and the CoreWeave session shaped how I showed up in those rooms. That, for me, is what a Global Experience is supposed to do.

THE IDEA THAT STAYED WITH ME: PHYSICAL AI

Professor Ilya Strebulaev is an LBS alumnus, Stanford GSB professor, and arguably the leading academic voice on venture capital and startups in the world. He was a guest speaker, providing valuable academic insight into the VC world. His session distilled years of original research on how venture-backed companies actually behave, succeed, and fail.

During his speech, there was one thread stuck with me more than any other. It was the rise of physical AI: Large models leaving the browser and entering hardware. The robots. The cars. The factory floors. We’ve spent the last three years marveling at what AI does on a screen. The next decade, on his read, belongs to AI that touches the physical world. For someone whose day job is data centres, that wasn’t an abstract observation. That is the thesis underwriting the next wave of demand for the infrastructure I have helped to build.

THE NUMBERS, NOT THE NOISE

During the pandemic, San Francisco was eulogized. The talking points were familiar – exodus, vacancy, the death of innovation, capital fleeing for Austin and Miami, California in decline. The drumbeat was loud, and not only from the usual sceptics.

The numbers tell a different story. The companies leading the AI wave are headquartered here. The venture capital is here. The engineers are here. California, taken on its own, sits among the largest economies in the world, and is not moving down the table. The model didn’t break. It bent, absorbed the shock, and kept going. That, more than anything, is what “open” produces over time: resilience.

I knew this already. This week cemented it. San Francisco – and Silicon Valley – will continue to lead global tech innovation.

CLOSING THE LOOP IN SONOMA

We capped the week at a winery in Sonoma. The venue was – by happy accident – a few miles from where some of my closest friends and family live. I went from a classroom-week of fireside chats and faculty sessions straight into a long table with people who knew me as a teenager. Two worlds, in one afternoon.

That, in the end, was the homecoming.

Thank you to the LBS experiential learning team and the faculty who led us. This Global Experience didn’t show me a city I’d never seen. It showed me one I thought I already knew, from angles I hadn’t earned the right to see until now.

The small voice that asked what I could possibly learn at home? It’s gone quiet. Turns out the answer is: more than I’d expected, and exactly what I needed.

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Arsalan Barmand is Managing Partner at PGP Group, a London-based mission-critical infrastructure advisory and delivery firm. He brings 16 years of experience across digital infrastructure, real estate development, and complex programme delivery.

Before PGP, Arsalan led partnership growth and marketing at RAEDEN, a Founders Fund and Friends & Family-backed AI data centre developer specializing in the adaptive reuse of existing industrial real estate. Prior, he was on the growth team at Belong – a Fifth Wall, Andreessen Horowitz, Battery, and GGV-backed real estate startup. Before Belong, he led strategic partnerships at Centinel, a cleantech company reducing carbon emissions from the built environment, and consulted for NextEra Energy’s Mobility division supporting fleet electrification. Earlier, he held business development and strategy roles in North America and the Persian Gulf.

Arsalan also serves as an Advisor to the Center for Responsible Hospitality, a New York-based non-profit driving data-driven transformation in the hospitality industry.

He holds a B.A. in International Communications, Cum Laude, from The American University in Washington, DC, an M.Sc. in International Political Economy, with Merit, from the London School of Economics, and is completing an Executive MBA at London Business School.

 

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