Saad advises companies from his home office, with its views of the San Francisco Bay and SoMa, itself a neighborhood in recovery. 

He coaches entrepreneurs in Europe, Australia, and across the U.S. on how to adopt “Silicon Valley thinking” in scaling their businesses. That means encouraging clients to visit, if not move to, the Bay Area. “If you want to maximize your probabilities,” Saad regularly tells founders, “hang out where all the capital is, where all the builders are, where the future is.” 

For some clients, Saad has become a Silicon Valley “Sherpa,” navigating their move across oceans, he said. “They know there is some magic here they need to tap into.”

Martes picked up on that energy as soon as he arrived last month from Colombia. “You come here and see autonomous cars driving around the city, and you think, ‘Am I thinking big enough?’” he said.