Storied: San Francisco27 Jan 2022

Gillibus Founder Alex Maxa (S4E34P2)

In this podcast, Alex picks up where he left off in Part 1, with his first trip to San Francisco.

He was with his dad and much older sister when she was scouting colleges. They ended up staying with family friends in Presidio Heights. He shares the stories of things they did and saw while here in the 1990s.

Alex spent a lot of time in New York City, where his sister wound up going to college. Later, he went into hospitality school at Cornell in upstate New York. After that, he dabbled in hotels in Detroit and Orlando before making the move West, where'd been drawn so many years prior.

He arrived in San Francisco in 2008, right as the bottom was coming out of the economy. But that wasn't what brought Alex here. His route to The City went, oddly, through Tokyo. The large Japanese metropolis told him that he could be anywhere he truly wanted to be. To reconcile that with Alex's belief that he needed to be around the right people, San Francisco was only logical.

He got work up in Napa in the wine industry pretty much right away, but only after a quick detour at Burning Man. He already had a place to live here, too. He shares his arrival story before we pivot to talking about Gillibus.

A friend was leaving SF to go back to New York and wanted to buy a vintage school bus for his journey. Alex went with him and was blown away by the beauty of the classic vehicle. Before his buddy's move, he and some other friends took the bus on epic road trips. His friend ended up leaving the bus in The City and bailing for NYC.

Alex kept that bus and learned to drive it. Soon, he was giving people rides and then it dawned on him: rent the bus out to folks.

We end the podcast with Alex's thoughts on what it means for him and for his bus company to still be here.

If you missed Part 1, please go back and listen.

We recorded this podcast on Zoom in January 2022. Photography by Michelle Kilfeather

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