Observations: AI in San Francisco
Notes from a week with AI founders, investors, and frontier lab operators.
👋 Hey, it’s Andrew.
Good morning from San Francisco. The past few days have been b2b attending the HumanX AI conference, Zero Click by Profound marketing AI summit, and hosting two CEO dinners of my own. Today, I’m doing the ‘non-tech’ stuff in the valley, heading down to Carmel-by-the-Sea for the first time to unplug. Before I do, here are my observations from within the AI bubble in SF.
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San Francisco, the AI capital of the world.
There is no place in the world like San Francisco.
Google, Apple, Meta, OpenAI. All born in the Valley. And as Tony Robbins once said, “proximity is power.” By being close to the epicenter, you receive information, access, and capital first.
This has only intensified over the last three years with the rise of AI, frontier labs, and LLMs. There is a massive wave happening here that slowly trickles everywhere else.
I visit San Francisco a few times a year on a quest for “alpha”: new information or unconventional ways of thinking that haven’t made their way across the coast yet. Every time, I’m surprised.
This trip, I gathered 50 CEOs over dinner, visited OpenAI, met with banks and VC funds, and spoke with a few dozen people, including investors at the largest venture capital fund in the world, senior operators at frontier labs, creators, and CEOs of eight-figure companies. People who I thought had the best grasp of what tech is like in San Francisco right now.
My observations:
The talent density is even more intense than you expect. You can’t walk through San Francisco without bumping into a VC. If you are raising money for your startup, this is a good place to be.
The perception of abundance. The scale of companies is generally larger: more capital, more revenue, more headcount. As a result, there’s a mindset that there is greater abundance, more talent, and more opportunity. Techno-optimism.
“You can just do things.” Among the people close to the technology, there is a general attitude that anything is possible. You can build anything you want in a day without knowing how to code, and just start building things; you’re no longer blocked by your ability to find engineers or raise capital.
But everyone is stressed. In the majority of my conversations with operators, founders, investors, and old friends and new, people are feeling anxious. There is a lot of FOMO. Things are moving too quickly. And there’s the unknown: with everyone racing toward AGI, what happens after?
Status games are everywhere. There is a heavy obsession with status signaling, or anti-status signaling (which accomplishes the same outcome). Understandable given information asymmetry in venture when millions of dollars are on the line.
There is a clear inequality of information, wealth, status, and access. It was surreal to take a meeting with an investor managing hundreds of millions of dollars, then get into an Uber where the driver had never heard of vibe coding.
Speaking of Uber, 75% of the drivers attempted to network. "So what do you do for work?" was a constant. One driver asked me for career advice (I’m in no place to give a stranger career advice). There's a clear level of ambition happening in this city.
There is consensus on the clearest opportunity for quick riches. If you want to become an entrepreneur right now, do some form of AI implementation (help organizations adopt AI) or AI enablement (help people learn AI).
The pecking order is shifting. For three decades, Silicon Valley was engineering and product-driven. I saw this at Google and Meta. Zuck built the product, then hired business people to sell and monetize it. Product first, business second. Now it's research first, engineering second. The makeup of talent at frontier labs like OpenAI is heavily concentrated on the researcher profile (who, by the way, get paid millions of dollars a year). This impacts how decisions are made and incentives are set, and ultimately trickles down to everyone else.
Who will be most valuable in a post-AGI world? Lots of discussion on this during our dinner. The general belief: if you're non-technical, having an educator background (teacher) or liberal arts experience (drama, theatre) is a good place to be, because you can do things that AI cannot. There will only be four jobs is a good read.
Complete and total immersion. SF is the optimal place to be if you need to lock in. Everyone, everywhere is working. There are even 24/7 cafes, funded by venture-backed startups, that incentivize people to grind around the clock.
The Silicon Valley Consensus is real. A large density of people thinking the same way, building the same thing, going after the same market. People in other markets may not have strong opinions, and people here do, but they're all similar.
Proximity to the greats. A big reason SF is the way it is: the greats are around and involved. The founders of Google, Airbnb, Facebook, DoorDash, OpenAI, Salesforce, etc. They regularly speak, mentor, angel invest, and participate in the ecosystem. This is incredibly rare, and few other markets have this.
Proportion of missionaries vs mercenaries. In other markets like NYC, Miami, and LA, I’ve noticed that people optimize their careers around compensation. People here are willing to take a longer-term view in service of a larger, more fulfilling mission.
Multiple friends told me this is the most stressed they've ever been. But also the happiest they've ever been. A paradox that you would only understand if you are ‘AI-pilled.’
Peptides are all the rage.
The highest-status career moves right now: Work at a frontier lab (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini), build an AI company, or create content.
After spending a week here, I’ve realized one thing: I need to go and touch grass.
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Thanks for this recap!