Before you move to San Francisco, read this.

Most of the people moving to San Francisco right now are coming here to be at the epicenter of AI. They’re also hoping this city will give them a sense of belonging. While it’s certainly possible to find that community here, it’s a lot harder if you’re relying on the venture backed tech scene to deliver it.

I was born in San Francisco and have lived here for over thirty years, which makes this city my longest voluntary relationship. I’ve seen people fall in and out of love with SF, often loudly, on Twitter. The ones who fall out are almost always the ones who came here hoping to find a career and life at the same time.

Tech didn’t always run San Francisco. There’s a reason we call this industry Silicon Valley. For the last fifty years, most of tech existed forty miles south of here, in Mountain View and Palo Alto and Cupertino.

San Francisco was something else entirely. Hippies in the Haight. Gay men in the Castro. Chinese immigrants in Chinatown. Tech didn’t really start shaping the culture until the 2010s, and even then, most SF tech workers commuted south every morning on Google buses.

Then COVID hit. The progressives moved to Oakland, the families relocated to Marin, the VCs fled to Miami. The city emptied out and its cultural fabric thinned. In their place came Y Combinator companies and the AI researchers who seeded “Cerebral Valley.” They started labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, which grew into trillion-dollar companies. Tech took over because the rest of the city walked away.

But tech isn’t the only thing here. If you fly in from Twitter, tech is what you see. It has the easiest front door with its conferences, hacker houses, demo days, group chats and dinner parties. But the other scenes are still here. There are still surfers at Ocean Beach, parents in Noe Valley, a gay scene in the Castro. You can find any of them. You just have to look harder.

Most people don’t look that hard. Instead, they dive headfirst into venture-backed tech. They work in startups, socialize with other startup people, and spend most of their time in the same few neighborhoods. There’s nothing wrong with that. SF is one of the only places on earth where you can do this. The unhappiness arrives when people do this and wonder why they haven’t found the community they came here for.

The tech industry wasn’t designed to give most people a sense of self-worth. It was designed to change the world and make extreme outliers very rich in the process. A few things define how the culture actually operates.

The first is optimism. In most cities, if you tell people you’re starting a company, they’ll explain why it won’t work. In San Francisco, they’ll write you a check and tell you to think bigger. There’s nowhere else on earth where this happens at scale.

The second is monomania. Building a great company takes years of working 9-9-6. The people shaping the next decade aren’t out on Thursday nights, and they need a city that doesn’t make them feel like losers for staying in. If you’re looking for people with range, you’ll have a harder time finding them in tech’s corner of the city.

The third is the power law. Tech exists downstream of venture capital, which is built around outlier outcomes. A few enormous wins pay for everything else. This dynamic shows up in many social interactions. If you’re unknown, people will meet with you. You might be their lottery ticket, and they certainly don’t want to be the one who blew off the next Mark Zuckerberg. But if you’re clearly not shooting for a huge outcome, people won’t grant you the time you may think you deserve.

The tech scene in San Francisco runs on the opposite logic from New York’s. New York has distraction and diversity. It has a hundred industries and a thousand subcultures and a street life that doesn’t care what you do. San Francisco chose focus instead. That’s why OpenAI and Anthropic were founded in SF.

You can still build a life in San Francisco outside of the industry that brought you here. I have. My startup is venture-backed, and I’m in tech in most of the ways that matter. But most of my close friends are parents from our kids’ preschool, or business school friends in fields outside of tech. I like that the tech culture exists. I benefit from it. I draft on its optimism. I don’t source my self-worth from it.

If you’re moving to San Francisco for tech, this is the best place on earth, and it’s not close. If you’re moving for something else, the city has it, but you’ll have to look harder to find it.