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Secret salons, oyster happy hours, coffee raves--San Francisco is back and basking in idyllic weather as rent increases jump to the highest in the nation. Streets are teeming with people racing to events, despite tech season being weeks away, when conferences like Dreamforce, Disrupt, TedAI and SF Tech Week take over the city.
Much of the frenzy is being attributed to the AI gold rush with people returning to town to get a piece of the action, so over the past week I popped into several happenings to hear what everyone is talking about.
At AGI House, a sprawling Hillsborough mansion just outside of San Francisco, known for hosting tech celebrities like Google cofounder Sergey Brin and Grimes, dozens gathered for a garden gala featuring talks with industry luminaries OpenAI's chief strategy officer Jason Kwon and former OpenAI interim CEO Emmett Shear. It was as insider as it gets with a pulsing DJ set by Twitch cofounder Justin Kan, meticulously curated by AGI House founder Rocky Yu and Icons podcaster Melanie Uno.
In the mix was Poshmark cofounder Manish Chandra who shared with me his views on the AI transformation. I asked, what will people do with their lives as AI frees up time, and more importantly how will they pay for it.
"I feel like we're moving to more and more abundance, even though the path to abundance always feels a little uncertain and dark."
"When the dot com boom was crashing, it was impossible to find a job. Highway 101 was emptier than Covid. There were see-through buildings, literally no jobs, and people were throwing in the towel." Trying times, he recalled. "I remember it from a personal perspective, because I had young kids and had to figure out how to survive."
He expressed how hard times bring out things that can transform you, whether you discover superpowers or connect with new people.
"Human connections deepen when times are tough,"he said.
"When times are good, people just kind of ignore each other."He also said there have been far crazier boom and bust cycles that have come before, with companies giving away BMWs and other outrageous perks to attract engineers.
"In the nineties, technology was changing so fast, it felt like everything you were doing was going to become obsolete, literally every day,"he said.
"Every 10 years, we predict the demise of Silicon Valley, and we feel like whatever the technology is coming is dooming humanity, and is more severe than last time. Yet here we all are thriving, sitting here this lovely evening."
Emmett Shear, now cofounder of Andreessen-backed AI alignment lab, Softmax, sat down with me to discuss how people can best keep their head straight during these times. He explained that in the seventies there was a seminal work authored by Alvin Toffler, called Future Shock, that explored the psychological disorientation that can occur as a result of rapid technological change.
"This feeling of overwhelm, that if things keep changing, I can't learn fast enough to keep up with the system,"he said.
"But the way you keep up is actually by giving up on trying to understand everything at that level of detail."
He then shared his barbell strategy for surviving the next five years.
"In a high variance environment where things can change a lot in unexpected ways, you should just YOLO big things that might work, because even if you fail, your tried-and-true plan could also fail. So there's no point playing it safe, might as well be ambitious,"he advised.
"On the other hand, as things get riskier, you'll need to build up safety and reliability support to counterbalance."
He said hunter-gatherers lived in the same situation we're wandering into—a world of forces more powerful than themselves and beyond their control. Not only was it spiritually, emotionally and intellectually beneficial to be in a tight community; it was also economically sound. When you store meat from the hunt in the bellies of friends, they'll be around to help when you find yourself in a tough spot.
Back in San Francisco, at a Michelin starred restaurant where the meal was served community style making dining optional, AI unicorn Honeybook gathered the press to discuss how AI is birthing a new breed of one person startups and solopreneurs.
It was here I had a chance to talk with Jeff Crowe, managing partner of Norwest Venture Partners, who told me the story of a 20-year old founder that landed seed funding to create text-to-sheets, text-to-deck apps right before ChatGPT made it a feature. This led to the question, how can VCs futureproof bets to prevent obsolescense in the age of AI.
He said the first thing to look at is product. If it’s a thin wrapper around a core, it’s hard to futureproof as the LLMs eat their way further into the application layer. “It’s how venture capital looked at personal software in the nineties and said what’s the differentiation if Microsoft moves into the space. Thirty-plus years later, it’s a similar phenomenon in AI products where OpenAI, Anthropic and others keep adding functionality.”
As far as defensible moats, he looks for product capabilities not easily disruptable like those with domain-specific data; integration with large enterprise systems; bespoke distribution tied to supply chain. If it’s a product that’s been around longer, he looks for how fast it’s pivoting to AI; driving into core functionality as well as operations including development; customer support; sales; marketing; HR and finance. Because if operations aren’t futureproofed; competitors can gain superior cost structure; become more capital efficient; profitable. He looks to see whether customers are adapting because some are going to get accelerated; others obliterated; risks having nothing do core business. Lastly; he looks for culture’s nimble; can move exceptionally quickly.
A fan of young talent; Crowe believes hiring AI-natives best way transform organization; because their rate change less than worker whose baseline pre-AI.
Across town; Initialized Capital hosting its own press dinner; introducing portfolio agentic startups deploying digital workers.
Runway cofounder Siqi Chen told me from moment launched startup 2020; knew’d never more than 100 people; because early access GPT-3;knew scale faster AI;than headcount.
In contrast Crowe’s hiring strategy;Chen said;Runway hiring only senior talent.“The profile how we hire quite different today even three four years ago. It’s staff principal level only point;because junior stuff basically done LLMs today.”
“We’re seeing non-technical people contribute technical level like never before--tagging robot write code bug--that’s just magic,”he said.Runway uses bots everything;from qualifying leads reviewing documents.
One Initialized other portco commented deployed AI Slack IT support under name Paul,n’t AI Paul.A bit head-spinning think chatting AI colleague even funny.
Initialized Capital’s managing partner Brett Gibson said’s natural progression where we’re heading.
I asked him whether end app economy.He replied:“Software going trend towards generatable.There going lot apps still want relationship variety reasons:people them collaborating;perhaps AI itself personality want interact.It’s going away;just going adapt.”
And what about humans,I asked,next humans?
“The one thing makes very hopeful is if anything AI very good at’s personalized education.And so hopefully that’ll path those feeling left out.People should follow whatever they’re interested curious about because high agency person using high leverage tools going something cool valuable,”he said.
Back at AGI House,hanging out with hashtag inventor Chris Messina,I asked what advice he would give Gen Alpha on where to focus their energies,considering how pandemic losers have become AI winners—with ballet dancers,hair stylists and bartenders the few trades AI can’t replace.
“VCs are over,SAS is over,everything that’s been going on for the last 10 or 15 years kind of doesn’t really make sense anymore,”he replied.
“If you really want to invest in the future,it’s about having a perspective,being able to bring people into that and creating movements.”
Echoing what Chen said:
“There’s only one Mr. Beast—and so if you develop relationship as a brand，那就成为可持续价值，因为AI无法替代品牌。”
Or can it?
ChatGPT，可能没有作为AI助手的防御性护城河，但作为文化偶像，拥有估计10亿粉丝，它仍然几乎不可触及。