San Francisco's Tech Community, Connected
For years, leaving San Francisco felt like admitting defeat. Now a growing number of founders who packed up and headed to Austin, Miami, New York, or Pittsburgh are building businesses that might not have survived had they stayed. Here's what the data — and the founders themselves — are actually saying.
Aug 26, 2026
Not all founders funded by the same firms are playing by the same rules. Depending on your investor, your stage, and sometimes just your relationship with a single partner, you might be building remotely from Bernal Heights or fielding weekly check-ins about your office headcount. We talked to founders navigating this quietly chaotic landscape.
Aug 26, 2026
San Francisco's tech network is one of the most powerful in the world — and one of the most difficult to actually penetrate if you didn't arrive with the right connections already in place. We talked to engineers and founders on both sides of the invisible line to figure out what genuine insider status actually requires.
Aug 26, 2026
The pitch deck looks great. The reality? A little harder to romanticize. We talked to early-stage SF founders about the financial stress, logistical chaos, and mental weight of building something from scratch in one of the most expensive cities on the planet.
Jul 16, 2026
San Francisco's physical comeback is real — but walk into any coffee shop or coworking space and you'll find engineers on headphones, founders in back-to-back Zooms, and designers who haven't attended an in-person standup in months. The city is back. The office? Not so much.
Jul 15, 2026
Remote work scattered San Francisco's tech talent across time zones and zip codes, but something unexpected happened: the community didn't dissolve, it just went digital. We talked to founders and engineers living everywhere from Austin to Lisbon who still consider themselves card-carrying members of SF's tech scene—and they're not wrong to.
Jul 15, 2026
The 'SF is over' narrative made for great Twitter takes, but the migration data tells a messier, more interesting story. Some cities genuinely absorbed Bay Area talent. Others just hosted long, expensive vacations. And the founders who did come back? A lot of them returned fundamentally different — and not in the ways anyone predicted.
Jul 14, 2026
San Francisco's tech scene runs on more than code and capital — it runs on an invisible social architecture that determines who gets the best equity, the warmest intros, and the most forgiving salary negotiations. Understanding where you land in this unspoken hierarchy isn't cynical. It's survival.
Jul 14, 2026
A quiet but notable wave of seasoned tech leaders is returning to San Francisco after stints abroad, in the suburbs, or in sunnier states — and they're not coming back to do what they did before. Armed with fresh capital, global perspective, and a few hard-won lessons, these founders are targeting opportunities that remote-first operators keep overlooking.
Jul 14, 2026
Forget structured accelerator programs and formal office hours. Some of the most transformative mentorship happening in San Francisco right now is completely unplanned—born over cold brew in the Mission or a Slack thread that spiraled into something real. We talked to the founders giving and receiving this kind of guidance to find out what makes it stick.
Jul 13, 2026
While the rest of San Francisco obsesses over term sheets and Series A rounds, a scrappy cohort of local founders is quietly building sustainable, profitable companies without a single dollar of venture capital. We talked to five of them — and what they told us might change how you think about what it actually takes to win in this city.
Jul 13, 2026
San Francisco salaries look impressive on paper, but once you run the full math — rent, commute costs, taxes, and lost hours — the picture gets a lot more complicated. We talked to real SF tech workers and modeled out three common scenarios to help you figure out whether the city premium still makes sense for your life.
Jul 12, 2026
Stop wasting time in the wrong rooms. We've mapped out the real places — digital and physical — where San Francisco's tech community actually shows up, connects, and gets things done. Consider this your living guide to the city's best-kept professional secrets.
Jul 11, 2026
The obituaries for San Francisco as a tech hub were written early and often during the pandemic years. But a quieter, more complicated story is unfolding now — distributed companies are planting flags back in the city, and the reasons are messier than 'the office is back.'
Jul 11, 2026
In San Francisco, the best pitch deck in the world won't save you if nobody's picking up your calls. We went deep into the city's informal funding networks to figure out how relationships — not resumes — are still the real currency of startup capital.
Jul 11, 2026