Skyline

Oh San Francisco! The city where driverless cars zoom past streets lined with tech billboards and homeless people sleeping standing up.

I felt oddly at home in San Francisco as I visited for a few days on my way back to New Zealand from Mexico. Locals, event attendees, service staff, and tour guides communicated in a quirky analytical style that anyone working in tech is familiar with.

A changing demographic

San Francisco is one of the biggest tech cities in the world and was affected dramatically by the explosion in remote work after COVID. Many tech workers have moved out of the city, keeping their generous salaries and slashing their rent. SFChronicle reports a 21% decrease in 25-29 year olds after COVID [Source] and you feel it. From the half empty coworking spaces to huge areas of the city with empty streets.

Comedians ChatGPT vs Comedians Comedy Night

The second nail in the coffin was the end of the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon) in 2022 and thousands of layoffs. San Francisco wasn’t exempted with layoffs.fyi reporting 200,000 positions eliminated in the ‘San Francisco/Bay Area’ since then. Yes, two hundred thousand!

Twitter (x.com) as well as other prominent tech companies have also left the area [Source]. Twitter was a key company lured into the area by tax breaks, and is a huge blow to the area.

Even with an office vacancy rate of 37% [Source], less corporate locations like the mission district was full of cafes hackers tapping away at their Macbooks, streets full of live music, and restaurant lines snaking out onto the street.

San Francisco is in the process of reinventing itself.

Cerebral Valley

Silicon Valley is an outdated name. It’s been a long time since the 70s and the invention of the silicon microprocessing chip, with modern startups being more known for their web and mobile software. I would say today even the software narrative is outdated, with many artificial intelligence (AI) startups moving into what they now call the ‘Cerebral Valley’.

Workshop AI Engineering Workshop

Despite a general emptiness in the streets, I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of events, having to choose from multiple each night. There was a wide range through platforms like meetup.com and sf.funcheap.com from hiking, to pub socials, as well as the classic networking and tech presentations.

AI events were definitely the most popular and engaged. Full of impressive live streaming setups, eager and bright eyed learners, and generous amounts of pizza and drinks supplied by sponsors.

If you’re in San Francisco soon, I highly recommend checking out CerebralValley.ai to check some of them out yourself!

Conclusion

San Francisco is reinventing itself as tech workers start to shift their focus towards AI. There’s less buzz in the city due to COVID and ZIRP, but if you look in the right places there’s plenty of motivated people focusing in the right direction.

Digital work is still going through a huge shift and raising questions around the relationship between physical spaces and how we work. As someone who is big into communities and physical spaces, my eyes are eagerly on tech hubs like San Francisco to see what will happen next.