18-year-old Lance Yan recently made his location on X to “Waterloo | SF.”
The University of Waterloo student founded Clice, an AI startup. Yan recently visited the Bay Area to raise capital. He can also stay at a hacker house when he visits, he told Business Insider, which justified the bio change.
“If you’re trying to raise, and a VC sees you’re based in SF, they could be like: ‘Instead of calling me, just meet me in person,'” Yan said. “The negotiations would come smoother.”
Yan said that he wanted to associate himself with San Francisco’s startup culture — something many tech hopefuls can relate to. As the city booms with AI money, so does its online cachet. Tech hopefuls can tout San Francisco on social media in an effort to get closer to investors, build connections, or manifest success.
Business Insider spoke with tech workers about why San Francisco fever is spreading online — and how they’re inching closer to the city, digitally.
San Francisco is ‘back’ in fashion
When I called 35-year-old Margin founder Cathleen Turner, her X bio listed both Los Angeles and San Francisco. She had recently spent over a month in the Bay Area, where she told people that she was “strongly considering moving.”
Turner said that investors were “overindexing” on signals. “A lot of SF investors, they will not take someone seriously if someone has not moved,” she said.
San Francisco, long a tech mecca, is on the up-and-up once again. The city’s real estate market is experiencing a boom period, and local hiring is surging in part due to AI. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang declared over the summer that the city was “back.”
Toki Hossain, a 28-year-old working in developer relations in Vancouver, noticed that people online would “go to SF once and change their location forever.” He said he wondered if he should do the same for his coming trip.
The following week, Hossain hosted a Canadian diaspora night in San Francisco. He kept his location as Vancouver, but posted a photo of San Francisco’s trolleys on arrival.
24-year-old a0.dev cofounder Seth Setse lives in San Francisco. He said he’s noticed a younger crop of X users claim his city as home: college students.
Interns will move to the Bay Area for the summer, change their bios, and leave their listed city as San Francisco for the following year, Setse told Business Insider. It’s for clout on “tech Twitter,” he said; the interns want to “engage with other people in SF and get more people to respond to them.”
San Francisco fell out of favor among some in tech during the pandemic; tech leaders and VCs criticized local politicians. Some de-camped to Austin or Miami. Others who left during the pandemic have since moved back.
27-year-old Snoofer founder Antonio Song said he never wanted to move to the city. Thanks to his X feed, he now has “real big FOMO,” he said.
22-year-old cyber engineer Jack LaFond loves his city: Tampa. He’s noticed that when some tech people visit San Francisco, they often bash their home cities online.
“People see the all-or-nothing side of SF and think that, by denouncing their own city and pledging allegiance to SF, that will put them ahead in a cohort of tech people,” LaFond said.
‘Cali or bust’
Many of these SF flaunters online appear to come from one spot: the University of Waterloo.
The university has a strong tie to Silicon Valley thanks to its co-op program. In 2014, a Riviera Partners study found that the UWaterloo ranked third among the most hired candidates for Silicon Valley engineering jobs, behind UC Berkeley and UCLA. The city itself is also one of Canada’s tech hubs.
23-year-old Gale cofounder Haokun Qin said that online San Francisco allegiances were “very pronounced in Waterloo culture.” Qin saw someone change their LinkedIn location for a remote internship at a San Francisco-based company, he said.
Clice’s Yan described the structure at Waterloo: study for four months, intern for four months, and do it all over again. He’s planning to do his internships in the Bay Area, “so basically I’m spending 50% of my time in Waterloo and 50% of my time in SF,” he said.
Yan said that San Francisco was a “heavenly land” for Waterloo students. The philosophy on campus was “Cali or bust,” he added.
Dreaming of the Bay goes far beyond Waterloo’s campus, though.
Caleb Jephuneh’s location on X is “2025: moving to Silicon Valley.” The 24-year-old founder of Therabot from Nairobi, Kenya, said that he had “outgrown” his city.
“Putting it there, someone else who has an easier way can actually help me move to San Francisco,” he said. “It’s more of a manifestation.”
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