What on earth are they doing in SF
I went to possibly the most Bay Area (derogatory) event imaginable last night. god this place can be odd. it’s also pretty hilarious
Yesterday I turned 26, and as a symbolic kickoff for how I’m hoping this year will run — I wanted to experience something different. My friend Maarten came through with an enticing luma event posting:
DREAMS OF STEEL: Deep Tech Week Closing Party — 8:30pm-2am: Live music, themed rooms, burning man meets science and engineering innovation with humanoid robotics
Deep tech is a weird space. What makes it deep is the fact that you really have to dig deep in your mind to picture a world where any of it actually works. Deep tech startups range from humanoid mech robots to zeppelin cargo airship fleets or heat-free fusion reactors. I used to work at a Deep tech startup trying to sell a future 10 years down the load where we would deploy a suite of factory-scale plants that would remove a million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. It’s technology where there’s a million reasons why it won’t work. This week SF hosted a conference for startups in this field and the marketing was as much about pitching a philosophy of optimistic imagination as it was about showcasing technology.
Startup culture in SF is more than a little ridiculous. Sometimes it feels like everyone in this city either wants to join a big tech giant or become the next one. I’ve heard of house parties in the city that will impose a moratorium on talking about AI lest a room be taken over by founders pitching their GPT-wrapper or — god forbid — people start whipping out LinkedIn QR-codes on their phones.
On the other hand — these people are passionate and there’s real beauty to that. They love what they’re building and believe they can make big things happen. Talking to a brilliant founder can be like being served koolaid in a martini glass with 2 maraschino cherries and an orange twist — before you know it you believe in a future you’ve never even heard of. Good startups are build on positive energy and it’s infectious.
That’s what Deep Tech Week is all about. Allowing yourself to dream that you could be a part of re-engineering the world for the better. That’s what this party was supposed to be about — visualizing a sci-fi future.
But Deep Tech is also all about failure. Part of the reason there’s a conference for it is because these startups require specific kinds of VC funds comfortable with extremely high risk investment. The dream has to be so enticing specifically because it’s basically impossible to achieve. Over-promise and under-deliver is the name of the game. There was some expectation that this party might follow that trend.
A few notes on the features of the event —
The organizers rented out a pair of warehouses that are often used for underground raves and set up djs in both buildings. Genuinely a cool space that didn’t feel like another conference networking event
We were promised a ‘robot boxing match’ and ‘robot fashion show’ among other futuristic technology demos. As expected, this didn’t really come to fruition. There was a 3 ft tall humanoid robot with boxing gloves walking around advertising a fight some time in the future (presumably the engineering team couldn’t make the deadline)
There were various costumed women, some on stilts, others in skin-tight shimmering spandex and another doing acrobatics on a cube dangling from the roof. Someone in our group commented that it wouldn’t be an SF tech-bro dream without exoticized sex
Music seemed to be trying very hard to play a mix of cool-futuristic while also appealing to a varied corporate audience. One dj pair wore TRON helmets and played Daft Punk greatest hits for hours. This isn’t really a criticism as much as I felt like it encapsulated the vibe of the evening
What made this so party so painfully (but also kinda amusingly) SF was the people. Despite entering with zero intentions to network, I found myself asked for my professional contact within minutes of entry. Top of mind for everyone there was hustle: hustling a career, hustling a business, even hustling a lifestyle (bio-hacking being my personal hell of conversation topics).
At one point Maarten connected with a VC rep and pitched a fake startup idea we’d concocted — AI girlfriend meets weighted blanket (don’t you wish your comforter played big spoon and whispered in your ear?). The fact that our new friend didn’t balk once drove home the realization that there’s an awful lot of stupid ideas flying around here.
One comment that stuck with me is that there’s a lot of founders who are so caught up in startup frenzy that all they care about is being able to tell people they’re a founder. There’s a culture where the only status symbol is the amount of funding you’ve raised. And people will do absolutely anything to achieve it.
The most refreshing conversation of the night came from a hilarious founder who seemed to be the only person who, without losing any of her passion for what she was building, was willing to be be real and not care what others thought about her. In the span of a few minutes she:
Barged into my conversation by asking the other guy if they’d met (before he could respond she corrected herself by remarking that he just looks like every other white guy). She then proceeded to call him a Zuck soldier upon finding out he works at Meta
Immediately after insulting him she pleaded with us to register for her website and become users #81 and #82. It turns out the submit button on the website was broken. We joked that maybe she should message her head of engineering to fix it. She said she was the head of engineering and that this explained why her instagram ads which were getting hits weren’t resulting in new signups
We introduced her to a couple VC people to help her raise funding and she led by showing them the cold sore on her lip and asked if any of them had cold sores. (and then asked if they wanted to invest)
It was bizarre, but looking back — she may have been the most normal person there. Honest, irrational, unpredictable, maybe a little drunk. She brought the energy the party was missing. I hope she achieves her goals
As much as I like to poke fun at the absurdity of spaces like this it’s fascinating to remember that this is still a culture that breeds success stories. If we were more serious, that VC connection that Maarten and I made could’ve one day evolved into a multi-million dollar investment. Our friend with the broken website might go home and fix it and go on to become a dominant player in her field. At the end of the day, SF is still the place to be if you want to start a tech business from scratch. And that’s because it’s full of places like I went last night. Kinda electric to be a part of
