Let's Go San Francisco: The Greatest Head-Fake In Urban History

Why the smartest money is quietly flowing back to the city that builds tomorrow.

“Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies“ — Andy Dufresne, The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

In 1906, San Francisco burned to the ground. Three days later, it started rebuilding. In 2020, it burned again, this time over Zoom. Many fled to Austin, Miami, anywhere with lower taxes and fewer needles. But here’s what the LinkedIn refugees missed: the real builders never left. They just stopped tweeting and started training models.

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Lisa and I landed here January 2000, three months before the NASDAQ went full Hindenburg. Twenty-five years, four market crashes, three tech revolutions. Pattern’s clear: San Francisco doesn’t die. It sheds dead weight and accelerates.

Right now, we’re in the acceleration phase. And nobody’s watching.

This week, OpenAI DevDay at Fort Mason. The world’s AI leaders converged on a waterfront venue everyone swore would stay empty forever. Between keynotes, the real conference: founders pitching in hallways, deals closing over coffee, talent getting poached in bathroom lines. Every hotel sold out. Every restaurant with a two-hour wait. The city everyone wrote off hosting the future’s command performance. This is how San Francisco reloads, one GPU at a time. The 2021 remote brigade said geography didn’t matter anymore. Tell that to the founder who just raised $20 million because they bumped into the right partner at the right coffee cart. Physics rewards presence.

The pandemic was chemotherapy. Brutal, necessary, clarifying. Killed the cancer of performative progressivism that had metastasized through City Hall. The supervised injection sites, the decriminalized shoplifting, the Chesa Boudin fever dream. When Walgreens started locking up deodorant, even the true believers knew the fever had broken.

Enter Daniel Lurie. Friend, Levi’s heir who built Tipping Point instead of a wine label. Proved nonprofits could run like startups before running the city like one. San Francisco’s first adult mayor since Willie Brown. Highest approval rating in decades. His catchphrase? “Let’s go San Francisco.” This summer at Dead & Company, he grabbed the mic: “I am the mayor of the greatest city in the world.” The crowd roared, for him, not just the band. No committee wrote that.

No Twitter manifestos. No virtue theater. Just competence. Under Lurie, drug dealers get arrested, novel concept. Building permits that took 18 months take 18 days. The city stopped subsidizing chaos and started shipping results. He turned the DMV of cities into a startup.

The numbers tell the story the media won’t: Property crime down 32% year-over-year. Q2 2025 office leasing hit its highest volume since 2019, all AI and tech. The city that couldn’t keep a CVS open is now the neural center of artificial intelligence. OpenAI, Anthropic, a dozen unicorns you haven’t heard of yet, all within six blocks of each other, all hiring like it’s 1999 with better unit economics.

Next year, the world shows up for the Super Bowl and World Cup. They’re expecting to find the zombie city from their 2021 Twitter feeds. Instead, they’ll find the command center of the future. That’s the punchline. Everyone wrote the obituary while we were writing the next act.

Meanwhile, New York’s debating rent control while we’re debating consciousness. One city’s regulating the past; the other’s engineering the future. Watching progressive politics migrate east is like watching someone adopt your discarded hairstyle. Good luck with that.

Zohran Mamdani’s rise in Queens? It’s like watching someone find our suicide note and use it as a business plan. Rent control as religion, landlords as villains, inequality solved by legislation. Brother, we tried this movie. It ends with CVS locking up deodorant and your tax base in Austin. But sure, import our 2019 fever dream. We’ll take the refugees.

The culture returned first, always does. Beyoncé at Oracle. Tyler at Outside Lands. Gracie at the Greek. The festival circuit that went dark in 2020 now burns brighter than 2019. Artists colonizing Dogpatch warehouses, turning shipping containers into galleries. The Mission’s dive bars with three-hour waits, $18 mezcal in places that still reek of last century’s cigarettes. Restaurant reservations impossible again, but now it’s Michelin stars next to taco trucks. When creatives return, capital follows. Urban physics.

Here’s what outsiders never understood: San Francisco’s dysfunction was the feature. This city attracts people allergic to safety, people who’d rather fail at fusion than succeed at another meal delivery app. The high cost isn’t a bug, it’s selection pressure. Mediocrity can’t make rent.

Every great city tests something specific. New York tests endurance. Can you grind? Los Angeles tests delusion. Can you believe your own narrative? San Francisco tests conviction. Can you build tomorrow while today calls you insane?

We shed the progressives but kept the progress. Cleaned the streets but kept the freaks. That’s the trick: becoming functional without becoming Phoenix.

The founders here now are different species. No Burning Man camps, no Twitter philosophers. They’re solving extinction-level problems. Climate tech that actually scales. Biotech that ends diseases instead of managing them. AI that amplifies humanity instead of replacing it. They’re not building unicorns. They’re building arks. And they’re all here, in person, building together. The group houses are back but now they’re compute clusters. The late-night sessions are training runs, not parties. This is what frontier feels like.

The remote-work exodus wasn’t tragedy, it was natural selection. The people who fled to save 13% on state taxes revealed themselves as tourists, not builders. The ones who stayed, who doubled down during darkness, understood something the “Why I’m Leaving San Francisco” essayists didn’t: San Francisco isn’t a city, it’s a strategy. (To our best friends that moved to Aspen: this isn’t about you. You left for the après, not because of the apocalypse. We’ll see you at Thanksgiving.) You don’t live here for comfort. You live here to be in the room when it happens.

Our daughters, growing up in the city everyone abandoned, will inherit the future everyone missed. They’ll know that resilience beats rhetoric, that builders beat cynics, that the best time to invest is when everyone else is running.

Cities are portfolios. The biggest returns come from the ugliest entries. San Francisco in 2020 was WeWork at $2. San Francisco in 2025 is NVIDIA at $50. Still early, trajectory locked. The next wave of fortunes will be made by people who move here now, while everyone else is still debating.

While America debates remote work and making things great again, we’re building consciousness in South Bay garages. We’ve got Waymos mapping streets, AI labs mapping minds, and founders mapping what’s after next. Fog rolling in, lights flickering on, GPU fans humming like prayer wheels. The rest of the country’s playing checkers. We’re training models to play games that don’t exist yet.

The comeback already happened. And it’s just getting started.

The fog’s lifting. The cranes are back. The city that dies and rises, dies and rises, is rising again. This time feels different because it is different. We’re not rebuilding what was. We’re building what’s next.

Let’s go San Francisco.

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PPS H/T @onbrandwithamanda for the spark.

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