Well Done SF, Well Done
No. 93 | Super Bowl LX and a love letter to the city that never left.
"Don't call it a comeback." — LL Cool J, 1990
Last Sunday, 70,000 people packed Levi’s Stadium. A B-1 bomber rattled windows from Santa Clara to the Marina. Bad Bunny descended through a mock rooftop. The Seahawks hoisted the Lombardi Trophy.
And San Francisco, the city half of America had reduced to a cautionary tale, showed the world exactly what it’s been building.
The game itself was forgettable. The city was anything but.
Well done, San Francisco. Well done.
Lisa and I moved here in January 2000, three months before the NASDAQ collapsed. We’ve lived through four crashes, three tech revolutions, a pandemic exodus, and more “San Francisco is dead” essays than I can count.
The cycle never changes. The city stumbles. The tourists leave. The builders stay. Then it reloads.
This week wasn’t quiet. This week was a love letter to everyone who stayed.
Everyone expected dysfunction. Traffic gridlock. Encampments as broadcast backdrop. Waymos freezing at intersections while visiting commentators rolled their eyes. The national media arrived with a script already written.
Instead, they found sunshine in the mid-60s. Clean streets. Crowds that felt energized, not defensive. Even Pat McAfee admitted on air: “We were so surprised by what we’d been told to expect versus what we saw when we got here. This place has been gorgeous. It’s been incredible. You can feel it’s a football town.”
The gap between the San Francisco of social media and the San Francisco of reality has rarely been wider. This week, reality won.
San Francisco didn’t just host the game. It distributed itself. NBC cut to the Golden Gate Bridge, the Ferry Building glowing at night, pregame segments broadcast from Alcatraz Island, a cinematic backdrop no other city could replicate. Cable cars wrapped in NFL branding rolling past packed sidewalks.
New Orleans has jazz. Miami has beaches. San Francisco has light on water at golden hour with fog lifting behind it. That isn’t manufactured atmosphere. It’s structural advantage.
The city wasn’t performing. It was just being itself.
Levi’s sold a $180 LX Hammer Burger: braised bone-in beef shank with demi-glace and Point Reyes blue-cheese fondue. Two hundred available. A shareable stadium burger that cost more than most people’s tickets to a regular season game.
Audacious. Slightly absurd. Completely on-brand.
Across the city, restaurants leaned into what they do best. Chowder in bread bowls. Mission burritos eaten on piers at sunset. Guy Fieri hosted a free tailgate for 10,000 fans and reserved passes for 2,000 veterans and active-duty military. That isn’t corporate activation. That’s civic muscle memory.
The music was relentless. Molly, our newest teammate at Sugar Capital, and I saw Noah Kahan at the Warfield on Thursday. Invite only. Two thousand people shouting every lyric. Lisa was in Florida with her mom, so Molly got the full Warfield initiation with me. It wasn’t officially a Super Bowl event. It didn’t need to be. It was just a great show in a city that knows how to host one.
Green Day at Pier 29. Post Malone at Fort Mason. Stapleton at Bill Graham. Shaq at the Cow Palace. The Killers at the Palace of Fine Arts, a venue so beautiful it made “Mr. Brightside” feel like it was written for the moment.
For one week, San Francisco was the center of the universe. And it wore it lightly.
Sunday afternoon we did what we’ve done for over a decade. We hosted the Super Bowl at our house.
Same subs from Submarine Center in West Portal. Same crack chicken from Comforts in Marin. Same quac made by Eric. Same Squares game in front of Alex at the control center of the Man Cave, run by him as it has been since I can remember. The grid used to go up on our old chalkboard wall, which is now covered in ombré blue wallpaper. The wall changed. The game didn’t.
But not all the same faces. The Moatzes are in Aspen now. The Bar-Zivs moved to DC. Katie’s at Wake Forest, texting us from her dorm room.
Every chair was full. They always are. Elle and her 7th grade friends upstairs doing 7th grade things. Juliet out and about with her friends, newly armed with a driver’s license. New faces where familiar ones used to be. Because that’s what San Francisco does. People leave. People arrive. The city absorbs it, adjusts, keeps going.
Our Man Cave on Super Bowl Sunday is a small version of the same story the city told all week. A little different than last year, a little different than five years ago, but the room was full. The core holds.
The subs were perfect, by the way. They always are.
Daniel Lurie has been a friend for years. Long before the campaign.
Last summer he grabbed the mic before Dead & Company at Oracle Park. “I am the mayor of the greatest city in the world.” No committee wrote that. The crowd lost it.
Super Bowl week, Dan was everywhere. The kickoff concert. The press conferences. The Chinatown block party on Grant Avenue, standing between lion dancers and NFL banners, wishing everyone a happy New Year and a happy Super Bowl. The community events. The small business pop-ins. Every single one of them documented on his Instagram, because that’s what he does and it works.
And the city delivered. Streets were clean. Transit ran past midnight. The gridlock everyone predicted never came. A media shuttle got lost in Santa Clara. A few Waymos confused some drivers. That’s not failure. That’s character. No press conference. No victory lap. Dan understood something most politicians miss: you don’t need to tell people the city is back. You just need to make it obvious.
Tens of millions watched coverage this week. Many had a mental image of San Francisco shaped by cable news and doom threads: tent encampments, smashed car windows, $18 avocado toast served over a layer of existential dread.
What they saw instead was a world-class city. Clear skies. Packed streets. Super Bowl week colliding with Lunar New Year and Chinatown throwing a block party that felt like the center of gravity. A waterfront that reminded the world why this city has been inspiring people since the Gold Rush.
They saw a city that works. Finally, so did the narrative.
San Francisco isn’t a city. It’s a strategy.
This week validated every founder, every operator, every family that doubled down. The AI labs filling South of Market. The restaurants that reopened. The small business owners who kept their doors open through the worst of it.
They didn’t stay because it was easy. They stayed because they believed.
San Francisco didn’t just host a Super Bowl. It hosted a reintroduction.
To the visitors who came expecting the worst and found the best: you’re welcome. Come back anytime. The fog will roll in. The hills will test your calves. The sea lions will bark at you. And the city will be exactly what it’s always been: strange, beautiful, relentless, and building something the rest of the world hasn’t imagined yet.
To Dan: the city needed a builder. It got one.
To every San Franciscan who stayed: we knew. We always knew.
And to the rest of the country, to the pundits and the doomscrollers, here’s what you missed.
San Francisco has been pronounced dead more times than any city in America. After the earthquake. After the dot-com crash. After the financial crisis. After the pandemic. Every single time, someone with a podcast and a moving truck declared the experiment over. And every single time, while the obituary writers were updating their LinkedIn locations, the builders were pouring foundations.
Twenty-six years ago, Lisa and I came for Internet 1.0 and planned to stay five years. The city kept us. It always does.
Don’t call it a comeback. San Francisco never left. The rest of the world just wasn’t paying attention.
Well done, SF. Well done.
Now let’s get back to work.