Why I left the Bay Area tech scene (and what I miss)

I lived in San Francisco for nine years. I worked at three companies, two of them you have heard of. I went to enough Y Combinator dinners and AI house parties to last a lifetime. I left in 2024 and I am writing this from somewhere quieter, and I want to be honest about both why I left and what I genuinely miss.

This is not a "Bay Area is over" essay. It is not a "Bay Area is back" essay either. Both takes are wrong. The Bay Area is itself, more so than ever, and that is a good thing for some people and a bad thing for others.

What was actually great

Let me start here, because this is where most leaving-SF essays cheap out.

The density of seriousness. I have not found this anywhere else. In the Bay Area you can have a coffee with someone working on hard problems and within 20 minutes you are deep in technical specifics. The cultural assumption is that you are working on something hard and the conversation should be useful. That is rarer than it sounds.

The talent pool is actually deep. I am tired of the takes that pretend NYC or London or Austin tech is at parity. They are good. They are not at parity. The depth of senior, specialised AI/ML/infra talent in the Bay Area is still in another league. If you are building something technically demanding, the people you need are still mostly here.

The optimism. SF gets a lot of stick for being culty about technology, and some of that is fair. But there is also a baseline assumption that things can be built, that capital is available, that smart effort is rewarded. That is a culture, and it is genuinely valuable, and most other places do not have it.

The events scene, when it is on. When SF tech is having a moment — like the AI wave from 2023 onwards — the event density is unmatched. You can attend something substantive every weeknight if you want to. You will burn out, but you can.

I miss all of these. I am being honest about that.

Why I left anyway

A few converging things. None of them is a single dramatic reason. It was a slow accumulation.

The conversation got narrower. This is the big one. The "everyone here is working on AI" thing that people brag about cuts both ways. By 2023-2024 every dinner conversation was about agents, evals, model releases, who left OpenAI for Anthropic, who left Anthropic for Mistral. It is interesting once. It is interesting twice. By the 200th time you start to wonder whether you have a personality outside this.

Friendship infrastructure was thin. This is the SF specific issue and it is real. People move every two years. Companies pivot, layoffs happen, friend groups reshape constantly. After nine years I had a small handful of durable friendships and a much larger pile of "we used to hang out, now we follow each other on Twitter."

The cost of not being optimistic. The flip side of the "things can be built" culture is that being skeptical, tired, or just normal-human-feeling-sad is genuinely socially costly in SF. The cultural surface area for "actually I am not that excited about this product launch" is small. Over time that wore me down.

The geography of optionality narrowed. This is hard to explain but real. SF is dense in one specific thing — tech ambition — and thin in basically everything else. After nine years I wanted access to other kinds of weeks. Live theater, walking cities, weekend trips that did not require flying. SF makes the trade-off in a particular way and I no longer wanted that trade-off.

The vibe got brittle. 2023-2024 had a specific energy in SF that was, sorry, kind of insufferable. Twitter accounts about being "based" and "high agency." The crypto-to-AI pipeline of personalities. The "we are saving the world" rhetoric being run on what are, sometimes, just SaaS products. I am not above this — I participated — but it stopped feeling like a community and started feeling like a content economy.

What it looks like to leave

This is the bit nobody writes honestly. Leaving SF is harder than people admit because you are not just leaving a place, you are leaving a specific career operating system.

Career velocity drops. Whatever you say about remote work, in-person density still matters for early-career and mid-career growth. The serendipitous coffee, the mentor you bumped into at a dinner, the introduction that happens because you were physically there — these are real and they are concentrated in SF. Leaving costs some of that.

The information bandwidth narrows. A lot of what is happening in AI right now is in private group chats and dinners that are SF-physical. Twitter and podcasts give you the surface. The texture is local.

You become a tourist to your old life. Visiting SF a few times a year is a different experience than living there. You see the surface and the events. You miss the daily grind of building. After a year out, you are not in the conversation in the same way.

These are real costs. I knew them going in. I still left.

What I miss specifically

A few things that hit me.

The casual late-evening coffee that turns into three hours of technical talk. The AI happy hours when they were good. Y Combinator's dinners during a strong batch — I went to a few good ones and they had the right energy. The Tartine bread.

The walk between Coit Tower and the Embarcadero on a clear day — there is no replacement for that.

The general assumption that everyone is doing something hard. The lack of small talk. The fact that the question after "what do you do" was usually "what is the technical hard part."

I miss the version of SF that I had 2018-2020. I miss it less now, but for a while I missed it daily.

What I do not miss

The performative optimism. The "high agency" Twitter discourse. The way every conversation could be turned into a pitch with three minutes of warning. The cost of housing relative to what you got. The lack of weekend variety. The narrowness of what was "interesting."

Also, honestly, the weather. SF is mild but it is not actually nice. The fog gets to you eventually.

The honest summary

If you are 25-32 and ambitious in tech, especially AI or technical infrastructure, SF is still the right answer. The trade-offs are worth it. Do the time. The career value is real.

If you are 33+ and starting to want a fuller life — partner, kids, weekends, hobbies, friendships that last — SF gets harder to justify. The infrastructure for that life exists in a way that is just harder than other cities. You can do it, plenty of people do, but you are working against the cultural grain.

I left because the trade became wrong for me. I might come back for stretches. I would not move back full-time.

If you are still there and reading this, the SF this-week feed is genuinely useful for cutting through the noise. Filter out the sponsored stuff and you get a clean read on what is actually on. Use it.

The Bay Area is fine. It is going to keep being itself. That is the whole story.