One Chowdhury has the prototypical startup-founder origin story.
Last year, the 23-year-old dropped out of his computer science program at Duke University after his business idea was accepted by the world-famous startup accelerator Y Combinator. In December, he packed up and moved to San Francisco.
After spending last summer here for an internship, he knew from experience it would help to be in close proximity to other founders, as Y Combinator advises. But what became clear to Chowdhury was that in the intervening months, the AI scene had gone from a simmer to a boil.
“I got three invitations yesterday for an AI event for tomorrow night,” Chowdhury said, while self-effacingly admitting his junior status. “We are not the hottest company. We’re a very new company. I’m sure other founders are getting even more invitations.”
He’s noticed the momentum everywhere: conferences, talks, and billboards across the region referencing the transformative technology. This week, Chowdhury went to dinner with Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam and Figma’s Dylan Field. “I get to meet extraordinary people,” he said. “The talent density is very high. None of this would happen if I wasn’t in San Francisco.”
Chowdhury’s experience mirrors a growing belief among a new breed of Gen Z founders that San Francisco is waging a comeback after three years of being vilified. In the tech industry, at least, much of the credit for the renaissance can be given to those who never left; chief among them, Garry Tan and Y Combinator.
Tan, who has served as CEO of the accelerator since January 2023, has single-handedly made a difference, founders say. He has urged participants to move to the city to be close to other entrepreneurs and firms that might become customers or partners.
“I believe in San Francisco,” Tan tweeted in March. “Let’s accelerate the boom loop.” That’s a phrase he utilizes as a counter-narrative to the idea that the city is in a “doom loop” of decline.
His controversial opinions on local politics notwithstanding, Tan gets credit from Y Combinator founders for pushing them to surround themselves with like-minded company-builders. For Chowdhury, it means that whenever he feels stuck, “I can call someone and immediately go for a coffee chat and get support.” The organization even sends founders a list of recommended apartment buildings near its Dogpatch offices.
One of those is The Landing, at the edge of Potrero Hill. In May, Chowdhury went to meet a customer of his startup, Octolane AI, which is building a Salesforce competitor, at the complex. He ended up running into three customers — they all lived there. The apartment complex advertises among its amenities a “coding room” in addition to the usual coworking space.
Also on the residential list for Y Combinator denizens: O&M Apartments on Indiana Street, Avalon Dogpatch, and The Martin.
Outside of the AI energy, Chowdhury is reveling in the adventure of living in a city with microclimates, diverse restaurants, and a bougie coffee scene. The homelessness crisis has saddened him and made him more vigilant, he adds.
Still, Chowdhury plans to continue to try and make his fortune in San Francisco and believes in the city as an incubator of ideas.
“Achieving something great is never easy, but San Francisco has a unique way of making things come together,” Chowdhury said.
Comeback kids
The efforts of Y Combinator, paired with the AI momentum, have won over San Francisco skeptics. Mrinal Singh, CEO of Crew, an AI HR and recruiting startup, spent his Y Combinator tenure in San Francisco last summer. His experience of the city’s post-Covid recovery, he admits, wasn’t the best. San Francisco felt dirty and hollowed out, so he decamped to New York for nine months.
“Fast forward a few months: We realized we’d have a lot of customers here in the Bay,” Singh said. “We came out in early July were pretty surprised by how much it seemed like it had changed.”
So Singh, along with a co-founder, moved back. (The third Crew founder remains in New York.) The 25-year-old opted to park himself in lower Pacific Heights, given its proximity to the Marina and easy commute to Hayes Valley and the Mission. He says Tan and the city’s renewed vitality were motivators for the move.
“The same streets we were kind of afraid to walk on last year were way cleaner. It felt way safer,” Singh said. “The same spots we used to go to were livelier. We found ourselves really liking the city.”
Nearly 49% of engineers at Big Tech companies live in the Bay Area, and more than half of new Y Combinator startups are based here, according to a SignalFire report.
“Reports of the death of San Francisco’s tech scene have been greatly exaggerated,” the venture capital firm wrote in its report, noting that the Bay Area’s share of tech engineers has been increasing since 2022.
Charlie Cutler, a San Francisco commercial real estate broker, said he’s hearing from more Y Combinator founders who want to plant their companies here. Many are interested in offices in the Dogpatch or the Mission and are looking for enough space to host hackathons and other events.
Cutler said there appears to be a consensus among founders that “you have to be here physically to do that, because things are moving so fast” in the AI industry. “People at the forefront are getting together and discussing things,” Cutler said. “The AI thing is spinning faster and faster.”
Yusuf Hilmi arrived in San Francisco in June from Istanbul. He was accepted into Y Combinator this summer after visiting the city in March.
Hilmi, 24, had known since high school that he wanted to end up in SF, because most big technology companies were built here.
“This is where founders are and have been for a long time,” he said. “The pandemic was just a blip.”
While SF has its problems, such as safety and cleanliness in certain neighborhoods, “every city has those,” including Istanbul, he said. It helps that San Francisco is beautiful and reminds him of home, with the expansive hilly, coastal views.
“Everyone who is building something really cool is either here or is going to be here,” Hilmi said. “This is the place to build. You can’t find this community anywhere else in the world.”