At SF Tech Week, the AI ‘Gold Rush’ Shows No Signs of Slowing Down

What a difference a year makes.

At last year’s San Francisco Tech Week, OpenAI was valued at a mere $157 billion, and there was unease about whether tech had truly left the doldrums of the post-COVID downturn behind.

Now OpenAI has reached a lofty $500 billion valuation. AI has gone mainstream and is fueling investor frenzy in all manner of startups. The good times are back in tech, and San Francisco is the white hot center of it all.

“This year, there’s an energy I haven’t seen in a long time,” said Gwyneth Borden, founder and CEO of Remynt, a fintech startup. “There’s a lot of optimism and exuberance. The promise of what AI can do in transforming people’s lives is very exciting.”

Borden, with the cool wind blowing through her hair, was speaking under the Golden Gate Bridge on the bow of a ferry that had been rented by Menlo Ventures and other investors for founders to mingle while watching the Blue Angels practice. Below deck, founders loaded up styrofoam plates with meatballs and crudité.

The air show ended up getting cancelled due to the government shutdown, but Jerry Shu did not seem to mind. He was taking in the views of the city, feeling exuberant after just raising millions for his Boston-based AI company, Daylit.

“It’s no longer buzzwords, said Shu. “Before, products were more talk, but now you can feel how strong it’s going to be. There’s probably never been a better time to be a founder than right now.”

Andreessen Horowitz first hosted SF Tech Week in 2022, mostly to serve as a marketing vehicle for the mega venture firm more commonly known as a16z. The first version was smaller than the Los Angeles or New York versions.

“Many wrote SF off — empty offices, headlines about decline,” a16z partner Katia Ameri wrote in an email to attendees at the beginning of the week. “Many questioned why we wanted to do SF Tech Week at all! Then AI hit escape velocity. Companies have taken millions of square feet, rents are rising, hacker houses are back.”

This time, with over 1500 events, San Francisco’s tech week is the biggest of the three. The only question is whether the city, where you can hardly go to a coffee shop without hearing an AI agent pitch, needs a week dedicated to tech.

“Everyone who lives here has said that it feels like any other week in San Francisco,” said Amber Trivedi, who was visiting from San Diego to try to find investors for her startup, LifeSpark Labs. “But it’s great to have multiple events to make it worth the trip.”

The gamut of events ranged from robot-yoga, “a playful experiment blending movement, machines, and mindfulness to question how it feels when technology enters a space usually reserved for trust and vulnerability,” to a Wednesday late-night party in SoMa promising a guest list of “founders, VCs, and operators who ship fast, love great shows, and aren’t allergic to a dance floor. “

One of the week’s highlights was a16z’s Speedrun Demo Day, where 61 founders, picked from a field of 14,000, had a precious two minutes to pitch their startup.

“Over 90% of our companies were very AI focused,” said Joshua Lu, an investing partner at a16z. “We’re in a tech supercycle with AI.”

Whether early morning or past midnight, it was hard to find events where AI was not the dominant theme.

“It’s a bit of a gold rush,” said Joanne Chen, general partner at Foundation Capital. “You could argue the valuations are too high and that investors are too enthusiastic.”

Chen paused before adding, “People realize that there’s going to be a lot of winners, but also a lot of losers.”