Nobody tells you about The Group Chat before you move to SF.
There's no orientation. But the moment you start building here, you're already in it, and it's already forming an opinion about you.
The Group Chat is the invisible, collective judgment that SF's investors, founders, and operators hold about you and your startup. It's shaped by what you post on X, your pitches, news, rumors, and hallway chatter. Think of it like a massive WhatsApp group that everyone important is in – except no one ever added you, and you can't see the messages.
The Group Chat has two powers. When The Group Chat's wind is a tailwind, raising money is easy. You get inbound from investors, talented employees want to join your company, your reply rate is close to 100%, and you can get an intro to almost anyone. Sometimes you can even get term sheets without pitching. When The Group Chat's wind is a headwind, everyone ghosts you and leaves you on read. Investors who have already said "yes" can pull away from the round. Hiring becomes hard, as SF is a very competitive place, and talent stops believing you'll win.
The first SF Group Chat is obviously Twitter. If your launch goes viral on X, investors & customers start talking about you. When you do it several times in a row in a short amount of time, you become "the hot company" – everyone calls it "momentum", and your biggest goal is to never lose momentum. It makes sense why it works like that: X is the social network for the entrepreneurs & the most powerful people in the world. If your post on X reaches 1M views, it's safe to assume at least 1000 investors saw that launch at the same time – each one assuming the other 999 are already in your inbox. Paul Graham famously wrote that the biggest thing that matters for investors in fundraising is the opinion of other investors about you.
I first learned this when my co-founder @levan told me the way to raise in SF is to be viral on X. Then I heard it again when Hubert Thiebolt from Founders, Inc. said to me in Dec 2024: "There are two ways to raise money in San Francisco: YC Demo Day and Twitter".
But there is a second, private group chat. The one that is the actual sum of all WhatsApp group chats and private parties. This chat can be bad news for those who come here with a pure, naive American dream. But as we know, life doesn't owe it to anyone to be fair – it makes sense why it currently works this way. SF and the US operate on speed and high trust, so private circles of power naturally form around circles of high trust in the place that runs the world's tech.
There are three ways to influence the group chat. Growing fast, getting attention on Twitter from smart people, and influencing powerful people at closed private parties.
The Group Chat fosters the collective thinking nature of SF – people call it "the SF hive mind". Collective thinking gives a one-sided view of the world. It enables fast deals and innovation, but can kill the most contrarian ideas and contrarian founders. Paradoxically, groupthink makes SF founders miss obvious ideas, too. Groupthink is one of the reasons Rork, founded by two immigrants with no network, is winning (apart from the fact that Rork has the best team).
The Group Chat creates the best things in the world. But The Group Chat also makes SF blind to groupthink.
That's why The Group Chat is the best and, at the same time, the worst thing that happened to San Francisco.
Just move to SF – The Group Chat will change your life.