When startup founder Julia Xu walked up for the TechCrunch Disrupt after-party in a part of town affectionately called Costco Valley, she was “shook.”
“I was expecting to just show up and get in,” she said. For one, it was a Tuesday night. Secondly, the event was in sleepy San Francisco, not some hip stretch of Silver Lake.
Instead, half an hour later, Xu was finally rounding the corner of the line that snaked around the block. She planned to hold out for the next 15 to 20 more minutes.
Xu, who’s building a custom merch company at Temu prices (think branded stuffed animals, notebooks, and water bottles), joined about 900 other techies on the guest list for a conference after-party that billed itself as an event that would “prove SF is back” by featuring “aerialists, fire dancers, laser art, and 4 DJS on the roof and inside a $10M penthouse.”
Perhaps due to a renewed San Francisco energy or maybe self-justification, prospective partygoers waiting in the nearly hour-long line on Tuesday night seemed to agree:
“SF is so back,” said Alexander Stratmoen, founder of a stealth startup visiting from Canada. He’d spent the summer interning at a VC firm and was feeling the city’s gravitational pull. “It’s exciting — it’s the place to be again. Things are heating up.”
“I actually own the domain issfback.com, and I should probably post Josh’s picture on it,” quipped his linemate, Umesh Khanna, referring to Josh Constine, a partner at SignalFire, the VC firm hosting the party. (Constine is also a contributor to The Standard).
“This past weekend there was a huge party at the Palace of Fine Arts, and I actually had a friend fly up from L.A. to go to it,” piped in Karina Hsieh, a former “happiness engineer” training to be a therapist and launching a company to help couples break up better. “So that shows how much SF is coming back.”
These days, there’s a constant drumbeat of AI hackathons, networking nights, and ponderous panels.
“As a resident who’s in tech here, every week is tech week in SF,” said Khanna, holding a mini confetti cannon he planned to set off during one of the DJ sets.
Like a handful of others in line, Khanna and Hsieh hadn’t actually attended the Disrupt conference but were just there for the party.
“This is crazy,” groaned one prospective attendee, weighing whether it would be worth it to wait.
“Sometimes the best networking happens in lines,” retorted another, referencing the unofficial “linecon” that happens at security conference DefCon. Indeed, walking past hundreds of patient party hopefuls led to overheard snippets of conversation where people were chatting animatedly about AI agents, funding rounds, and “middle-out compression.”
Around 9 p.m. — about an hour after the event’s start time — party host Constine stopped by the back of the line to discourage people without a ticket from waiting, insisting they wouldn’t be allowed in.
The party had vetted individual ticket holders earlier in the week, asking for their job titles and (what else?) their LinkedIn profiles.
“But if you do have a ticket, then the experience is amazing,” he said. “It’s worth the wait.”
Super fun times at the @SignalFire afterparty for #TechCrunchDisrupt. Thanks for hosting @JoshConstine . I always forget how smart, motivated and inspiring the sv tech sense is👌🏼 pic.twitter.com/i25aN2jjAM
— Nikki H Nguyen (@NikkiHNguyen) October 30, 2024
One group told The Standard they were in town for their company’s offsite and decided to stop by. They had thought they were on the party’s VIP list but had resigned themselves to the wait once they were bounced from that express lane.
“San Francisco is definitely our spiritual base,” said CopilotKit cofounder Atai Barkai, though the AI company he runs is technically remote. “There are a lot of really interesting things that are only happening here and nowhere else.”
“It’s a bit rough around the edges, but it’s more lovely than when I was first here in 2020,” added his colleague Ran Shem Tov, visiting from the Netherlands. “Coming from one of the biggest tech hubs in Europe, you can feel that SF is on a completely different scale. It’s not even in the same league.”
So, for all that anticipation, how was the party?
“It was decent,” according to one attendee on his way out. In a bit of bro-etry, he compared SF to a “lat pulldown because it’s so back,” but added that “the most cracked founders weren’t there” because they were probably grinding away in the office.
His ultimate review: Basically, it was just networking with too-loud music.
“Yeah,” his friend agreed, “And it could have used more drugs.”