In November 2023, Joel Reske, a 28-year-old software engineer, received a Venmo for $700 from a stranger. The payment memo was tagged “for the flower run.”
Reske, who lives in the Lower Haight, had pitched the idea of a flower run — an unofficial 5K in which people in race bibs and tutus would hand out flowers in Golden Gate Park — a month earlier to a Google form allegedly monitored by a mysterious, altruistic tech worker.
Reske loves planning offbeat events — he hosts free line-dancing lessons from his garage every Sunday — but his parties tend to be free or low-cost. The idea of a floral foot race had been in his head for a while, but the bare-bones cost to purchase flowers and race bibs was at least $200. “I can’t be spending that much on events,” he said.
Then his friend clued him in to the Google form run by Francisco San, a pseudonymous Bay Area benefactor who funds events that tickle her fancy. Reske filled it out but didn’t expect a response. An acceptance email came a week later. And then the $700 dropped into his Venmo.
“I was totally shocked by this,” he said. “This random woman just sent me hundreds of dollars to run around the park with flowers?”
The result: an absurdly joyful Sunday in November, when 30 people donned athleisure and glitter, grabbed 12-stem bouquets, and jogged around the park, handing out flowers at a whim.
“We gave out every single flower,” said Reske. “People came back to the start with these big, glowing expressions, like ‘OMG, this is the best!’”
A $6,000 mansion party
Francisco San is quickly becoming a mythic figure in San Francisco’s fringe cultural scene. In an interview with The Standard, the first she’s given to the media, she revealed that she’s a 23-year-old engineer at an AI company who lives in Duboce Triangle.
Initially, she spoke on the record about funding events in the city — which she’s been doing sporadically since 2023. Then she changed her mind, no longer wishing to be written about. The Standard is quoting from the initial on-the-record interview but withholding her name and additional identifying details to protect her privacy.
“I just review emails,” Francisco San said of the people who submit requests for funding. “Sometimes, I ask follow-up questions. Sometimes, I just Venmo them.”
In the past two years, she has given away approximately $39,300 in the name of lighthearted fun. She’s funded scavenger hunts, pasta parties, Beyblade tournaments, and mini-concerts for composers. The amounts range from $50 to procure parts for a pooping dog robot to several thousand for an epic “Vibe Gala” featuring an “oxytocin-filled cozy cuddle.”
“There are so many SF people that have weird event ideas but have no way to do them,” she said. “I wanted to give them agency to do these cool things.”
The reason for her benevolence? She’s flush with cash from her previous job at a startup and wants to give back to the city she loves: “I donated around 80% to charity and $50,000 to the fund.”
Francisco San recently upgraded her humble Google Form to a charmingly lo-fi website, where the stated purpose of the microgrant program is “to make the city and county of San Francisco more whimsical through eventures and installations.”
The requirements for consideration are simple: The event has to be in-person, it has to be fun, and it has to be in the city. Not everything meets Francisco San’s definition of fund-worthy. “Some people just want to throw a big party,” she said. “That’s not that cool or compelling.”
She estimates that she responds to about 5% of applicants. Occasionally, she Venmos them immediately; more often, she wants additional information first. “I want to know if they’re ambitious enough,” she said, “but not too ambitious.”
She’s been wowed by the caliber of applicants. “Often, they have awesome ideas that are pretty cheap,” she said. “They just need some cash or someone to motivate them ahead of time.”
Elena Lake, a bodyworker and former machine learning engineer at Meta, received $6,000 from Francisco San to fund Vibe Gala 2024, a “late-night odyssey” mansion party held in March. “Large parties notoriously require fronting a lot of money,” Lake said. “Francisco San gave us some welcome extra breathing space.”
Occasionally, a project that wins Francisco San’s heart ends up falling through — for instance, the $100 she granted an artist to place “Do not climb” signs in places you had to, ironically, climb to see. Perhaps surprisingly, most people who fail to complete their project eventually pay her back, she said.
She said she’s been scammed exactly once — by someone who said they’d run a hot tub party on Ocean Beach. She sent $2,250, and they ghosted her. “It’s unfortunate that it happened,” she said, “but most projects turn out fine.”
Whimsy goes viral
Some Francisco San-backed events have achieved cult status.
Last summer, black-and-white posters featuring a stick-figure man appeared on telephone poles across San Francisco. “Pursuit, a scavenger hunt,” it read. “Text for the first clue.”
When 28-year-old tech worker Temi Famadewa spotted a flyer, she messaged the number right away. “I’m always down for random shenanigans,” she said. Famadewa, who also runs Mutual Feelings, a social club for Black women, expected a few hours of fun. Instead, she got a six-week, multi-part puzzle that took her to new areas of the city and required decoding timed clues and translating poetry in pottery studios. “It was so detailed,” she said. “At one stop, a crowd gathered, waiting for the 13th minute of the hour, because that’s when the next clue would drop.”
Famadewa never found out who was behind the scavenger hunt. “The mystery of not knowing who organized it was enticing,” she said. “It was free, but I would have paid for it.”
Francisco San had donated $2,000 to the team that created Pursuit. “It was easy to see that they’d do a good job [from their application],” she said. “They gave me concrete examples of how they’d use the funds. … The magnitude was cool.”
Of course, she never got credit — and that’s exactly how she likes it.