None of the dozens of men at Tarotpunk’s Tech Bro Tarot launch party Saturday would admit to being a tech bro. But there they were, in their Patagonia vests, asking the tech-focused cards whether they should raise another venture round.
“I’m dressed as a tech bro as a caricature,” said 25-year-old Arpan Bhattacharya, founder of an AI search startup and one of approximately 80 business owners, engineers, and developers, mostly male, who came out to the party at Frontier Tower, the new tech-blessed coworking highrise on Market Street. “There’s a bit of amorphousness to the definition … but I’m not a tech bro.”
The brainchild of techworker ATW, who goes by her X handle and is best known for her “product mommy” memes, the Tech Bro Tarot deck replaces the traditional cards with anime-styled startup stereotypes. “I wanted it to be polarizing,” she said. And she wanted it to lure techies to tarot. “A lot of men have never tried tarot, but they’re open, as this is in their wheelhouse.”
Bhattacharya, a noob when it comes to the mystical — he didn’t even know his star sign — came to the party because of the pitch. “The invite said it could help with your business and dating life. That sparked my curiosity,” he said. “I’m cynical, but I do have questions about our sales. … With tarot I can roll the dice and see what it says.” (As a tarot novice, he can be forgiven for not knowing that no dice are involved.)
He wasn’t alone. One guest asked the cards whether his startup should take on a bridge round. Another consulted the deck about a breakup. “People have asked about everything,” said ATW. “Fundraising, family curses. It can be very personal stuff.”
ATW soft-launched the tech tarot deck in 2023 in a livestream on X. It was so popular she built the full deck, which sells for $49.
The “Golden Handcuffs” card features Sam Bankman-Fried behind bars. The “Break Things” card shows Anduril’s Palmer Luckey in a Hawaiian shirt, leaning on an aircraft. A wide-eyed Sam Altman is on the “Burn Rate” card, ATW’s version of the traditional “Tower.” “It’s one of the worst cards of the deck,” she said, “but it can also mean something transformative.”
At the party, Alex Reibman, 30, founder of AI agent startup Agency, sat cross-legged, uploading a photo of his card spread to the Tarotpunk web app. “I was asking about a major company decision,” he said. “The cards were very good. They said what I needed to hear.”
Reibman was firm that he does not identify as a tech bro. “When I think of tech bros, it’s someone who has a really high income but doesn’t spend money because they’re so cheap and have displaced local residents and play pickleball every Tuesday. There’s no personality other than what they do.”
Roy Sarbo, 26, an engineer at a healthcare automation platform, is similarly opposed to the tag. “Tech bro puts you in too much of a box. Most of my conversations are around technology, but I don’t identify like that.” He likes music and art, he added.
Perhaps the mystical-curious partygoers represent a new kind of tech archetype. Tech occultists? Stedman Halliday, 31, the floor lead of the Frontier Tower Fitness Center and developer of a healthtech startup, says many tech workers are embracing mystical and alternative spiritual practices.
“A lot more weird woo energy has come back into the city,” he said. “We have this intermingling of different world views.” He’s been consulting tarot cards for several years as a tool for focus. “It primes people to either manifest subconsciously what their reading is or primes you to focus on things that are important to you.”
Case in point: Danny Vayne, 26, the founder of social photo game JPEG app, who paid $1,500 last year to a Singaporean mystic who is popular among CEOs. “It helped me set up my path,” he said.
Nicole Hsing, 24, founder of Arcarae, an immersive AI self-reflection app, believes Bay Area interest stems from the rapid advancement of AI, which “has brought this existential questioning about what’s next. If AI can do so many of the tasks that I do, what else should I do? That has really gotten people into this reflective, self-finding mode.”
ATW used AI in creating her deck; the technology also enabled the competing Bay Area-based Tech Bro Tarot deck recently released by Shweta Kayal, founder of podcast network Infinite Timelines, that touts itself as “100% vibe-coded.”
Reibman found ATW’s cards to be relatable and packed with inside jokes. He was particularly struck by one that featured a wailing techie staring into an empty fridge. “When you go to a hackathon, you’re just looking for something to drink, and there’s, like, one half-drunk LaCroix left over,” he said, laughing.
ATW was pleased with the reception. “Tarot for men doesn’t exist, and that’s its own billion-dollar market,” she said. “Where people may have scoffed at this in the past, it’s something they now have more of an open mind to, which is the whole point.”