Eighteen-year-old Lance Yan, a student at the University of Waterloo and the founder of the artificial intelligence startup Clice, recently altered the location on his X profile to read “Waterloo | SF.” This seemingly small digital change reflects both a strategic and aspirational move. Having traveled to the Bay Area to seek funding for his fledgling company, Yan explained to Business Insider that this profile update signifies practical readiness—he now has access to a hackers’ house where he can stay during visits, which solidifies his part-time presence in San Francisco. In his view, online representation can directly shape how investors perceive accessibility. As he reasoned, a venture capitalist who notices that his profile lists San Francisco might opt for a personal meeting rather than a remote call, enabling smoother, more spontaneous negotiation processes and establishing credibility within the heart of the tech ecosystem.
Yan’s reasoning mirrors an attitude shared by many young entrepreneurs seeking proximity to the culture and momentum of the Bay Area’s startup scene. For countless tech aspirants, associating oneself—digitally or physically—with San Francisco communicates ambition and belonging. The city continues to pulsate with artificial intelligence investment and technological prestige, so publicly identifying with it on social media becomes a subtle signal of entrepreneurial alignment, a declaration of intent to participate in the fast-moving innovation economy. Among founders and developers, this virtual linkage serves as both social capital and a branding maneuver: listing “San Francisco” in one’s bio opens doors to networks, investor circles, and aspirational visibility, even when one’s actual location remains hundreds or thousands of miles away.
Business Insider’s conversations with various tech workers reveal that this form of virtual migration reflects a growing cultural trend—a digital gravitational pull toward the Bay Area that blurs the distinction between online and offline identity. Thirty-five-year-old Cathleen Turner, founder of the company Margin, exemplifies this phenomenon. Her X biography currently lists both Los Angeles and San Francisco, a dual affiliation that mirrors her recent, month-long stay in the Bay Area. Turner shared that while she is based elsewhere, she told colleagues she is “strongly considering moving.” Her remarks underscored the weight of perception: investors, she observed, are “overindexing” on locational cues. Many venture capitalists treat physical relocation as a measure of seriousness, implying that full commitment to San Francisco’s environment garners greater credibility.
The city’s allure has intensified again in recent years. Long celebrated as the world’s primary epicenter of technological innovation, San Francisco’s real estate market and hiring rates have rebounded sharply, propelled largely by the explosive growth of artificial intelligence. Major industry figures, such as Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang, have proclaimed the city as having made a definitive comeback. Online, the resurgence manifests in everything from location-tag trends to lifestyle branding among tech workers eager to reclaim San Francisco’s cultural prestige.
Twenty-eight-year-old developer relations professional Toki Hossain, who lives in Vancouver, noticed that many people in his digital circles would visit San Francisco once and then permanently change their social media location to the city, even after returning home. Amused by the trend, Hossain admitted he considered doing the same before his own visit. During his stay, he hosted a Canadian diaspora event, ultimately keeping his profile tagged as “Vancouver” but posting an image of San Francisco’s iconic cable cars—a symbolic compromise between authenticity and aspiration that underscores how identity in the tech industry increasingly plays out in digital space.
Seth Setse, the 24-year-old cofounder of a0.dev and a San Francisco resident, has observed an influx of younger users adopting the city tag on X, particularly among college students and interns. Many, he explained, relocate temporarily to the Bay Area for summer internships, update their bios to reflect San Francisco residency, and then never revert the change even after returning to campus. For them, the gesture is not deceit but a bid for engagement—a way to join the high-status conversation that dominates “tech Twitter,” where claiming an SF presence can attract more responses, followers, and recognition.
This collective fascination with San Francisco follows a pendulum-like arc. During the pandemic, the city’s reputation dimmed as high-profile tech leaders and investors criticized local governance, and some relocated to rising hubs like Austin or Miami. Yet as conditions normalized, many of those same figures quietly returned, reigniting enthusiasm for the city’s distinct ecosystem of innovation and community. Twenty-seven-year-old entrepreneur Antonio Song, founder of Snoofer, confessed that he once dismissed the idea of moving to San Francisco, but exposure to online discourse surrounding the city has now sparked what he calls “real big FOMO”—fear of missing out—a sentiment echoed across social media.
Meanwhile, cyber engineer Jack LaFond, aged twenty-two and proudly based in Tampa, Florida, has noticed another curious behavior: some tech professionals, after spending time in San Francisco, publicly disparage their home cities as if to reaffirm allegiance to the Bay Area’s exclusive status. According to LaFond, this phenomenon reflects a belief that repudiating one’s origins in favor of symbolic commitment to San Francisco might accelerate professional acceptance within elite technology circles—a kind of ritualized self-rebranding.
Remarkably, many of these digitally relocated enthusiasts share a common origin: the University of Waterloo in Canada, a renowned incubator for engineering and computer science talent. Its cooperative education model, which alternates four months of academic study with four months of industry experience, has forged particularly strong ties with both Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. A 2014 Riviera Partners study even ranked the university third for producing Silicon Valley hires, just behind UC Berkeley and UCLA. Waterloo’s local tech ecosystem fosters an ethos of global ambition, and its students often regard California as the ultimate proving ground.
Haokun Qin, the 23-year-old cofounder of the startup Gale, described the San Francisco obsession at Waterloo as “deeply ingrained.” He recounted instances of peers who modified their LinkedIn locations to reflect San Francisco for remote internships with Bay Area companies, signaling affiliation even when working from afar. Similarly, Lance Yan noted that his educational schedule already divides his time evenly between Waterloo and the Bay Area, since his cooperative placements will take place in San Francisco. He summarized the student body’s collective mindset succinctly: within Waterloo’s culture, California—and specifically San Francisco—is viewed as a “heavenly land,” a destination synonymous with success. Among his peers, the informal motto echoes a centuries-old pioneer spirit: “Cali or bust.”
Yet fascination with the Bay Area extends far beyond Canada’s borders. For instance, 24-year-old Caleb Jephuneh, founder of Therabot in Nairobi, Kenya, lists “2025: moving to Silicon Valley” as his X location. He explained that after maturing professionally in Nairobi, he feels prepared for the next chapter and sees the Bay Area as the natural frontier for his ambitions. The declaration on his profile, he admitted, serves a dual function: it is an act of manifestation, projecting intent into the digital world, and a practical signal to potential collaborators or benefactors who might facilitate his move. For Jephuneh, as for countless others around the globe, publicly claiming San Francisco online represents far more than geography—it has become a shorthand for aspiration, community, and belonging in the modern technological era.
Sourse: https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-hopefuls-list-san-francisco-online-bios-live-elsewhere-2025-10
