Bottom line: This is how some of San Francisco's tech workers now date: They pipe their dating-app data into spreadsheets to track matches, while others try to game the apps' algorithms. Many also run their replies to dates through ChatGPT, and some hand the chatbot their whole dating history and ask it to find the patterns.
The industry's boom has drawn a wave of young, ambitious founders and engineers to San Francisco. Many say they date less because they work more, and when they do date, they treat it as a high-stakes decision. A first coffee can start to feel like a final-round interview.
Joyce Zhang sees this every week. A former product manager at Stripe, she now works as a dating coach in San Francisco, charges $5,000 a month and takes only tech founders as clients. She coaches them in the language they already use at work. Their "top of funnel" is the raw pool of prospects. Their "conversion rate" is the share of matches that turn into actual dates.
Zhang said her clients treat dating like any other problem that money can solve. Her job is often to undo some of what the tools have taught them. When a client has run his dating life through ChatGPT for a diagnosis, she spends the sessions pushing him to trust his own intuition. She describes her role as helping clients get past their "blind spots."
Long hours make the efficiency mindset worse. Many AI start-up employees keep "996" schedules, 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week, a norm borrowed from China's tech industry. With so little free time, a date has to justify itself before it happens.
Mehul Agarwal, 24, co-founder of the AI filmmaking start-up Koyal, put it plainly. Founders "don't want to waste time, so you only go on a date when you really feel there's something to explore," he told the New York Times. Koyal has raised $3.4 million. Agarwal moved to San Francisco a year ago when the company joined Y Combinator.
His criteria for a partner read a bit like a hiring rubric. She must be smart, and "someone who went to Stanford or M.I.T. is great." She must be kind and have a personality, "which is very, very hard when in San Francisco," he said.
He has been on a handful of dates this year. One took two months to schedule. He and his date, who also worked at an AI start-up, were both worn out from work and so practiced at professional small talk that the evening felt more like a networking meeting.
His most promising prospect faded after two dates, when he left for three weeks in India, where Koyal does much of its business, then spent five days in Los Angeles, then traveled again. "I need to be really sure, and I don't know her well enough to make that kind of bet," he said. He has told his parents that if he has not found someone by 28, he would like to try an arranged marriage.
The due-diligence approach wears on the people on the other side of the table. Sina Hartung, 29, co-founder of the AI health company Eureka Health, lived in San Francisco for three years before moving to New York in August, frustrated with the dating scene. "You don't need to understand if they have cancer in their family, you don't need to understand on the first date if they really want three children," she said.
Amanda Chung, 25, who works at the AI start-up Nectar Social, wanted something casual after a long relationship. She found that most men she met wanted something serious "even if they aren't ready for it yet." One founder would meet only after 10 pm because of his work. Another spent a whole evening asking about her job and working style, "trying to check off boxes internally," she said. She eventually paused her Hinge account. "I was like, oh, wow, is that really it?"
Demographics add to the pressure. San Francisco has about 106 men for every 100 women, compared with roughly 98 nationally, according to the Census Bureau's American Community Survey. Dowell Myers, who studies population change at the University of Southern California, said the latest AI arrivals may not show up yet, since census data lags by about two years. Women in the city have long summed up the 20-something dating pool this way: "The odds are good but the goods are odd."
Some singles are pushing back by poking fun at the culture. At Kilowatt, a bar in the Mission, a recurring event called "Date My Friend," run by Annalise Wulf, 25, and two friends, offers an alternative to the apps. At one edition, "Date My Ex," presenters had five minutes or less to pitch someone they cared about using a slide deck. One presenter put his friend on a bar graph against "the average dating experience." Another slide read "5'11" (but his hair adds 2" so kinda 6'1")" and "works in tech (but isn't happy about it)." The audience waved paper hearts on sticks when a pitch landed.
"People in San Francisco, they work really hard, they have crazy long hours, especially in the start-up culture," Wulf said. "So to even go on a date with someone, if it doesn't feel amazing, if the sparks aren't flying right away – it just takes time to develop those things, and I don't think a lot of people in San Francisco have the time to do that."
Joe Berusch, 27, who was pitched that night and keeps "one foot out" of the tech world, thinks the intense daters are a loud local minority. He sees a broader cause behind them. AI has made many of the chores of adult life so frictionless, he said, that people expect dating to work the same way. But dating, he said, is "fundamentally" different.