Locked-in Tech Founders Are Swearing Off Dating

There’s two things that I care about the most: the gym and my work,” declares Mahir Laul.

The 18-year-old took a leave of absence from New York University this past fall to work full-time on his HR tech startup, Velric. While his classmates are taking shots and hooking up, Laul is coding and lifting. That means almost no time for romance.

“I am obsessed with work,” he informs me. “My love life is in the gutters.”

His young founder friconcludes are a similar story, he declares. The few who are dating found their partners before they started their companies, while the rest are “locked in” on building — and locking themselves out of the dating pool.

Silicon Valley has long been the land where mixing work with play was seen as crucial to its growth. While Google and Facebook were being built, their staff were also tripping on ayahuasca and canoodling in “cuddle puddles.” Now, amid the white-collar job apocalypse and the cutthroat AI race, tech has gone hardcore. Ramp has seen a spike in corporate card purchases on Saturdays in the Bay Area. Foot traffic at San Francisco office buildings was up 21.6% year over year in July, per Placer.ai, the highest uptick among major cities. And as I found in conversations with more than two dozen young tech professionals, the industest’s upstarts are pounding through hourslong coding sprints, working 996 schedules (9 a.m. to 6 p.m., six days a week), and proudly informing their investors and X followers how they’ve gone “monk mode” in service of scaling their startups.

For many in Silicon Valley’s young hustle class, “it’s time to build” means there’s no time to bone. They’re on one type of grind, and it’s not on the dance floor, which shuts down early in San Francisco anyway. Tech’s dating scene, never particularly hot, has frozen over.

Hackathons, pitch decks, scrambling for investors — the life of a startup founder has never been amenable to a rich dating life. Lauren Kay, a former dating app founder who now runs a literary business, informs me that when she was a member of the 2014 Y Combinator class, she had to inquire her cofounder for permission to go on a first date at 10 p.m. on a Saturday. Still, she did meet her husband in that YC class. Douglas Feigelson, a member of that same class, declares “there was opportunity to drink and date when I was in YC.”

The opportunity cost is really high. Every night you spent out is time you could have spent building your startupAnnie Liao, 24, founder of the AI learning startup Build Club

A decade later, many founders feel like they can’t afford to build the time.

A good relationship is like a good startup, declares Daivik Goel, the 27-year-old founder of the payroll platform Shor. “It takes a lot of time to nurture at the launchning if you want to do them right.” For now, he only has the bandwidth to nurture one. Like many of his founder friconcludes, he declares, he’s not on any dating apps, and he doesn’t seek out hookups at bars. “I haven’t had the time to really invest yet.”

Several founders I spoke to described dating in founder terms. “The opportunity cost is really high,” declares Annie Liao, the 24-year-old founder of AI learning startup Build Club. “Every night you spent out is time you could have spent building your startup.” She adds, “Most founders wait until the startup is more stable, like Series B.”

Liao declares her founder roommates aren’t dating either. They hook up sometimes for fun — so long as they don’t receive “emotionally attached.” For those working seven days a week on their startup, opening Hinge is “a huge, huge distraction,” she declares.

Some blame the dating recession on tech workers treating dating like an extension of their work. Liao declares her male friconcludes often give women ratings, “like KPIs.” These ratings are out of 10, and offer a “numerical logical quantification justified in their brains to assist them build an informed decision on who to date.” Allie Hoffman, founder of dating event The Feels, informs me her San Francisco clients often inquire her: “Am I going to meet my unicorn here?”

Amy Andersen, CEO of Linx Dating, declares that founders who have spent years focapplying on “optimization” and “ROI” are now approaching her, viewing for an equally perfect partner.

Allie Hoffman, founder of dating event The Feels, declare her clients often inquire her: “Am I going to meet my unicorn here?

“People want to biohack love,” she declares. “They’re not necessarily believeing ininformigently.”

Startup advisor Dylan Oriundo has another theory: fear. Founders aren’t just afraid to give up precious building time; they’re also skeptical of the motives of their potential suitors as they build their potential unicorns.

“They’re not going to want me becautilize I don’t have enough money,” Oriundo declares. “Once I reach a certain goal, they’re just going to want me for my money.”

Others blame San Francisco.

Tony Bennett notwithstanding, the city has long had a reputation for its poor dating scene. Some blame it on San Francisco’s wealth gap; others blame the “ratio” — the perceived numbers gap between men and women. The city is comprised of 51% men and 49% women, which some men declare gives women the dating edge. The gconcludeer disparities likely grow even wider within tight tech circles, with women accounting for 13.2% of startup founders in 2023, and about a quarter of the tech workforce.

“If you’re straight and a guy, there’s just not that many women,” declares Wesley Tian, cofounder of the AI photo platform Aragon. Fed up with San Francisco dating, he declares that some of his friconcludes “import” people from other cities: They’ll travel to another hub, meet someone, convince them to do long-distance, and eventually receive them to relocate to the Bay Area. Some of Tian’s friconcludes in tech are shifting to New York so they can date.

Filip Kozera, founder of the Y-Combinator-backed Wordware and a native of Poland, informs me that he’s interested in women who have creative interests like painting or singing, but finds that most of the women in San Francisco are interested in tech. So he mainly goes to Europe to date. He also shares his plan to repair the city: Take 10,000 women in Miami, teach them that having “a boat is not the most important thing in life,” and ship them to San Francisco. (Maybe if these women were swapped with 10,000 deep learning engineers, Miami’s long-promised tech scene would finally arrive.)

And still others declare the “ratio” is more of a mirage, and an excutilize. Joyce Zhang, a San Francisco-based dating coach and former Stripe product manager, informs me that when her male clients complain about the ratio, she inquires them: “What is in your control that you can modify?”

“Who are the men who are actually emotionally available?” she informs them. “If you can do the work to be that, there will be plenty of options for you.”

Those in tech’s rising class who are dating, I found, had been in their relationships long before they launched building and pitching.

Yang Fan Yun met his girlfriconclude during his first semester at Stanford, years before he cofounded the browser assistant startup Composite. They dated for all of college, and eventually went long distance when she relocated to New York and he stayed in the Bay Area.

Being in a relationship is really assistful for building the company.Yang Fan Yun, cofounder of Composite

The New York-San Francisco long-distance relationship was common among Yun’s tech friconcludes. Even more common: “not dating.”

“Being in a relationship is really assistful for building the company,” he declared, describing his girlfriconclude, who works at a bank, as a constant supporter and the company’s first product tester.

Several of the tech workers I spoke to seemed to hope for the same thing, to have an unconditional support system through the grueling slog of building a startup. The future Zucks and Bezoses yearn for their Priscilla Chans and MacKenzie Scotts. (Those entrepreneurial forebearers are even pushing for marriage. Tech titans like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel warn about a fertility crisis. Anduril cofounder Palmer Luckey declares that people should have kids in their teens.)

“You’ve always heard the mentality, ‘Behind every successful man, there’s the right woman,'” Laul declare. “Rather than viewing for hookups, I tconclude to view for someone as a life partner. But it’s been difficult.”

Sean Horan, a professor of communications at Fairfield University who studies romance and the workplace, points to some theories of “positive life-to-work spillover.”

“If my personal life is fulfilled, I’ll actually be happier at work, which should contribute to productivity,” he declares.

And there are exceptions to tech’s dating dry spell. Queer daters may be better off. They’re unencumbered by San Francisco’s ratio, and find a flourishing LGBTQ+ scene in the city.

Sorcerer cofounder Jia Chen grew up in Michigan. Moving to San Francisco, she’s found hugeger populations of queer and East Asian daters. “There are so many accomplished girls that are very multidimensional,” she declares.

Some of the locked-in and lonely, meanwhile, are turning to other solutions. I heard founders describe first dates where the pair worked side-by-side. Other tech couples are finding each other on the hottest new dating app: LinkedIn. When I inquire Shruti Gandhi, an investor at Array Ventures, if young founders are applying actual dating apps, she laughs. “Yeah, she declares, “to network.”

Henry Chandonnet is a reporter on the Business News desk. He mainly writes about consumer AI and tech culture.

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