The Rush
September 25, 2025
“A city is not gauged by its length and width, but by the broadness of its vision and the height of its dreams.” — Herb Caen
The Gold Rush
Imagine you’re a 19-year-old farmhand in Ohio in 1849. You’ve just sold your tools, kissed your family goodbye, and set off with little more than a pickaxe and a prayer. The newspapers promised gold so plentiful you could scoop it up with your bare hands. You board a crowded steamer south, hoping to cross the Isthmus of Panama. Letters from home warned: “Do not go to Panama too soon, as the cholera and yellow fever would be there at this season.” Still, you press on.
If you take the overland route instead, the wagon train rattles across the Great Plains into the deserts. One miner later recalled: “None of us knew exactly where we were… nor when substantial relief would come.” The journey was so brutal that even children remembered decades later: “It was so fraught with trouble, hardships, and suffering, that it made an impression… [that time] has not erased.”
Those who reached the Sierra foothills wrote back with clear-eyed accounts. William Swain, a farmer turned prospector, told his family: “There is an abundance of gold here… if we are blessed with health, we are determined to have a share of it.” Yet he also admitted: “Many… meet with bad success & thousands will leave their bones here.”
When you finally step off the ship in California, San Francisco is a half-built jumble of tents and wooden shacks clinging to the edge of the Bay. Yerba Buena Cove has become a “forest of masts,” as crews deserted their ships and fled to the diggings. The streets are mud, the nights are filled with drunken brawls and the glow of gambling dens. Yet to you—and to thousands like you—it feels like heaven on earth, because here, in this raw and unruly place, anything seems possible.
This has continued to be the story of San Francisco: a city that thrives on sudden influxes of outsiders chasing a dream. A city where early arrivals don’t just reap fortunes (although there’s plenty of money to go around), but reshape the entire world in their image. Latecomers, meanwhile, often find only chaos, crime, and disillusionment.
The Tie-Dye Rush
In 1967, San Francisco once again became the frontier town of its past. Young people migrated in droves to the Haight to experience peace, love, freedom (and LSD).
David Talbot’s Season of the Witch notes, “San Francisco beckoned to dreamers and losers everywhere. Many of them found the paradise they were seeking, free of the small voices that had hobbled them.”
The Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park that January drew tens of thousands, a prelude to the flood. Streets were electric. “If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear a flower in your hair” wasn’t just a song, it was an invitation. More than 100,000 people came from around the country and world to grab a piece of what San Francisco was offering.
Musicians, poets, and idealists arrived in waves. And like the 49ers before them, the earliest staked the best houses, claimed the prime corners of the Haight, and composed a new mythology.
Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and others became world-renowned artists, making San Francisco a mecca for music and the arts. The Grateful Dead even remain popular enough to sell out shows in 2025. The late ’60s and the Summer of Love created new forms of music and transformed not just San Francisco, but the world.
But by the early 1970s, the tide had receded. The Haight grew crowded, brittle, and unsafe. What newcomers discovered was no longer paradise but violence, theft, and decay. The promise of “free love” and spiritual revolution clashed with the realities of addiction, homelessness, and policing.
Talbot captures that bittersweet collapse: “The city was still known for its enchantments, but it would soon become notorious for its terrors.”
The Silicon Rush
It’s 2016, and I don’t have to imagine what it’s like to be a young, idealistic person arriving in San Francisco with nothing but a laptop and a dream, because that was me! Landing at the shores of The Fillmore Center to chart my path forward.
It’s hard not to see 2014–2017 as SF’s latest golden era. I, and many others, eschewed big tech jobs to build something new, something fast, something ambitious. We wanted to write ourselves into the annals of San Francisco’s history, to create the next Google, Facebook, or Twitter. Even if I never quite reached those heights, 2016 and 2017 were some of the last years when people arrived exuberantly optimistic.
Those who came in 2019 or 2020 encountered a different city. The frontier energy had faded. Instead, they saw homelessness, fentanyl, and corporate campuses that felt more like slow-moving governments than radical startups. Then came the pandemic, which slammed the door on whatever magic remained.
The dot-com boom and bust two decades earlier may have unfolded 40 miles south in Silicon Valley, but it was another echo of the same cycle.
The Current Rush
Now, once again, San Francisco is filling with dreamers. This time, they carry not pickaxes or guitars, but GPUs. In coffee shops around Hayes Valley, founders pitch the next frontier of artificial intelligence. In Mission lofts, researchers stay up late chasing breakthroughs in alignment, agents, or reasoning speed.
The earliest arrivals already look like legends: OpenAI, Anthropic, and a handful of scrappy startups will shape the industry for decades. But thousands more keep coming, hoping to catch the wave, only to discover that AI’s brightest minds cluster in a few well-funded labs, that GPUs are scarce, that the easy magic has already been claimed.
It is the same story told with new tools. AI will transform the world, and San Francisco has once again cast itself as the stage for the rush.
The Cycle
Each rush leaves behind both infrastructure and scars.
- The Gold Rush built railroads and ports but left corruption and displacement.
- The hippie rush gave us art, music, and cultural legacy—but also heroin and crime.
- The dot-com and Web 2.0 eras created trillion-dollar companies—but also a housing crisis, homelessness crisis, poop on the streets crisis… and other crises.
- The AI rush will leave datacenters, capital flows, and breakthroughs—and time will tell what else.
The pattern is almost fractal:
- Visionaries arrive early.
- Migration floods the city.
- A golden moment emerges.
- The dark side creeps in.
- Bust or normalization follows.
San Francisco resets every 20–30 years. What changes is only the gold of the moment.
The Only Story San Francisco Knows How to Tell
San Francisco is a city with one plotline. The details shift—gold pans, guitars, startups—but the structure never does. A surge of dreamers, a fleeting golden hour, then the dark turn. Over and over.
This is why the city enchants and frustrates in equal measure: it cannot be steady. It can only host the stampede.
The rush is the only story San Francisco knows how to tell. And yet, for all its chaos and heartbreak, people keep coming back because no other place tells that story quite so well.
San Francisco’s flag has sported the phoenix since 1900, rising from its own ashes after fires, quakes, and busts. It is the city’s truest self-portrait: forever burning, forever reborn. Each rush consumes it, each collapse remakes it, and yet the wings spread again.