Since the dawn of Silicon Valley, there’s been a widespread perception that San Francisco is, put gently, not exactly a dating mecca.
The city famously has a skewed male-to-female ratio (per census data, there are about 105 men for every 100 women), and there’s a perception among many women that men who work in tech tend to have poor social and emotional skills and a lack of style—opting for Patagonia vests and Meta glasses rather than putting substantive effort into their appearance.
On August 31, however, Celeste Amadon, the founder of the AI-powered dating app Known, valiantly attempted to reverse that stereotype. In an X thread accompanied by a moody, upward-angled selfie, she announced that she and her team were compiling a list of “SF’s most dateable people,” titled “San Francisco’s Hot List.” She attached a link for people to nominate their single friends according to criteria like “ambition,” “accomplishment,” “reputation,” and “aura.”
The post was skewered online by many in and outside of the tech scene, with some referring to it as “cringe” or mocking the lack of eligible singles in San Francisco: “The solution to dating in SF is to leave SF,” posted one female founder. But it was an extremely effective bit of marketing for Known, garnering more than 15,000 submissions 24 hours after the tweet was posted, according to Amadon. It was also an effective piece of counter-propaganda to the stereotype of San Franciscans, officially heralding that San Francisco Is Hot.
“Not to be cheesy, but I think the SF dating scene deserves some defending,” Amadon tells WIRED. “It gets so much flak for being a place where it’s hard to meet people, but there are many people who are super eligible in not just their physical attractiveness but in their holistic dateability.”
Known’s Hot List is part of a broader conversation focused on the general attractiveness of the San Francisco populace—and why some locals seem to be placing more importance on being perceived as hot.
Last summer, two women who work in tech—Madison Kanna (who is on the Hot List) and Cat Orman—threw an “enforced ratio” party at a Tesla showroom in the city, ensuring that there were as many women as men. The invite stipulated that the vibe would be “unapologetically feminine and fun” and that “Patagonia vests will be turned away at the door.” On August 28, Mantis Biotech startup founder Georgia Witchel posted an X thread titled “Tech Is Having a Hot Girl Renaissance.” In the thread, Witchel describes how social media has been deluged with “young, attractive women taking tastefully slutty duck-faced mirror selfies” to promote their startups, citing Known and the insurance company Corgi as examples.
Witchel says her argument is not so much that she objects to young women using their attractiveness as a marketing strategy—it’s more to explain how and why it has emerged as a marketing strategy to begin with, telling WIRED the trend is a result of “a renaissance of sales culture in SF.”
Throughout much of Silicon Valley, software marketing was “nerds selling to other nerds,” she says—but with the emergence of vibe coding, the barrier to entry for the industry has gotten lower, and the standards for marketing a product higher. “The fact that you are able to build a complicated product is not enough to give you the leeway of not being charismatic,” says Witchel. “People are recognizing that.”
When reached for comment, Brooke LeBlanc, head of community at Corgi, who Witchel cites in her thread, referred WIRED to an X post. “My mom just heard about the hot girl in tech renaissance and she’s absolutely thrilled by the news,” she wrote. “No one in my family from Georgia can believe that it’s breaking news for a woman to care about how she looks.”
Amadon says the Hot List has “minimal” connection to Witchel’s thread, but she understands why Known’s marketing “draws interest” (though she notes that X specifically is “not a primary marketing channel” for the app). She concedes that the list was intended to capitalize on the discussion and create “positive discourse” around dating in San Francisco.
And it’s working: On September 1, Known posted the first round of Hot Listers, including LeBlanc and startup founders like Jasper Carmichael-Jack, the CEO of the AI-driven company Artisan. There was nary a Patagonia vest in the bunch.