San Francisco: The Dreams, the Delulu, and the Messiah Syndrome

There is a particular look people get when they land in San Francisco to build something. I have worn it myself. The look of someone who has finally arrived where the future is manufactured, who has been told that the thing they want is impossible and walked into a city where “impossible” is a pitch, not a verdict. It is a beautiful look. It is also the first symptom.

I moved toward this world on purpose. I have inflated a description past what the numbers earned. I have felt the appeal of a mission large enough to excuse me from ordinary accountability. So when I complain about the delulu here, I am complaining about something I find attractive.

The ambition is real. That matters. A café can be a place to argue about mechanistic interpretability or a protein-folding pipeline, and the people doing it do not need to be famous to be serious. The belief that you can just build the thing makes an unreasonable life feel possible. People cross oceans, leave families, blow up careers, and sleep on somebody’s couch to be near it. I did a version of this. I do not regret it.

And enough of the things built here have worked to make disbelief look foolish. Things that once sounded impossible became ordinary. That gives the next impossible pitch a hearing. I like living around people who will give it one.

The trouble begins when getting a hearing becomes evidence that you are right.

An investor can afford to nod at a lot of possibilities. Other founders need belief too; yours helps sustain theirs. A conference needs somebody onstage. The timeline will call a landing page “insane” before anyone has used the product. You can receive a great deal of encouragement without finding out whether the thing works.

There is a whole vocabulary waiting to help. Every tool is a revolution. Every app is changing the world. A scooter company is on a mission to reshape human mobility. Apparently renting me two wheels would be an embarrassing thing to admit.

I understand the temptation to speak that way. It gets a response. The modest description leaves room for somebody to ask what you have actually done. The enormous one invites them to join you.

Then the bad numbers arrive. “We are early.” The launch goes nowhere. “The market is not ready.” Either explanation could be true. But if every possible result confirms the story, what would ever get us to change it? At that point conviction has become a very comfortable arrangement. Reality keeps paying the cost of being wrong.

AI gives this language somewhere much larger to go. Some of the work really could affect everyone. I work in the field; I cannot dismiss that possibility to make the argument easier. But “this could matter enormously” can turn into “I am enormously important” with almost no audible change in tone. The second claim gets to wear the seriousness of the first.

That is the messiah in the story. The founder becomes the person carrying humanity across a threshold. A critic becomes someone who cannot see the future. A check on power becomes an obstacle to the mission. The stakes that ought to make us more careful become a reason we cannot afford to stop.

“We will figure out the ethics later, we are too important to slow down now.” I have heard that in a dozen accents. I have caught it forming in my own mouth.

That is harder to sit with than somebody else’s ridiculous pitch. I know what it feels like from inside: urgency, responsibility, the fear of wasting an opportunity. It does not announce itself as wanting an exemption. It feels like having too much to do.

And I still want to be here. I still want the improbable idea to get a hearing. I do not want to become the person who mistakes refusing every dream for having understood the world.

But if I want people to take the work seriously, they need room to tell me it does not work. Even when I have persuaded myself that the future is waiting for me to finish it.