There’s a story you hear a lot in San Francisco these days: people barely in their early 20s, some not even finished with college, locking themselves into workspaces, coding from morning until late at night, treating every free hour as an opportunity cost.
Mahir Laul is a typical example. At 18, he paused his college education to focus fully on his startup, Velric. Most of his time is split between coding and the gym. Dating has almost disappeared from his life. Laul openly admits his love life is at its lowest point, but in exchange, he feels he simply can’t afford to slow down in the tech race.
In today’s Silicon Valley, work no longer fits into office hours. Offices stay lit through the weekend, company cards are swiped on Saturdays and Sundays. All-night coding sessions, sleepless hackathons, and social media posts glorifying a “monk mode” lifestyle have quietly become an unspoken standard among young founders.
In that environment, dating is often seen as a distraction. Some say bluntly that they only have enough energy for one thing, and that thing is their company. To them, a good relationship is a lot like a good startup: it demands time, effort, and emotional investment. And if they have to choose, they choose the product.
Many set clear “dating milestones”: they’ll only consider a serious relationship after a Series B round, when things are less chaotic. Until then, casual fun is fine, but commitment can wait. Love gets placed on a balance sheet, treated like a business decision.
What’s striking is that tech people don’t just optimize products—they try to optimize love itself. Some score potential partners like KPIs, rank emotions through logic, or attempt to “biohack” relationships. But love doesn’t run on algorithms, and the harder they try to control it, the more easily it slips away.
San Francisco isn’t exactly an easy place to fall in love either. The gender imbalance, the small number of female startup founders, and the anxiety of “not successful enough to date yet” or “too successful and worried about being loved for the money” all add up. Some even move to New York or fly back to Europe just to have a more normal dating life.
Meanwhile, the LGBTQ+ community often enjoys a more vibrant romantic scene, thanks to greater openness and less pressure to “make it first, then love.” As for many lonely young founders, they love in a very Silicon Valley way: meeting through work, connecting on LinkedIn, swiping on Tinder with networking in mind rather than finding a partner.
Perhaps at the heart of this relentless AI race, love hasn’t disappeared—it’s just been pushed to the bottom of the priority list. And somewhere between lines of code running through the night, many young people in Silicon Valley are quietly wondering when they’ll finally have enough time to love someone, not just their work.
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