SF Tech Week 2026: Are San Francisco Founders Superhuman?

Are founders in San Francisco superhuman? After three weeks there for SF Tech Week and TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, my honest answer is no. They are doing the same things we are doing, worrying about the same problems and thinking in much the same way. Strangely, that was the most encouraging thing I learned all trip.

This is the first of four posts about that trip. This one is about the people and the city. The others go deeper into moats, money and the US question, TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Battlefield and a Silicon Valley diary of Meta, Stanford, the HP garage, Waymo and my first poker night.

The doubt I crossed an ocean to settle

I started building things in Sri Lanka, long before I knew what a startup was (I wrote about those early days in How I Built My Startup). Then came the UK, where I did my PhD, watched Belfast's tech scene have its moment, and now work as CTO at Tellme AI.

Both places are full of brilliant people. But San Francisco always had an aura. From far away it looks like the place where the rules are different and the people are a little more than human. Every big name you read about seems to have started there, and from Colombo or Belfast it is easy to quietly assume there is something in the water.

So the first thing I wanted to settle, privately, in my own head, was simple. Are they actually different?

The trip at a glance

When I say "we" in these posts, I mean Eamon from Tellme AI and me. We did the whole trip together, and it spanned about three weeks:

• SF Tech Week in early October: not one conference but hundreds of independently hosted events across the city, from a Zendesk CTO Breakfast on 6 October to MongoDB's Poker Night on 9 October.
• TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, 13 to 15 October, including the Startup Battlefield final.
• Silicon Valley: a visit to Meta's campus, a tour of Stanford, and the garage where Silicon Valley began.
• And a lot of rides in cars with nobody in the driver's seat.

Same people, same problems

Here is the answer to my question: they are not superhuman. Over three weeks of events, talks, coffees and corridor conversations, I kept meeting founders wrestling with exactly what we wrestle with at home. How do we find our first customers? Where is our moat? When should we raise, and from whom?

Same questions. Same doubts. Same late nights.

What is different is the density. In San Francisco you meet a hundred of those people in a week. Ideas travel faster when everyone building the same kind of thing is within walking distance, and when the person next to you at breakfast has already made the mistake you are about to make. That changes the speed of everything. It does not change who the people are.

If you are building from Colombo, Belfast or anywhere else, I think that is worth hearing: the gap is not talent. It is proximity.

Everyone talks to everyone

The most noticeable thing about SF is how easy it is to talk to people. Someone walks up, tells you what they are building, asks what you are building, and five minutes later you are swapping notes like old friends. Nobody waits for an introduction. Networking between founders there is almost effortless.

Investors, on the other hand? A rare sight. You hear stories of VCs scouting every event, and plenty of events promise founders and investors in the same room. In reality, the rooms were full of founders. That changed how I think about events entirely: they are where you meet your peers, not your next cheque. I dig into what that means for raising money, and why everyone told us to get a US presence, in moats, money and a US presence.

First impressions of the city

Something fun first: the jet lag. Travelling from the UK to the US means eight hours of time difference, and it was bad. Properly bad. For the first few days my body was convinced lunch was dinner, and I was wide awake at hours that only bakers and founders recognise.

Then the fog. San Francisco's clouds sit so low that they pour over the hills and into the city like a slow waterfall. Locals even have a name for it: Karl the Fog. I have seen a lot of clouds in my life, but never clouds that behave like water.

Downtown's square blocks were another small delight. The streets run in a grid, so you can describe almost any spot by naming the two streets that cross there. For a first-time visitor, that is a comforting way to never feel lost.

And of course, we went to see the Golden Gate Bridge. If you are a startup founder in San Francisco, that photo is practically mandatory. We took it. No regrets.

Downtown is a busy, modern city. Silicon Valley, an hour or so south, felt completely different: quiet, calm and green. I write about which one I preferred, and why, in my Silicon Valley diary.

What I am taking home

• The gap is proximity, not talent. The founders I met were sharp, but no sharper than the people I have built with in Sri Lanka and the UK. They are simply closer to each other.
• Talk to everyone. The culture of walking up to strangers and asking what they are building is the most portable thing I saw, and it costs nothing to bring home.
• Specifics beat inspiration. The talks I valued most were the deeply technical ones, full of exact details you could use the next morning.
• The future is moving very fast. The winner of TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield grows tiny pieces of human gut in a lab. Let that sink in.

Will I be back?

Very likely, and often. There is a real chance I will be in San Francisco quite frequently over the next year, and we might even end up settling there one day. It is a probability, not a plan.

But after three weeks of discovering that the people building the future are people just like us, the idea feels a lot less far-fetched than it did before I landed. Which makes me curious: what would you do differently if you knew the people you look up to were just like you?

Frequently asked questions

What is SF Tech Week? SF Tech Week is a week of hundreds of independently hosted events across San Francisco, from breakfasts and panels to parties, put on by startups, companies and investors. The 2026 edition took place in early October.

Is SF Tech Week worth it for founders from outside the US? In my experience, yes, mainly for meeting other founders. It is very easy to start conversations, but investors were rarer at events than I expected, so go for the people and the learning rather than to raise.

Are founders in San Francisco different from founders elsewhere? Not in the way I expected. They face the same problems and think in similar ways. What is different is density: so many founders in one place means ideas and lessons spread much faster.

More from my San Francisco trip

• Moats, money and a US presence: what San Francisco's founders and investors taught me
• TechCrunch Disrupt 2026: lessons from Startup Battlefield: gut organoids, scam-baiting AI and a Hollywood moment
• A Silicon Valley diary: Meta, Stanford, the HP garage, a Waymo that broke my trust, and my first poker night