Locked in and celibate: For young tech founders, dating is a bug, not a feature

"There's two things that I care about the most: the gym and my work," says Mahir Laul.

The 18-year-old took a leave of absence from New York University this past fall to work full-time on his HR tech startup, Velric. While his classmates are taking shots and hooking up, Laul is coding and lifting. That means almost no time for romance.

"I am obsessed with work," he tells me. "My love life is in the gutters."

His young founder friends are a similar story, he says. The few who are dating found their partners before they started their companies, while the rest are "locked in" on building — and locking themselves out of the dating pool.

Silicon Valley has long been the land where mixing work with play was seen as crucial to its growth. While Google and Facebook were being built, their staff were also tripping on ayahuasca and canoodling in "cuddle puddles." Now, amid the white-collar job apocalypse and the cutthroat AI race, tech has gone hardcore. Ramp has seen a spike in corporate card purchases on Saturdays in the Bay Area. Foot traffic at San Francisco office buildings was up 21.6% year over year in July, per Placer.ai, the highest uptick among major cities. And as I found in conversations with more than two dozen young tech professionals, the industry's upstarts are pounding through hourslong coding sprints, working 996 schedules (9 a.m. to 6 p.m., six days a week), and proudly telling their investors and X followers how they've gone "monk mode" in service of scaling their startups.

For many in Silicon Valley's young hustle class, "it's time to build" means there's no time to bone. They're on one type of grind, and it's not on the dance floor, which shuts down early in San Francisco anyway. Tech's dating scene, never particularly hot, has frozen over.

Hackathons, pitch decks, scrambling for investors — the life of a startup founder has never been amenable to a rich dating life. Lauren Kay, a former dating app founder who now runs a literary business, tells me that when she was a member of the 2014 Y Combinator class, she had to ask her cofounder for permission to go on a first date at 10 p.m. on a Saturday. Still, she did meet her husband in that YC class. Douglas Feigelson, a member of that same class, says "there was opportunity to drink and date when I was in YC."

A decade later, many founders feel like they can't afford to make the time.

A good relationship is like a good startup, says Daivik Goel, the 27-year-old founder of the payroll platform Shor. "It takes a lot of time to nurture at the beginning if you want to do them right." For now, he only has the bandwidth to nurture one. Like many of his founder friends, he says, he's not on any dating apps, and he doesn't seek out hookups at bars. "I haven't had the time to really invest yet."

Several founders I spoke to described dating in founder terms. "The opportunity cost is really high," says Annie Liao, the 24-year-old founder of AI learning startup Build Club. "Every night you spent out is time you could have spent building your startup." She adds, "Most founders wait until the startup is more stable, like Series B."

Liao says her founder roommates aren't dating either. They hook up sometimes for fun — so long as they don't get "emotionally attached." For those working seven days a week on their startup, opening Hinge is "a big, big distraction," she says.

Some blame the dating recession on tech workers treating dating like an extension of their work. Liao says her male friends often give women ratings, "like KPIs." These ratings are out of 10, and offer a "numerical logical quantification justified in their brains to help them make an informed decision on who to date." Allie Hoffman, founder of dating event The Feels, tells me her San Francisco clients often ask her: "Am I going to meet my unicorn here?"

Amy Andersen, CEO of Linx Dating, says that founders who have spent years focusing on "optimization" and "ROI" are now approaching her, looking for an equally perfect partner.

"People want to biohack love," she says. "They're not necessarily thinking intelligently."

Startup advisor Dylan Oriundo has another theory: fear. Founders aren't just afraid to give up precious building time; they're also skeptical of the motives of their potential suitors as they build their potential unicorns.

"They're not going to want me because I don't have enough money," Oriundo says. "Once I reach a certain goal, they're just going to want me for my money."

Others blame San Francisco.

Tony Bennett notwithstanding, the city has long had a reputation for its poor dating scene. Some blame it on San Francisco's wealth gap; others blame the "ratio" — the perceived numbers gap between men and women. The city is comprised of 51% men and 49% women, which some men say gives women the dating edge. The gender disparities likely grow even wider within tight tech circles, with women accounting for 13.2% of startup founders in 2023, and about a quarter of the tech workforce.

"If you're straight and a guy, there's just not that many women," says Wesley Tian, cofounder of the AI photo platform Aragon. Fed up with San Francisco dating, he says that some of his friends "import" people from other cities: They'll travel to another hub, meet someone, convince them to do long-distance, and eventually get them to move to the Bay Area. Some of Tian's friends in tech are moving to New York so they can date.

Filip Kozera, founder of the Y-Combinator-backed Wordware and a native of Poland, tells me that he's interested in women who have creative interests like painting or singing, but finds that most of the women in San Francisco are interested in tech. So he mainly goes to Europe to date. He also shares his plan to fix the city: Take 10,000 women in Miami, teach them that having "a boat is not the most important thing in life," and ship them to San Francisco. (Maybe if these women were swapped with 10,000 deep learning engineers, Miami's long-promised tech scene would finally arrive.)

And still others say the "ratio" is more of a mirage, and an excuse. Joyce Zhang, a San Francisco-based dating coach and former Stripe product manager, tells me that when her male clients complain about the ratio, she asks them: "What is in your control that you can change?"

"Who are the men who are actually emotionally available?" she tells them. "If you can do the work to be that, there will be plenty of options for you."

Those in tech's rising class who are dating, I found, had been in their relationships long before they began building and pitching.

Yang Fan Yun met his girlfriend during his first semester at Stanford, years before he cofounded the browser assistant startup Composite. They dated for all of college, and eventually went long distance when she moved to New York and he stayed in the Bay Area.

The New York-San Francisco long-distance relationship was common among Yun's tech friends. Even more common: "not dating."

"Being in a relationship is really helpful for building the company," he said, describing his girlfriend, who works at a bank, as a constant supporter and the company's first product tester.

Several of the tech workers I spoke to seemed to hope for the same thing, to have an unconditional support system through the grueling slog of building a startup. The future Zucks and Bezoses yearn for their Priscilla Chans and MacKenzie Scotts. (Those entrepreneurial forebearers are even pushing for marriage. Tech titans like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel warn about a fertility crisis. Anduril cofounder Palmer Luckey says that people should have kids in their teens.)

"You've always heard the mentality, 'Behind every successful man, there's the right woman,'" Laul say. "Rather than looking for hookups, I tend to look for someone as a life partner. But it's been difficult."

Sean Horan, a professor of communications at Fairfield University who studies romance and the workplace, points to some theories of "positive life-to-work spillover."

"If my personal life is fulfilled, I'll actually be happier at work, which should contribute to productivity," he says.

And there are exceptions to tech's dating dry spell. Queer daters may be better off. They're unencumbered by San Francisco's ratio, and find a flourishing LGBTQ+ scene in the city.

Sorcerer cofounder Jia Chen grew up in Michigan. Moving to San Francisco, she's found bigger populations of queer and East Asian daters. "There are so many accomplished girls that are very multidimensional," she says.

Some of the locked-in and lonely, meanwhile, are turning to other solutions. I heard founders describe first dates where the pair worked side-by-side. Other tech couples are finding each other on the hottest new dating app: LinkedIn. When I ask Shruti Gandhi, an investor at Array Ventures, if young founders are using actual dating apps, she laughs. "Yeah, she says, "to network."

Henry Chandonnet is a reporter on the Business News desk. He mainly writes about consumer AI and tech culture.