The first time I moved to San Francisco was a total failure. I spent 2 years mostly at work (admittedly an intense hedge fund job), dating unsuccessfully, living in Tenderloin shitholes and dingy sublets, no lasting friendships. I left for New York where I continued to struggle through the Covid years, bouncing around to Miami, Seattle, and Singapore with no real change in quality of life.

I'm 3 years into my second attempt at SF, and it's gone a lot better. Lots of friends, lots of invites to events, open door code to offices all over the city, favorite restaurants where the auntie recognizes me, people use The Arena in daily conversation without knowing I coined it, car, dog, beautiful house and girlfriend.

Part of this is the change in SF from 2015 to 2025 led by Mayor @DanielLurie , and part of this is my own POV changing careers from finance to tech, but I suspect when people say "SF is dead" and move out it's because they were doing SF like me v1 and hadn't yet figured out SF v2. I thought for my first ever article I would lay down what I've seen — people move to SF all the time and this is the article I'd want to send to them.

DISCLAIMERS. Obviously this is techbro centric, obviously this leaves out a whole lot of SF that is still beautiful, obviously a lot of folks live outside of SF City but commute into SF. But hey, you're here to read something called "SF MMORPG Strategy Guide", this is all just for fun and of course slightly autobiographical. If you're here to fight a culture war, this ain't that kind of movie.

SF IRL

The first thing you have to know about the San Francisco MMORPG is that it has areas with levels. Here's a current annotated one:

https://thenetworkstate.com/

Level 0 are your spawn points - very safe areas to "land" in SF for the first time. Hayes (aka Cerebral Valley) is full of tiny but affordable group houses — basically off campus dorm rooms for recently graduated/droppedout 20somethings — <$2000/month, very walkable and high likelihood that some of your friends will be neighbors, and many neighbors will become friends, and basically guaranteed that some of them will become very successful founders (btw: they'll also all know each other) - not that it's a requirement to be friends of course. Adjacent/more recent spawn point is The Arena - a self contained place of work, life, food, and gym, hosting the old OpenAI/xAI office, Thinking Machines, and my friends at Pebblebed. You could spend entire months locked in In The Arena and not notice you haven't left. This is where the first two Smol Haus (aka where I stayed) were.

You naturally hit Level 1 when you find yourself dissatisfied with the cramped living and Eternal September neoteny of the Level 0 areas. By now you might be making over $150k/yr, have a core group of friends, know your way around town, and want to stop arguing over who left stuff in the sink/didn't clean up in the bathroom. Maybe you want a dog, maybe you want a car. I see people at this stage mostly moving north to Marina/Pac Heights, where the houses are larger and parks are beautiful and it's not far to a view of the Bay and the GGB. What's more recently emerged in the AI wave is a revitalization of the downtown areas of SF, which the city calls the Northern Waterfront but I'll call it Frontier Waterfront in honor of OpenAI/Anthropic/YC/Cursor/Cognition all siting there. Many who work at these places will live nearby, which automatically places them at at least Level 1 in quality of life.

https://x.com/swyx/status/1963417292596985933?s=20

I also see Level 1 people live VERY comfortably in Noe Valley or Twin Peaks out west — less close to work areas, but either having VERY nice views/mansions or with giant studios and lots of social events. If you're in AI you may want to be aware of the tale of Two AGI Houses here but these days that is mostly just historical curiosity.

You may notice this guide ends at level 2 — that's because that's just about as much of SF as I've personally figured out. I've put NoPa — "North of Panhandle" here but it was honestly borderline between Level 1 and 2. It's a LOVELY neighborhood and of course close to my beloved Golden Gate Park and Japantown. The transition from Level 1 to 2 is marked by definitely having a car, wanting a backyard, long term partners, and probably decent enough bank accounts or job security that you can splurge a little. This is definitely where I see people spreading out to Bernal/Noe Valley, and also much of South Bay. The higher your chances of having kids, and the higher your actual number of kids, the further south you will move.

SF Online

The thing about SF is that it also comes as what @balajis would call a Network State of techies, whose participation in the "SF Online MMORPG" has nothing to do with their physical presence in the city, though it helps to have spent enough time here to have working knowledge of the in-jokes and places.

To not belabor the point: @X/@Twitter is the Group Chat of SF. When you are part of "ingroup" you can just tweet oblique references to IRL "funerals" and jokes about the gender imbalance and everyone will get it.

People much better at this than me have written guides, and I've written my own, but we probably don't have space to "teach you how to twitter" in here. Just know that it helps! If you're just landing in SF and want to know whats going on, there's fortunately just ONE authoritative source you have to follow: @michelleefang who posts the SF event calendar every week:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gUjf7pFkU7M

I would start by attending a good sampling of all of these - most meetups in SF aren't great, but there are some gems in there and you won't know what resonates with you until you try. Also don't forget to keep tweeting about your interests and be a good replyguy to people you resonate with and eventually you'll be invited to stuff that doesn't show up on Michelle's list.

GL, HF, welcome to SFOMMORPG.