Casey Noon

about the first time I ever visited this company.

It was in 2023, so three years ago.

And when I tell you that this company was not only ambivalent about making money, but seemed to actively resist the idea of making money, they're like a small group of like very earnest AI safety obsessed people who were like tinkering with and building models for unspecified purposes.

But boy, howdy, did they make a product and decide that they actually liked making money and wanted to make a lot of it?

And now they're going to be one of the largest IPOs of all time, just three years after I was hanging out with them in their little, like, Jackson Square walk-up office.

Yeah.

OpenAI, we don't know anything about their upcoming IPO except that they have said that they plan to do it.

They may file as soon as this week their paperwork with the SEC to start that process.

People also expect this to be a big, gigantic IPO.

And so all of this taken together, I think there are a few threads to pull on here, one of which is, what is this going to do to San Francisco?

Right.

Here we have to call it two and a half companies because SpaceX has some headquarters and offices in other Texas and Southern California and other places.

So two and a half companies going public in the same year based in San Francisco, minting, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of new millionaires, Deca millionaires and sent to millionaires.

And what that will do to the city's tech scene, to the local real estate market, et cetera, et cetera.

What are your thoughts on that?

Totally.

And it's obviously there's some, you know,

It's hard to feel much sympathy for these people who are very well-paid engineers and tech workers who are looking at their slightly richer peers and thinking, I got to get some of that.

But I think this is a real like status anxiety moment in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where even the people who sort of thought they had sort of made it in the world of tech are now looking at these people who have joined these like, you know,

insanely fast-growing companies that are wanting to get in on that somehow, but also thinking it might be too late.