AI startups snatch San Francisco offices, use Zoom fatigue to recruit

When Noah Jackson began his search for a new software engineering job at the start of 2024, there was one quality he knew he wanted in his next employer: office culture.

Jackson, 27, has spent almost his entire professional career in the post-Covid world of remote work. While many tech companies eventually brought employees back on a hybrid basis, others got rid of their leases altogether. For Jackson, all but the first nine months of his first real job involved working out of his home in San Francisco or at his company’s office, which tended to be mostly empty.

“Coming out of school, I overlooked how much work is really a part of your life and not just a box to check off,” said Jackson, who previously worked at an enterprise software company. “Being fully remote, it feels like it’s just like a thing that you have to do.”  

In May, Jackson got his wish, taking a job at Tako, a visualization search engine startup that requires employees come to the office four days a week. Tako is among a growing crop of early-stage tech companies in San Francisco attempting to return to the pre-Covid days, when startups took pride in their digs and limited their use of Zoom.

“We’re not trying to build a culture that works for everybody,” said Tako CEO Alex Rosenberg, who launched the company earlier this year. “We’re just trying to make it work for Tako.”

The recruitment success enjoyed by Tako and its peers speaks to a growing remote work fatigue, particularly in San Francisco, where housing conditions are often cramped and where a high concentration of young, ambitious techies are eager to comingle. The changing landscape also coincides with a boom in artificial intelligence that started after OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. It’s one of the few areas where venture capital firms are showing an appetite for risk.

Rosenberg says he’s seeing a much more competitive real estate market in San Francisco as emerging companies duke it out for deals on office space after an extended stretch of high vacancy rates.

“When you’re trying to invent something new, it’s really hard to do that over Zoom,” said Rosenberg, whose company is run out of a coworking space in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood, a couple miles from the downtown business districts.

Tako has been on the hunt for a bigger space, preferably in the Hayes Valley neighborhood, a hub for generative AI startups, or in downtown Jackson Square.

Overall, the San Francisco office market remains tepid, with the vacancy rate climbing to 34.9% in the third quarter from 29.4% a year ago, according to data from Cushman & Wakefield. However, AI startups OpenAI and Sierra AI accounted for two of the largest leases in the period, and the firm said, “artificial…