Mehul Agarwal, a co-founder of the artificial intelligence start-up Koyal, has a goal. He wants to find a wife before he gets rich.
The 24-year-old says he wants to be loved before the money comes, so he never has to wonder whether a partner is attracted to him or his success. But he has strict criteria.
A potential girlfriend must be smart, Mr. Agarwal said, adding that “someone who went to Stanford or M.I.T. is great.” She must be beautiful, which he is careful to distinguish from “hot,” a term he considers shallow. She must be kind, and in possession of a personality, “which is very, very hard when in San Francisco,” he said. And finally, she has to like him back.
Mr. Agarwal moved to San Francisco a year ago, when his A.I. filmmaking company, which has raised $3.4 million, joined the start-up accelerator Y Combinator. This year, he has been on a handful of dates. On one, which took two months to schedule, Mr. Agarwal said, he and his date were both exhausted from their jobs — she worked at an A.I. start-up, too — and they were so practiced at professional small talk that the evening felt less like a date than a networking meeting.
“What I’ve told my parents is if I’m 28 and haven’t found someone, then I would love to enter in the arranged marriage circuit,” said Mr. Agarwal, who has never had a girlfriend.
San Francisco’s A.I. boom has drawn a wave of young ambitious people who are now reshaping the city’s dating life. Start-up founders and engineers are dating less because they are working more as they try to build A.I. products and establish their fortunes, many said. So when they date, they bring a high-stakes mind-set to it, which means a first coffee can feel like a final-round interview.
“You don’t need to understand if they have cancer in their family, you don’t need to understand on the first date if they really want three children,” said Sina Hartung, 29, a co-founder of the A.I. health technology company Eureka Health who became exasperated by the dating scene in San Francisco. She lived there for three years before moving to New York in August.
The intensity is showing up in the daters who screen partners against fixed criteria, in those who outsource their messages to chatbots and in the dating coaches who charge thousands of dollars a month to translate romance into the language of a start-up.
Founders “don’t want to waste time, so you only go on a date when you really feel there’s something to explore,” said Mr. Agarwal, who works long hours. Many A.I. start-up workers keep “996” schedules — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — a norm borrowed from China’s tech scene.
Joyce Zhang, 32, a dating coach in San Francisco who charges $5,000 a month, works exclusively with tech founders, she said. A former product manager at the payments company Stripe, she coaches clients using the tech vocabulary they already think in — their “top of funnel” (the raw pool of prospects) and their “conversion rate” of dates that actually happen.
Her clients approach dating as any other problem to be solved with money, Ms. Zhang said. Some have connected their dating-app data to spreadsheets to track their matches; others obsess over gaming the apps’ algorithms.
Clients also run their replies to dates through A.I. chatbots like ChatGPT, she said. Some share their entire dating history with ChatGPT and ask the chatbot to diagnose their patterns. In those cases, Ms. Zhang said, she spends the coaching sessions pushing the techies toward trusting their intuition. Her job, she said, is to help them overcome their “blind spots.”
Amanda Chung, 25, who works at the A.I. start-up Nectar Social, is single and dates casually. Fresh off a long relationship and wanting to keep things low-key, she said most of the men she had met in San Francisco wanted something serious “even if they aren’t ready for it yet.”
One founder she saw for a few weeks would meet only after 10 p.m. because of his work schedule. Another spent an evening quizzing her about her job and her working style, “trying to check off boxes internally,” she said.
The prospects were so uninspiring that she eventually paused her Hinge account. “I was like, oh, wow, is that really it?” Ms. Chung said.
San Francisco has long had a reputation for skewing male and nerdy in the 20-something dating pool, with many female residents popularizing the phrase, “The odds are good but the goods are odd.”
The city has about 106 men to every 100 women, versus roughly 98 men to every 100 women nationally, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Dowell Myers, who studies population change at the University of Southern California, said the recent A.I. arrivals might not yet register in census data, which lags by about two years.
In some corners of San Francisco, young singles are getting creative with dating. On a Saturday night at Kilowatt, a bar in the Mission neighborhood, people packed together for an event called “Date My Ex,” where participants on a stage pitch someone they love in five minutes or less, with a slide deck. Attendees wore name tags and waved paper hearts on sticks whenever a pitch landed, like bidders at an auction for other people’s exes.
One presenter rated the friend he had come to pitch on a bar graph against “the average dating experience.” Another slide read: “5’11” (but his hair adds 2” so kinda 6’1”)” and “works in tech (but isn’t happy about it).”
Still another presentation was about Joe Berusch, 27, who keeps “one foot out” of the tech world. He said he was convinced the intense daters who asked about family medical history on a first date were a loud local minority. A.I. has made many of the chores of adult life so frictionless that people expect dating to work the same way, but it’s “fundamentally” different, he said.
The “Date My Ex” event was part of a “Date My Friend” series run by Annalise Wulf, 25, and two friends as a tongue-in-cheek rebuke of San Francisco’s extreme dating requirements and as an alternative to dating apps.
“People in San Francisco, they work really hard, they have crazy long hours, especially in the start-up culture,” Ms. Wulf said. “So to even go on a date with someone, if it doesn’t feel amazing, if the sparks aren’t flying right away — it just takes time to develop those things, and I don’t think a lot of people in San Francisco have the time to do that.”
Mr. Agarwal, meanwhile, is still looking for someone who meets his criteria. His most promising prospect this year did not work out because of his schedule. They had two dates before he left for three weeks to India, where his start-up does much of its business. Then he spent five days in Los Angeles. Then there was more travel.
“I need to be really sure, and I don’t know her well enough to make that kind of bet,” he said.
That gives him three and a half years to find the love of his life before he turns the search over to his parents.
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