San Francisco is a city of extreme juxtapositions. It is one of the least religious cities in the United States, but it is here that a cadre of technologists are building AI in religious zeal. It has a highly-educated, staggeringly-rich population — as well as a significant number of people collapsed on the sidewalks in pharmaceutical stupor. San Francisco has become one of the most important places on Earth, but it can’t govern its own streets.

Enter the SF10X Project, a civic experiment led by tech locals who believe the city can be ten times better. It is built on five core theses: 

1. San Francisco is under-developed, especially housing and transportation. 

2. Our children should be able to walk barefoot on any street in the city. 

3. The SF government should be lean, meritocratic, and magnificent. 

4. Families should move to San Francisco for the schools, not away 

5. San Francisco should lead an American industrial renaissance.

“San Francisco is the city of the future, whether we like it or not. If you can make San Francisco great, you can make the future great,” Wolf Tivy, founder of the SF10X Project, told Arena Magazine. This is not Tivy’s biggest bet on the future of this city. He recently moved here with his wife and four children after six months traveling across America in a Volkswagen van. Why San Francisco? “All the interesting stuff was happening here. All the people I wanted to meet were here. If you want to make an impact on the future, you have to go to where it’s being made.”

Soon after returning, Tivy began hosting dinners and neighborhood trash pickups. He recruited Pablo Peniche, following his having commissioned a statue in honor of internet hero Aaron Swartz for a public park. Massey Branscomb and DC Posch joined soon after. The next step was to involve more people, from all corners of civic life: technologists, policymakers, philanthropists. 

None of SF10X’s organizers are San Francisco natives. All are “tech bros” who put in their own money to fund SF10X for the prize pool and took time off work to make it happen. “Tech is insular, it doesn’t really talk to civics people,” says Tivy. “And on the civic side, there’s a lot of anti-tech feeling. With the new mayor, with tech taking more interest in politics, we thought it was the right time to strike.”

In August, the group organized a hackathon to prototype projects that might be useful to the city’s future. At the SF10X hackathon at Frontier Tower on Market Street, participants were sprawled across the space with laptops, notebooks, and sleeping bags. Groups set up in small cubicles with whiteboards, extension cords, and assorted snacks. Some had their parents drop off food and sweaters. A few had just been accepted into Berkeley or Stanford and wanted to experience a classic San Francisco hackathon for the first time. When I asked these youngsters about their motivation to participate, the answers were simple: “We really don’t know how else to help”. 

The winning team built SF OS, an operating system for the city that bridges the gap between civic hackers and government. The runners-up set out to make rezoning more transparent. Their project, Cityscaper, provides a pipeline for modeling neighborhood development both accessibly and accurately. The third-place project was a dashboard to parse the endless hours of San Francisco Board of Supervisors meetings. 

To recruit judges for the hackathon, Branscomb and Tivy made their way into City Hall, knocking on doors of supervisors, aides, and assistants. As COO of AlphaFund, Branscomb also comes from the tech world, but his reputation in San Francisco grew out of something simpler: swings. While living in Bernal Heights, Branscomb told me he would hike up the hill every morning with a latte and a podcast, only to find a tree swing cut down. “I thought: this is critical San Francisco infrastructure we must rebuild”. His guerrilla replacement swings went viral on X.

That spirit carried into the hackathon, though Branscomb admitted he was skeptical at first. “I worried people were going to see us as tech bros, that we thought we were smarter than them,” he said. Instead, the reception was warm. “They were like, wow - that’s a lot of people.” The scale of the hackathon itself helped win respect in City Hall.

One memorable exchange came when a legislative aide asked Branscomb to explain what a vector database was. “It was such a genuine question”.

Peniche told me that the hackathon existed to bring attention to a greater cause. “San Francisco can be the world’s metropolis. Every year, trillion-dollar companies are built here. The potential to create the world’s capital is already here—we just have to unlock it. It’s not enough to be nice or affordable. We should be the world’s capital… New York is no longer where new things happen. The only contenders are San Francisco and Shenzhen — or Beijing. And we cannot give it away to China. I want America to win.”

(His company, Aqua Voice, signed on as a sponsor, with co-founders Jack McIntire and Finnian Brown advising participants and demoing their product during the event.)

Co-organizer Posch, the founder of Daimo Pay, has been involved in San Francisco politics, even helping newcomer Michael Lai canvas for election to the Board of Supervisors. For him, the hackathon was part of a broader shift in the city’s mood. “People were hopeless for a very long time,” Posch told Arena. “Now we have a new mayor, a new board of supervisors. People feel like they can be part of something.”

Posch is skeptical of easy fixes. “There is no deus ex machina, no one is coming to save us,” he said. But he sees San Francisco as uniquely positioned. “SF is upstream of most things that happen in America and the world. It’s one of the most ambitious cities on earth. If you’re up to something crazy, SF is the only place that will tell you you’re not being crazy enough, that you should swing harder. A lot of people have come to the conclusion that there isn’t a second place.”

San Francisco has been difficult to govern most likely due to the antithetical nature of technologists and politicians. The city sits at the intersection of two incompatible cultures. Hackathons like SF10X represent an experiment in reconciling the two. SF10X is deeply interested in policy, but wants to do it by rapidly iterating on ideas, not through closed-door negotiations or drawn out deliberations like in Washington. 

The larger goal is to gesture in a direction: to get the city talking to itself again, to help those in City Hall recognize that there are technologists who want to help, and to remind technologists that civic life isn’t a distraction, but a really important thing. 

As Branscomb puts it: “If you can have fun while creating culture, while improving your community, it goes from this dirty political game to a party with friends.”