Why tech workers no monolith in SF politics

But the local elected officials, consultants and activists who spoke with The Examiner said they didn’t perceive tech workers as comprising a distinct bloc of voters. They don’t generally see tech employees as a constituency to which they specifically have to appeal. Instead, they see those in the industry as having a wide range of viewpoints reflecting the interests and concerns of city residents as a whole.

Working in the tech industry can mean a lot of different things, said state Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat who represents San Francisco. Some people are venture capitalists, some are startup founders. Some work at large tech companies, some at startups, and others work for themselves. And on many issues, you can find people in the tech industry on opposing sides, he said.

“I don’t view tech as a monolith,” Wiener said. “And I think that would be disrespectful of folks who are in technology, because … they are a very, very diverse community who hold a lot of different perspectives.”

Twenty years ago, the very idea that San Francisco would have a tech voting bloc would be laughable. The center of the Bay Area’s tech industry was in the South Bay. To the extent that tech workers lived in The City, many of them commuted from there to Silicon Valley.

But a lot has changed in those 20 years. Some of the biggest tech companies in the world are now located in San Francisco. The City itself draws in a greater share of venture-capital investment than nearly all states — and far more than the valley. San Francisco has quickly become the center of the tech industry’s latest focus, artificial intelligence. And the number of tech workers in the area has swelled.

In early 2010, around 46,000 people total worked in the tech industry in San Francisco and San Mateo counties, according to data from the state Employment Development Department. Today that number stands at more than 150,000 — even after the industry shed more than 30,000 jobs in those counties over the last two years.

At least in San Francisco, many of those jobs are filled by people who live in The City rather than commute in, according to Ted Egan, San Francisco’s chief economist, citing U.S. Census data. Only a smaller portion of tech workers who live in San Francisco now commute to jobs outside of The City.

In recent years, many of the City’s tech moguls have become much more active in local politics. In 2018, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff helped lead the effort — financially and politically — to pass Proposition C, which raised taxes on businesses to provide housing for homeless people. Venture capitalists David Sacks and Garry Tan were among the leading donors to the 2022 campaigns to recall three school-board members as well as District Attorney Chesa Boudin, and Tan is a board member and backer of local political group GrowSF.

Meanwhile, fellow venture capitalist Michael Moritz founded TogetherSF, another political group that has pushed The City to focus on government dysfunction, homelessness and public-safety issues. And Chris Larsen, the executive chairman of cryptocurrency company Ripple, has become a big donor to various local campaigns.

But it’s unclear that any of those moguls represent anyone other than themselves, local political experts said.

“I don’t know that any of them have individual constituencies,” said one longtime San Francisco political consultant who asked not to be named.

To be sure, some of the groups those moguls have founded or backed have built loyal followings. But the people affiliated with the groups aren’t exclusively in the tech industry. And the policies they’ve advocated have resonated beyond just techies.

Sachin Agarwal co-founded GrowSF after working for Lyft and Twitter. Initially the group focused on San Francisco’s tech community, which traditionally hadn’t been very engaged in local politics.

Although a lot of tech people — including Tan — have donated to the group, Agarwal said he doesn’t see GrowSF today as representing the tech industry or workers. It doesn’t advocate for policies that would benefit the tech industry, he said.

Instead, it focuses on issues such as public safety and public education that have broad appeal, he said.

The group mailed its voter guide for the March election to every household in The City, and its website in that period drew 100,000 unique visitors, which would represent a sizable chunk of San Francisco’s electorate, Agarwal said.

“We’re not about any single industry,” he said. “We are about normal people … people with families who have kids, who are homeowners who want to stay in The City long term.”

Meanwhile, not all tech workers are politically aligned with groups such as GrowSF or TogetherSF.

Supervisor Hillary Ronen said she has numerous friends who work in the tech industry, but they are independent thinkers. While organizations such as GrowSF recruit from the tech community, they don’t represent the values of her friends or other regular tech workers, Ronen said.

“I just don’t think [those groups] represent the community at large,” she said.

Indeed, within San Francisco’s tech community are a lot of diverse viewpoints — even about industry–related policies, local political experts say.

Wiener said there are people in the community on both sides of the debate over his bill that would attempt to prevent artificial-intelligence models from causing catastrophic harm. While many tech people are intensely in favor of housing construction, some aren’t on board with that movement, he said. They have a range of views on policing and public safety and even on who they favor for mayor in November, he said.

“In my experience, quote-unquote tech people are as diverse in their political views as anyone else,” Wiener said.

Matters such as quality of life, public safety and homelessness are important to many of those in the industry, said the political consultant. But those issues are the top priorities for many San Francisco residents, tech or not, the consultant said.

No matter what industry they work in or where they live, residents generally want the same things from The City — a safe place with good schools, affordable housing, frequent and reliable transit service, and activities they can enjoy with friends and family, said Maggie Muir, a political consultant who works with Wiener and Mayor London Breed.

“Whether you work in tech or any of those other places, you all want the same thing,” Muir said.

Many of those items are the focus of The City’s so-called moderates. But just because tech workers prioritize such things doesn’t mean that they also ascribe to the pro-business policies favored by such centrists, the consultant said.

In fact, folks in the industry can’t be counted on to support policies that might benefit their own companies, such as local tax reform, even when those policies are popular, the political consultant said.

Instead, it’s not unusual “that tech employees will go out of their way to vote against the interests of their employer,” the consultant said.

The November ballot will offer an example that’s arguably along those lines. Proposition L would put a new tax on Uber, Lyft and Waymo to help address the huge budget deficit faced in coming years by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.

Uber is one of The City’s leading tech companies and one of its biggest private employers. The ride-hailing services it and Lyft offer took off due in no small part to The City’s tech workers. And Waymo is the leading developer of a new iteration of technology — autonomous vehicles and robotaxi services.

But those companies have also drawn plenty of criticism over the years, charged with helping undermine the traditional cab industry, treating human drivers as second-class workers, and — in the case of Waymo — offering a service that’s under-tested and potentially unsafe.

So one might think that the measure might come out of a backlash against tech, but no: The three authors of the proposition all work or have worked in the industry. Many of the people they’ve signed to support it are in the industry.

Although Uber opposes the measure, Prop. L’s backers say don’t see it as particularly antitech. Instead, they see it as a measure that would not only benefit Muni but the ride-hailing services also, said Lian Chang, one of its authors. By keeping the transit system healthy, the measure would encourage people to continue to use the system instead of driving, thus keeping the streets less congested for Uber and Lyft drivers, she said.

“If Muni craters, we’re looking at a lot more traffic,” Chang said. “That is not good for anyone.”

For her part, Chang said, she sees support for the measure among tech workers as indicative of what actually might be a unifying theme among the community: While many in tech do support transit, what they actually have more broadly in common is what she called a “problem-solving attitude.”

Technically minded people love to solve problems; it’s what they do for a living, Chang said. Those who work in the industry have a lot of experience collaborating to find solutions, she said. And especially as the community has become more politically active in recent years, they’ve been looking for ways to address The City’s problems.

“There’s a lot of political diversity in tech, so it doesn’t all go in one way,” Chang said. “But there is that problem-solving vibe.”