The hot girls are taking over San Francisco… or at least my Twitter feed.
As Claude writes code (and I scroll), my feed has become overrun with aerial photos of young, attractive women taking tastefully slutty duck-faced mirror selfies to accompany the hard launch of their relocation to SF to do growth for a sexy new startup.
Note that
These posts are getting millions of views
They don’t actually mention anything about the startup.
They will not mention the startup for four more posts.
Respectfully… this selfie and personalityless content don't deserve a million views… and on any other platform, it wouldn't get a million views. The reaction is disproportionate.
Not only is the viewership on these posts insane, but so is the formulaic reproducibility and the outraged responses.
I did the math, and if you’re willing to assume an attractive woman introducing herself on X has a 10% chance of going quasi-viral on tech Twitter (say 240k views), and the CPM for your average group of tech people is around $48, then economically, hoe-ing it up on Twitter has an expected media value of $1,152 per attempt. Multiply that by a sales team of 5 posting 2 slutty photos a month … and that’s a 138k marketing budget
Upon doing this math, I immediately posted a photo of myself in a swimsuit on X with an uninteresting caption. Anecdotally, I can confirm the marketing works.
Clearly I am not the only person who has done this math, and the male incel population of Twitter has begun to clutch their pearls and scream for vindication. SF is too respectable, too erudite, too logical to be exposed to this lowbrow gorilla marketing.
To many, the attention these women are getting feels like an epic fall from grace. SF, the city once revered for its creative genius and entrepreneurial values, is collapsing into a dumpster fire of ragebait and pornographic marketing. In the world of an ex-founder with 20k x followers I was recently coffee chatting with, “Twitter used to be full of interesting discourse… now it’s just full of slop”
Implied by the illogical amount of rage being farmed by these women is the idea that by using their appearance, these women are getting something they didn’t earn. Their marketing, like all good marketing, should be completely based on logic, reason, and hard scientific numbers.
Only in SF would you see this type of disdain for what is clearly (as mathematically proven above) good advertising.
SF, as a city, believes it is morally superior to advertising. The only correct thing to do when feeling entrepreneurial in SF is to spend all of your time building, and once your product is good enough, it will find its way to the market.
This used to be much truer when there were far fewer products on the market. Now, for the first time since the invention of the internet, it’s not easier to build than it is to sell.
As a result, the skill of selling is being repriced. Suddenly a college girl with a ring light and an iPhone can out-earn a senior engineer.
In other words: We are entering a 90’s style hot girl rennesance.
It shouldn't shock these self-proclaimed geniuses that a warm, attractive, socially fluent person gets in front of more customers than an 18-year-old virgin who’s legally blind
As software becomes less defensible, business and sales become increasingly important. Pull your head out of your ass and hire the hot blond to do your marketing.
Revenge of the Booth Bunnies??
There is an obvious historical comparison here: the booth bunny.
In the early 90’s it was popular for software companies to hire hot women to man conference booths and explain the software to nontechnical buyers.
Today, companies like Corgi and Known are reusing that same GTM. Corgi has gone so far that employees have been dubbed “corgi girls.” The important thing to note here, and what makes them booth bunnies and not salespeople, is that they never actually sell you anything. They just increase top-of-funnel leads.
The issue with booth bunnies: One enterprise marketer actually split-tested it at a company with an $80K average deal size and found that staffing the booth with models was a lead-conversion anchor. Traffic went up. Qualified pipeline went down.
That being said, it’s undeniable. The corgi girls have increased name recognition. Beyond that, the corgi girls are full-time employees, and booth bunnies are typically on contract.
The booth-bunny analogy explains why the reaction is so loud. A twenty-six-year-old with forty thousand followers and a direct line to every founder in the Mission is a threat to your standing, because she has something you can’t acquire by working harder at the thing you’re already good at.
Whatever else you want to say about the hot girl takeover… an insurance company is currently the most-discussed brand in tech, and it sells commercial liability coverage. This may be the first time in human history that general liability trended.
Holy Fuck, Just Move On, You INCELS
Okay, so this is the last part of my essay on the resurgence of the SF hot girl.
The women doing this are, and say it with me, just doing their job. Behind every corgi girl is a CEO explicitly pushing them to post more. In the era of Roy Lee, you need to do one thing: get attention.
And the reward for the corgi girls killing the game was a ranking website built out of their scraped LinkedIn photos.
You cannot run an ecosystem that tells women their visibility is an asset and then treat them as suspect when the asset appreciates. The insult doesn’t land with Cogi… it lands with Brooke Leblanc (One of the most notorious corgi girls).
In conclusion: the ability to leverage your skillset to move product is just called being good at your job. Until coding becomes an effective way to produce emotes and software, unemployment rates will keep going down. The hot girls are here to stay. Maybe be nice to them.
it’s hot to work in tech? i don’t know for how long
I expect the exact opposite to quickly happen: the fall of the tech-hotness
With high probability, all of these young attractive women are AI generated fantasies. It is a tough time for actual beautiful people for the first time in my history. Everyone who is a winner in the genetic lottery is now automatically assumed to be AI generated on-line. This AI generation presumption will kill their ability to make sales and garner the attention their genetic lottery win would have previously presented