Greg Isenberg came back from San Francisco with seventeen observations. The billboards advertising either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies, the seed rounds, the forward-deployed engineers, the founders showing each other their Obsidian vaults like athletes comparing gym routines.
He noted an important thing in observation fifteen, almost as an aside.
Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats — none of them use any AI at all.
Everett Rogers formalized the technology diffusion model in 1962. He was studying hybrid seed corn in Iowa. He noticed that the farmers who adopted early weren’t just better informed — they had different social networks, different relationships to risk, different orientations toward outside knowledge. The late adopters weren’t slower. They were operating from a different set of facts about what was safe to try.
Those AI billboards in SoMa are not visible in the Mission. That’s not metaphor. That’s just geography.
What strikes me about the taqueria is not that it’s behind. It’s that the conversation happening a mile away — about MCP endpoints and agent fleets — is not legible to it. The vocabulary doesn’t exist there yet. Nobody has sat across from the woman making carnitas for twenty years and said: here is what this could do for your ordering, your scheduling, your response to a customer who asks on Yelp at 11pm whether you’re open on Monday. One day her daughter or son might.
The builder class optimizes for the builder class. You build what you understand, for people whose problems you can see. The founders in SoMa understand each other’s problems with extraordinary precision.
The woman making carnitas has different problems — thinner margins, less access to capital, relationships built over decades that don’t easily transfer to a new system. Nobody is at the Series A meeting making the case that her problems are the interesting ones.
The historian of technology David Nye wrote about the “technological sublime” — the awe Americans felt in the nineteenth century standing before a great bridge or a locomotive or the first electrified city. The feeling was real. But the sublime is a view from a particular angle. The workers who built the bridge experienced something quite different. The families displaced by the railroad’s right-of-way experienced something different still.
The question isn’t whether the technology will eventually reach her. It will. The diffusion curve is patient. It likely will surprise.
The question is whether anyone is doing the translation work. The act of standing in a specific kind of life and asking: what would this actually change here? In the actual kitchen, on the actual Tuesday.
Isenberg noted that the coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people.
The taqueria is also a place where people want to be around people. It has been that for a long time.
She’ll adapt. She’s been adapting for twenty years.
But that’s a very different story than the one being told in San Francisco on those billboards.
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