To Get Ahead In Silicon Valley, Start Running
"Now I’m signed up for a 50k race with my manager. I’m not sure whether I should let him beat me or not."
In the past, the golf course was a place for business as much as for pleasure. Going golfing was an ideal way to hammer out a business deal or to suck up to your boss. But in Silicon Valley today, running is the new golf.
When tech was concentrated in South Bay, venture capitalists and founders donned spandex suits and biked from Sand Hill Road to Old La Honda Road to discuss a deal. But with a new generation of startups centered in San Francisco, it’s more likely to find Goodrs-clad coworkers conducting “run on runs” along the Embarcadero.
Running clubs have exploded in popularity across the country among young people who want to meet other singles in real life instead of on dating apps. But in San Francisco, they have proven to be better for finding founding engineers than a romantic partner.
“Somebody came and started aggressively approaching people to recruit for his startup. We had to pull him aside and tell him to stop because he was making people uncomfortable,” said Kieran Collins, founder of the Uncanny Valley Running Club. “Also a lot of laid-off people started to join our runs to try and find a job, and they were really slow.”
“Being good at running can improve your career prospects,” said one AI researcher who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The entire pretraining teams at Anthropic and OpenAI run. At lunch everyone just talks about running. I joined to do training runs for models, not ultramarathons. But now I’m signed up for a 50k race with my manager. I’m not sure whether I should let him beat me or not.”
Running skill can be even more useful at larger companies. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently ran a sub 20 minute 5k with a group of big-name tech CEOs, and as part of his “Year Of Efficiency” cost-cutting measures, layoffs and promotion packets will now consider employee mile times. One product manager injured their IT band while running a 6 minute mile but told us it was “totally worth it” because they were successfully promoted to L7. On the other hand, employees who run the mile in more than 10 minutes are posting in Blind about their fears of being the next on the chopping block.
Some corners of Silicon Valley are pushing back against what they perceive to be a toxic cardio culture in the tech industry. Airbnb founder Brian Chesky, a former bodybuilder, is a strident promoter of weightlifting. One Twitter (currently known as X) denizen created a “Deadlift ETF” to prove that CEOs who lift are more successful. Either way, it’s clear in Silicon Valley you’ll need to elevate your heart rate if you want to elevate your career.