{"slug": "back-from-1-week-in-sf-from-paris", "title": "Back from 1 week in SF from Paris", "summary": "A Paris-based angel investor returned from a week in San Francisco, where meetings with senior software engineers, CTOs, and founders revealed a talent market now dominated by frontier AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI, displacing former interest in Google and Meta. The trip also found senior engineers shifting to product-focused roles, CTOs coding again, and a growing resignation among founders that labs will capture any market above $1 billion, reshaping investment strategy for European tech.", "body_md": "[Back from San Francisco (S10E02)](https://www.poxx.net/weblog/2026/05/back-from-san-francisco-s10e02.html)\n\nBack from San Francisco. S10E02.\n\n[S10E01 was the robotaxis](https://www.poxx.net/weblog/2026/05/robotaxis-san-francisco.html). S10E02 is the coffees.\n\nBetween two redwood contemplations, I had a lot of coffees with old contacts: former founders, Epitech, Telecom, and LIP6 people.\n\nThat was the point of the trip: take the pulse from senior SWEs, SREs, CTOs, founders, and adjust how I think about angel investing.\n\nThis is what unsettled me most.\n\n- Everyone wants to work at Anthropic or OpenAI.\n\nThe talent pool that would have considered Google or Meta 10 years ago now points at frontier labs. Experienced founders and CTOs I could easily imagine starting again are in hiring loops there.\n\nThis is the main difference with Paris.\n\nWill that still be true post-IPO?\n\n- Senior SWEs are now product engineers.\n\nThey serve product, growth, marketing, whatever needs shipping.\n\nYou need to be good at code and architecture. You also need taste. And people skills.\n\nProduct differentiation is accelerating. Tech no longer differentiates enough. Product does.\n\nParis has taste. That could put us in a good place.\n\n- CTOs are coding again. A lot.\n\nThe code inflation question is real. Full-LLM codebases will raise hard questions. LLMs love adding code. Refactoring is harder.\n\nThat is a question for the future. The present is already busy enough.\n\n- Founders sound resigned about lab velocity.\n\nThis was a few weeks after Claude Design shipped and Codex accelerated. The common belief: if the TAM is above $1B, the labs will eat it.\n\nBuilding DevTools means competing with Claude Code and Codex. Hard.\n\nThe better move is to use them as leverage.\n\nThat is starting.\n\n- Agentic companies are tired and excited.\n\nNew models ship every quarter from frontier labs and China. Every release forces teams to reassess agent quality.\n\nA prompt that worked on Opus 4.6 will not produce the same result on 4.7. Even less on 5.5. And then Qwen enters the room.\n\nLots of work ahead for evals.\n\n- Token cost arbitrage is now a CFO topic.\n\nWhy let a frontier model handle prompts that could maybe run on a small model in a closet?\n\nSilicon Valley is in a rupture period.\n\n“The labs take everything” is one version of the story. The other is more practical: the quality of iteration outside pure tech is accelerating.\n\nThe opportunities to accelerate are exceptional.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/back-from-1-week-in-sf-from-paris", "canonical_source": "https://www.poxx.net/weblog/2026/05/back-from-san-francisco-s10e02.html", "published_at": "2026-05-28 09:39:04+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-28 09:59:13.247618+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-startups", "ai-products", "large-language-models", "ai-research"], "entities": ["Anthropic", "OpenAI", "Google", "Meta", "Epitech", "Telecom", "LIP6"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/back-from-1-week-in-sf-from-paris", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/back-from-1-week-in-sf-from-paris.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/back-from-1-week-in-sf-from-paris.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/back-from-1-week-in-sf-from-paris.jsonld"}}