Key Notes
- Some San Francisco AI startup workers say long schedules leave little room for dates and raise the stakes of each meeting.
- Former Stripe product manager Joyce Zhang coaches founders, some of whom use spreadsheets to track matches or ask ChatGPT to draft replies.
- The habits build on a startup culture that predates generative AI, while the technology gives workers new ways to manage dating like work.
Joyce Zhang spent part of her career managing products at Stripe. Now she coaches tech founders who want to find a partner, and one of the numbers she talks about is how many app matches turn into dates. The price, as reported by The New York Times, is $5,000 a month. In a city where an evening can be harder to come by than another match, there’s a business in helping people get from one to the other. Times report
Some of the startup workers in the Times story follow a schedule known as 996, shorthand for 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. That’s 72 hours before anyone opens a dating app. Mehul Agarwal, co-founder of AI filmmaking startup Koyal, said it took two months to arrange a date with someone who also worked at an AI startup. Both arrived exhausted, and the conversation slipped into the kind of small talk they already knew from work.
When the First Date Has to Do Too Much
Amanda Chung, who works at AI startup Nectar Social, told the Times about one founder who could meet only after 10 p.m. Another spent an evening asking about her job and how she worked. There’s a practical logic to screening for compatibility when an open evening is rare. The trouble starts when each person shows up expecting to leave with a decision. Sina Hartung, a health AI founder, told the Times that topics like family medical history and exactly how many children someone wants can wait beyond a first date.
Zhang’s clients sometimes put their dating app data in spreadsheets so they can track matches. Some ask ChatGPT to polish replies or analyze past dates. That can help someone notice a habit they’ve missed, but it gives the model only the version of events they choose to type. Zhang’s own writing describes how she used to agree to more dates with people she felt little excitement about because she doubted her judgment. Her work now includes helping clients pay attention to how they actually feel around someone. Zhang’s essay
The Boom Changed the Tools
San Francisco has been through waves of startups demanding long hours. The dating coach’s business predates this particular round of attention, too. In 2025, the San Francisco Standard visited one of Zhang’s events, where tech workers practiced conversation in person. The AI boom has given that older problem a new set of tools. A founder can work past dinner, have a chatbot rewrite a message on the way home and consult a spreadsheet the next morning to see whether any of it paid off. 2025 reporting
The demand for time and attention has also shown up in a different business. Forbes reported in June on escorts who catered to clients in the AI industry, including by learning enough about the field to talk shop. The work itself can be hard to leave behind. Some developers describe feeling guilty when their coding agents sit idle. For the people trying to date around that kind of work, the precious resource is still an evening when both can show up with something left to say. Forbes reporting
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