On a cool October evening during San Francisco Tech Week, a line of people gathered outside the wrought-iron gates of a Pacific Heights mansion. Two burning braziers flanked a red carpet leading up the steps up to the house—a former art school building whose revivalist architecture felt worlds apart from the offices and corporate venues of other Tech Week events. The crowd, too, looked out of place by San Francisco standards: structured jackets, silk neck scarves, and tailored skirts set the tone, with barely a hoodie in sight. This was Fashion X Tech, an event devoted to a topic many people no longer associate with San Francisco: style.
Max Hui, the founder and CEO of Lookbook, is amongst the attendees. “I heard someone say this was the best-dressed room in SF. They’re not wrong,” he jokes.
His startup, a consumer app focused on curating personalized outfit inspo for Gen Z, isn’t an obvious fit for a city better known for SaaS and enterprise software. In fact, the city is described as one of the worst-dressed in the country, thanks to its inescapable tech scene, where hybrid and remote work is prevalent and and in-office dress codes, where they exist, tend to be more relaxed. Despite this, a number of fashion founders have decided on San Francisco as their home base. For Hui, the logic is straightforward: the city may not be Lookbook’s market, but it is still one of the best places to build the company.
“One thing that’s really hard to substitute is the startup environment. It’s undoubtedly the best place to build. You’re surrounded by people who are doing the same thing, and it helps you find your bearings,” Hui says to Tech Funding News.
Hui argues that the infrastructure needed to get a company off the ground is unparalleled in San Francisco, from capital to talent to incubators. One part of that ecosystem seeing a post-pandemic resurgence is hacker houses and in-person founder communities in the Bay Area.
“A big part of kickstarting my journey was living at one of the houses in The Residency”, Hui recalls. “It put me in touch with the right people and a group of people working towards the same goals.”
The Residency is one of several prominent hacker-house programs in the Bay Area. In some ways, it positions itself as an alternative to the traditional path of higher-education. It’s no less selective, though; according to their socials, one of the organization’s recent cohorts had about 3000 applicants, of which 3% were given a place in one of its 6 Bay Area houses.
Despite the demand for these living communities, the sentiment surrounding them can be mixed. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to separate the culture fueling hacker houses from the new-age AI hustle culture that is grifty, cringe, or “weirdly ascetic”, depending on who you ask. Nonetheless, for early founders, these programs can compress months of introductions, feedback, and momentum into a much shorter window.
Hui credits that environment with helping Lookbook raise $150,000 in initial capital from both angel and institutional investors.
“It’s allowed us to go and validate our theses with the market,” he says. But the value, he argues, extends beyond funding. “Intimate dinners, parties, panels, summits — they all put you in touch with different people that matter to your journey,” Hui remarks.
Hui has also become a connector in his own right. He helped bring the Fashion x Tech event to the Pacific Heights mansion—fittingly, one of The Residency’s houses. The event’s oversubscribed turnout suggests to Hui that, even in a city not typically associated with fashion, there is appetite for consumer and culture-focused technology.
Nonetheless, Hui is careful not to confuse that with San Francisco being a perfect proxy for Lookbook’s users.
“I always get told I should be in New York instead,” Hui says. “Don’t get me wrong. Being close to the consumer is probably the number one most important thing to do.”
He just doesn’t believe that closeness has to mean physical proximity. Instead, his team uses their millions-strong viewership on social media to reach users elsewhere: New York, Los Angeles, and on college campuses across the country.
“In the age of social media and algorithms, content that we post might naturally find our target users in places like LA, New York, maybe even more easily than it might find someone physically closer to us,” he says.
To put their hypothesis to the test, the Lookbook team started posting to TikTok—according to Hui, before they’d started building the app. A few weeks in, one of their videos went viral, reaching hundreds of thousands of viewers. Since then, the team has accrued millions of views across platforms, and has expanded to involve multiple creators and freelancers working on the project.
In addition to helping them raise brand awareness, Hui says these social campaigns have helped the team understand which ideas, features, and pain points have resonated with real users outside the San Francisco bubble.
“It becomes a bit of a two-way conversation with our target audience,” he says.
That online dialogue between Lookbook’s team and their users matters to them, Hui says, consumer startups can be vulnerable to misleading feedback. He’s found this to be especially true in San Francisco, whose startup scene has no shortage of opinions on any product or idea.
This seems to be the one thing that tempers Hui’s otherwise effusive view of the city. “Too much of [it] can get noisy,” he says of the Bay Area’s startup culture. “There’s a lot of hype that sometimes you have to ignore, and opinions that you have to… well, have opinions on. Opinions on opinions.”
Ultimately, Hui’s case for San Francisco isn’t about whether the product is a fit for the city. If anything, it’s a case for separating the place where culture is observed from the place where companies are built.
His company has found that it can learn from users online. It can test its branding on TikTok, watch behavior on Instagram, and find users far outside the Bay Area. What San Francisco offers, then, is a different set of tools: capital, density, urgency, and a high tolerance for early, unfinished ideas.
For Lookbook, and for Hui, that’s enough reason to call San Francisco home base.
