A first-person shooter set in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood and vibe-coded by a Y Combinator-funded entrepreneur set off an immediate and overwhelming backlash last month, as news outlets picked up on the controversy and elected officials condemned its dehumanization of the poor. Within days of its initial release, "Tenderloin Night Shift" was taken down by its creator, Pierre-Louis Biojout, who apologized for his poor judgement.
During the game's brief lifespan, Biojout gleefully rage-baited his critics on X, bragged about selling billboard space in his murderous dystopia, and used the outrage cycle to promote his AI startup. The list of advertisers has not been made public.
The news cycle will move on from "Tenderloin Night Shift", but the episode reveals a truth about San Francisco that appears destined to endure: Y Combinator is a problem.
The startup incubator is deeply enmeshed within a right-wing network of tech wealth and power that has remade national politics in Trump's second term. Current YC CEO Garry Tan is an acolyte of Peter Thiel, an early employee of Palantir, an early investor in Flock Safety, and has aspirations of rinsing San Francisco of its progressive policies. He went so far as to publicly call for the death of progressive San Francisco politicians and his instrumental role in recent recall elections and gray money political influence operations have made him a player in the local Democratic Party.
Former Y Combinator CEO Sam Altman is now busy running OpenAI and risking the solvency of the US economy in his bid to "reshape the material conditions of human life" by either automating all human intellectual labor or accidentally destroying the human species. Altman has served as an advisor to Mayor Daniel Lurie and publicly supports Donald Trump. Y Combinator alumnus and AirBnB cofounder Joe Gebbia was tapped by Trump to serve as the first-ever US Chief Design Officer and launch America.gov, a Grok-powered "concierge to navigate government." And current Y Combinator employees and officers of companies it funds have been at the forefront of a social media campaign to vote for Manny Yekutiel for Supervisor AFTER Yekutiel withdrew from the race because of sexual assault allegations.
Since relocating from Mountain View to San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood in 2023, Y Combinator has increasingly invested in military technology companies: of 27 defense startups Y Combinator has incubated, 19 were in the last year. Tan himself was a chief instigator of the "doomloop" narrative and constantly derides San Francisco's homeless. "Tenderloin Night Shift" was not an anomaly. It seems to accurately reflect the cultural trend of Y Combinator companies.
