Silicon Smokers: Meet the tech founders who think that cigarettes are their edge

Stephen Campbell knows the cigarettes didn’t land him one of his biggest deals, but they certainly lit the match.

The cofounder of the startup Revamp AI was in Shenzhen, meeting with what he calls an “enormous” Chinese tech company. (He’s under NDA with them.) The initial meeting was stressful, especially because of the language barrier, he says.

Then came Chinese barbecue, rounds of Baijiu, and countless cigarettes.

It took the relationship from vendor-customer to something more personal, says the 27-year-old.

They made their way to a cocktail bar (where they smoked), and then a KTV karaoke bar (where they smoked). “By the end of the night, it’s us and our prospects ripping cigs in the karaoke lounge,” Campbell says. “We’re belting out Oasis, because that was their favorite band.” Campbell knows that cigarettes are bad for you.

He also sees the positives: breaks from the founder grind to go outside, and more chats with strangers.

It’s how he’s met most of his neighbors in San Francisco’s Rincon Hill neighborhood and the European tenants in his office building.

Cigarette smoking has been snuffed out across America.

In 1966, more than 40% of US adults smoked, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

By 2022, the rate had dropped to 11.6%.

Smoking is especially rare today in the tech industry, where longevity is practically the official religion.

For those who still want a nicotine fix, more work-appropriate alternatives have flourished, like vapes and zyns.

Startup offices are clouded with the smell of strawberry-matcha smoke; locked-in engineers pack pouches into their gums to code faster.

But a strong counterculture is huffing darts.

Engineers are chainsmoking to power through coding sprints.

Venture capitalists and founders are talking burn rates while burning tar.

For some in tech, amid the noise of optimization, smoking has become the new cignal.

Jake Jolis noticed that the founders who smoke don’t care about VCs — and that makes VCs want them even more.

The Los Angeles-based general partner of Zeno Ventures says the smoking founders’ laissez-faire attitude sets them apart from the “central casting, ruffle no feathers, middle of the road” founders.

He meets with founders early, often before they have a pitch deck.

In some cases, he’s gone for a walk with them or sat outside a coffee shop.

Both activities are outdoors — and he’s seen founders light up in both contexts.

When they offer him one, he passes.

Jolis isn’t actively looking for smokers, and doesn’t necessarily view it as a positive trait.

Rather, it’s a sign that their “guard is down,” he says.

Two of the smokers Jolis has invested in have performed “extremely well,” he says.

Smoking a cigarette is a social activity.

It makes people more casual, especially in an industry that can be stiff and awkward.

One seed-stage investor tells me he felt more confident about an investment after watching the founder smoke Marlboro Reds at a bar.

He liked that the founder could “hang,” he says. “The bond got stronger.” “When you’re smoking, you’re networking by accident,” says Campbell, who has hired some of Revamp’s employees after sharing cigs with them.

Interviews over Marlboros, call it a smokescreen.

Jamie, a crypto alum who asked not to share his last name, met a backer for his raw milk startup at a Miami kava bar.

The crowd was “50% recovering opioid addicts from Appalachia and 50% Wall Street and Silicon Valley refugees looking for shelter from taxes, pandemic restrictions, and leftist ideological hegemony,” he says.

A crowd accumulated in the corner, smoking.

He struck up a conversation with a jacked, Harley-riding investor while chain-smoking Marlboro Reds.

Jamie told the investor about his startup, and the two talked about alternative wellness between drags.

A week later, the investor signed a check.

Smoking poles put him in pole position.

Tech has a long history of smoking.

Robert Noyce, the so-called “Mayor of Silicon Valley” and cofounder of Intel, was a chronic chain-smoker.

Atari staffers smoked “special cigarettes” on the production floor.

Jian Yang from the TV show “Silicon Valley” gifted himself a single cigarette on special occasions.

These days, in the grand tradition of “drunk cigs don’t count,” tech workers say they most often spot cigarettes on the balconies of house parties and outside San Francisco bars.

One Microsoft engineer tells me that he doesn’t see much smoking on the Seattle campus, just managers and senior engineers (read: older).

When he goes to San Francisco, though, he always sees a 20-something from a startup passing around a pack outside the bar.

Avi Schiffmann, the 23-year-old founder of the viral AI wearable Friend, tells me lights up during camera-off work meetings.

It doesn’t matter that he’s inside his San Francisco apartment. “My landlord probably won’t like that,” he says. “It makes my house smell like an opium den.” Schiffmann clarifies that he doesn’t smoke pre-rolled cigarettes; he rolls his own with Amsterdam tobacco. “Cigarettes are kind of ass, honestly,” he said, explaining that the nicotine barely affects him. “It’s a very fun fidget.” Asian imports are also popular among tech’s smokers.

The Microsoft engineer says most of his cigarettes were from China and Japan.

Another San Francisco-based engineer tells me he smokes Mevius, a Japanese cigarette that tastes like berries.

His tech friends bring back cigarettes from their travels, which has turned into a “fun conversation starter.” Revamp’s Campbell used to be a Marlboro smoker, and switched to Chunghwas after the company developed close ties to China.

You can buy them in Chinatown, he says, “if you know where to look.” While cigarette consumption has been decimated in the US, smoking rates are nearly double in Europe and Asia.

Silicon Valley has an extremely strong immigrant workforce — nearly 50% of H-1B applications are related to “professional, scientific, and technical services” — many of whom bring their smoking habits with them to Palo Alto.

Hassan Ismail, a cofounder of the physical AI startup Argos Research, tells me that he’s noticed that hard tech and defense tech founders are smoking more, while SaaS founders have backed away. (He wasn’t sure exactly why, though he said that those industries were more blue-collar, which smoked as a way to “deal with hard labor.”) Still, Ismail says that Chinese founders break this rule. “Friends from China who are straight-up, normal SaaS founders, they all smoke,” he said in July. “They all smoke religiously.” Silicon Valley is on a wellness bender.

Techies are sleepmaxxing, cold-plunging, and hosting peptide parties.

They’re making deals worth billions while they ice their balls in the sauna.

That makes cigarettes highly controversial in tech — and what founder doesn’t like to stir up some internet drama?

Richard Wang strategically placed a pack of Newports in the launch video for a “brainrot IDE” from his startup, Clad Labs.

He wanted something provocative, something that would get the pitchforks out on X. “What’s more bombastic right now than smoking cigs in the Bay Area?” he tells me.

Wang barely smokes, clocking about a cig a year.

For the video, he had to smoke 4-5 Newports in a day, a brand he doesn’t particularly like the taste of.

He’d take a couple of puffs, then leave them for waste.

The rest of the pack still sits in his apartment, untouched.

The health-conscious techies thought he was insane.

The actual smokers thought he was ripping off their culture. “It’s a lose-lose,” he said, which makes a win-win for viral marketing.

Can a healthmaxxer also be a cig-smoker?

The 27-year-old from San Francisco founded the trading app 10X.

He said that many people who spend $800 a month for a boutique sauna/ice bath subscription are trying to “cancel out” their vices. “It’s an unspoken thing that, if someone’s bragging about all their health practices, they’re also very likely smoking a few cigarettes,” Harris says.

Harris smokes blue American Spirits on weekends, but prefers Zyns during the workweek.

The social effects have benefited him: While smoking cigarettes outside San Francisco’s Balboa Café, some founders went “gloves off” and told him not to join the founding team of a certain startup.

He steered clear and is grateful he did.

Others simply aren’t worried about the health costs.

Schiffmann, the Friend founder, referenced an essay by Gwern Branwen, a popular writer among the AI crowd.

The essay considered whether nicotine could have nootropic benefits. “By the time you do get lung cancer, our AI robots are supposed to have cured that,” Schiffmann says.

As for Campbell, he knows his cigarette habit doesn’t jive with the Valley’s relentless focus on health.

For him, that’s a perk. “It’s aggressively inefficient,” he said. “It’s not productive.

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