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Sitting in the audience of Co-Founders, a new hip-hop musical playing at San Francisco’s Strand Theater, I notice that the start-up founder I invited to join me is bouncing his leg up and down.
David Yue, Stanford dropout turned co-founder of artificial intelligence research company Accordance, assures me that he’s not annoyed by the production or anxious to get back to the grind — he’s just enjoying the show. “This is all fascinating,” he says. “It’s exaggerated but accurate. Silicon Valley can feel like a cult.”
Part-financed by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and pitched by the show’s producers as a mash-up between the musical Hamilton and the sitcom Silicon Valley, Co-Founders tells the story of Esata Thompson, a Black woman from Oakland who hacks her way into a start-up incubator called Xcelerator (a parody of the Bay Area’s famously competitive early-stage start-up accelerator Y Combinator), while also trying to rescue her family home from the grips of gentrification.
The script, written by a collective that includes a former Microsoft engineer and a Grammy nominee, is stuffed with local references and tech stereotypes including nepo baby founders and megalomaniac executives who quiz ambitious young wannabes about being “the 1 per cent” — a reference to Y Combinator’s purported acceptance rate.
Yue, a Y Combinator alum, says the musical does a good job of interrogating the strange culture of tech start-ups. It’s a world in which, he says, entrepreneurs drink the “Kool-Aid of disruption while chasing billion-dollar fantasies”.
“It’s an insular ecosystem obsessed with finding the next unicorn,” he adds.
The musical, which has been in development for nearly a decade and is on the 13th iteration of its script, is particularly interested in the intersection between start-up culture and activism.
Its main score, “Silicon Valley to Vallejo”, gives a rhyming potted history of the tech boom and I nod along to lyrics including: “In ’95 the bubble comes alive. (Yahoo!) Netscape IPO. Dot boom!” and “Leland Stanford and Jane back in 1885. A century went by and then the mafia arrived (PayPal).”
But the defining theme is inequality across the sector, in particular its relationship with the Black community. It highlights tech’s recent pull back in diversity, equity and inclusion. As one character puts it bluntly: “I thought the DEI ship had sailed.”
Hoffman, an outspoken Democrat who has criticised the tech sector’s swing in favour of Donald Trump’s administration, tells me the show “holds up a mirror” with “humour, music and heart”.
“The show isn’t anti-tech. It’s anti-hubris. And if we’re serious about building a better future, that’s a message we need to hear and embrace,” he says.
This better future is envisioned in the musical’s feel-good conclusion as an “all people-powered accelerator” that is created to help community start-ups.
As someone who covers the cut-throat tech sector, this feels as if it is stretching the limits of artistic licence. But Ryan Nicole Austin, one of the show’s writers, says that this is intentional.
“There is value in reflecting the times. But there is value in imagining a better alternative,” she says. “Maybe it’s not realistic. We have the benefit of doing theatre. It can be as fantastical as we want it to be.”
After its run in San Francisco, Co-Founders’ creators are hoping that the musical will reach Broadway in New York, challenging popular depictions of Silicon Valley that focus purely on ultra-wealthy founders and Big Tech.
I suspect it will be even more popular with New York crowds than audiences in the Bay, many of whom are well aware of the tech sector’s oddities and can be sensitive to criticism.
After we leave the performance, Yue tells me he’ll walk back to his apartment rather than wait for a self-driving Waymo. When we catch up a few days later he’s full of praise for the musical’s ambition — even if it’s activist message didn’t do anything to change his own perception of the Valley.
“A musical isn’t going to change people’s hearts, but at least this one’s taking risks . . . I can’t think of anything that captures the essence of this place more than that.”
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