PALO ALTO, CA — At a co-working space on University Avenue on Monday morning, a 31-year-old founder named Braxton paused mid-standup to quietly remove his Patagonia vest, fold it into a perfect square, and place it on the floor like a man preparing to fight his own reflection. He had just been told, again, that the Chinese AI model DeepSeek can do roughly what his company does, but for what one investor described as “the cost of a Chipotle bowl with guac.” Braxton did not cry. Braxton sipped. Braxton whispered the word “moat” three times like a prayer.
It has now been four weeks since DeepSeek emerged from a Hangzhou office park and detonated the self-esteem of an entire zip code. What began as a news cycle has curdled into a lifestyle. Across Silicon Valley, founders who last month were using the phrase “compound intelligence” in LinkedIn posts are now making eye contact with their baristas for the first time in years, searching the faces of strangers for reassurance that their $400 million Series B still matters.
“We are observing textbook anticipatory grief,” said Dr. Marla Vennick, a workplace psychologist who specializes in founder decompensation and charges $675 an hour to say things like this. “The denial phase was brief because the denial phase required them to stop checking X. Most of my clients are now oscillating between bargaining and a new fifth stage we’ve had to add called ‘posting a thread.'”
Reports from the ground suggest the posting has reached levels typically associated with a primary election or a Taylor Swift album. One thread, which began “A few thoughts on why DeepSeek’s numbers are, respectfully, a little sus,” ran to 47 tweets and ended with the author announcing his new podcast. Another founder livestreamed himself re-reading the DeepSeek technical paper while a sous chef prepared a sea bass behind him. The sea bass was not acknowledged.
The panic has mutated, as panics do, into commerce. A pop-up on Sand Hill Road called The Moat Room is reportedly charging $180 for a 45-minute session in which founders are handed a laminated printout of their pitch deck and allowed to scream at it. A competing space in SoMa offers “Existential Breathwork for People Who Said AGI Was Six Months Away,” which is sold out through April. Matcha consumption in the 94301 zip code is up a reported 340%, per a barista named Liana who, to be clear, is not a statistician but has eyes.
Meanwhile, the rest of America has responded to the DeepSeek crisis with the measured and dignified response of downloading it immediately and asking it to write wedding toasts. TikTok users who last month briefly relocated to RedNote in protest of the ban are now openly stacking Chinese apps on their home screens like Pokémon cards, casually learning enough Mandarin to follow a skincare routine, and tagging their Silicon Valley ex-boyfriends in memes.
“I asked DeepSeek to explain my lease, to draft a breakup text, and to tell me if my cat is mad at me,” said Cassidy Munn, 28, a dental hygienist in Tulsa who has no stake in the geopolitical implications of frontier model development. “It nailed all three. My ex, who works at a company with a lowercase name, has blocked me.”
Inside the firms themselves, all-hands meetings have reportedly taken on the dissociative energy of a high school assembly about drunk driving. At one unnamed foundation model company, a chief strategy officer spent 22 minutes explaining that DeepSeek’s efficiency numbers are, quote, “vibes-based,” before being gently interrupted by an intern who pointed out that “vibes-based” was the exact phrase used to justify last quarter’s burn rate. The intern has since been promoted or fired; sources could not confirm which because, in Silicon Valley, those can be the same thing.
Venture capitalists, sensing blood, have pivoted with the grace of cats landing on countertops. Andreessen Horowitz is said to be workshopping a thesis called “Scrappy Is the New Scale.” One partner at a rival firm, who asked to be identified only as “a guy who was very early on Bored Apes,” said the new playbook is to fund teams of “two guys, a GPU, and a grievance.” He then excused himself to take a call from his mother.
Not everyone is suffering. A small cohort of Bay Area founders has reportedly embraced DeepSeek with the enthusiasm of converts, rebranding their companies overnight to include phrases like “efficient by design” and “lean-pilled.” One CEO changed his LinkedIn headline from “Scaling Intelligence” to “I Was Always Skeptical of Hyperscalers (See Archived Posts).” The archived posts were not, in fact, available.
Back at the co-working space, Braxton had by Monday afternoon regained enough composure to open a blank Notion doc titled “Pivot?” He sat with it for an hour. He added a question mark, then removed it, then added it back. His co-founder, a man named Peregrine who has the haircut of someone who owns a standing desk, suggested they “go outside,” a phrase neither had deployed unironically since 2019.
They went outside. The sun was doing its usual thing. A Waymo drove past, empty, driven by math that cost a reported six dollars.