San Francisco’s First No Telephones Occasion Revealed What Tech Can’t Automate

Founders and creators put down their phones for three hours at the height of SF Tech Week.

EXPERT OPINION BY KAMYA MARWAH, MARKETING EXPERT

San Francisco is the AI capital of the world. And for one Thursday evening, a room full of the people building its future went offline.

I spent the past week running around SF Tech Week. There were around 1,700 events happening across the city, and I made it to multiple panels, brunches, build sessions and the kind of events where everyone seems to be working on something they want to show you.

Almost everything, unsurprisingly, involved a screen.

People pulled out their phones to exchange LinkedIns,

People pulled out their phones to exchange LinkedIns, film panels, answer messages and show each other what they were building. I was doing it too. As a creator covering the week, my phone (and camera) practically became an extension of my hand.

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It was exciting, but it was also mentally exhausting. Which is why I was particularly curious about the one event where I wouldn’t be able to use my phone at all.

San Francisco’s first No Phones Party

On Thursday night, AI-powered B2B sales and go-to-market company Apollo teamed up with creator-entrepreneur and AI educator Cat Goetze—who is known to her more than 1 million followers as CatGPT—to bring Goetze’s viral No Phones Party series to San Francisco for the first time.

Phones were “pouched” at the door of wine bar Key Klub for three hours. No scrolling. No Slack. No filming. No pulling up LinkedIn halfway through a conversation.

Source: www.inc.com