Most Unhinged
Fake Fog Founder & Fake VC
SValley Ep. 085: At SF Tech Week, a founder pitched heaters at the Golden Gate Bridge to dispel the fog on command — at a pitch contest where one prize category is literally most unhinged. Ep. 085 sits in on the meeting.
San Francisco. Six a.m. A Tech Week pitch contest at a venture firm called Superset. Prize category: most unhinged.
FOUNDER: Judges. Karl the Fog. Nine months a year it rolls into San Francisco and monetizes nothing. We are here to change that.
VC: Change the fog.
FOUNDER: Dispense the fog. We install heaters at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge and dispel it on command. Fog is the last unmonetized atmospheric layer.
VC: The bridge is a national landmark.
FOUNDER: Which is why the fog has first-mover advantage. Eighty-nine years of user retention.
VC: We are not funding weather.
FOUNDER: You are not funding weather. You are funding Fog-Free Sunrise as a subscription. Uptime: three hundred forty days a year.
VC: And the other twenty-five?
FOUNDER: Fog Credits. You earn them back. Karl gives, Karl takes.
VC: Why would anyone fund this?
FOUNDER: Because everyone else here is pitching the same five models. The fog is pre-installed, has brand recognition, and cannot be cloned. You cannot Y Combinator the weather.
The judges retired to deliberate. The fog could not be reached for comment. It rolled in.
The Facts Behind It
- The pitch contest. NPR attended SF Tech Week (hundreds of events across San Francisco) and reported from a pitch competition at the venture firm Superset, where one of the prizes is for most unhinged.
- The fog pitch. A founder really pitched installing heaters near the Golden Gate Bridge to “basically dispel it on command” — heaters aimed at Karl the Fog, the city’s famous marine layer.
- Tech Week color. NPR’s day started with morning cold plunges in the San Francisco Bay, led in a Nordic chant by an Estonian founder in town to network.
- The Golden Gate Bridge. Opened in 1937 — eighty-nine years before this episode.
- Fiction framing: the judges’ deliberation, the subscriptions, Fog Credits, and the outcome above are invented for satire — NPR reported the pitch and the prize category, not a win. The fog founder and the VC are fictional voices, no real person depicted.