Silicon Valley has now started applying pre-seed investment logic even to dating. I recently came across a new podcast called SOTA Wives, hosted by Vivian Midha Shen, a partner at Y Combinator, and Sarah Chieng, Head of Developer Ecosystem at Cerebras. In the first episode, they discussed an intriguing topic: “Find your husband before he exits.” Sarah shared her story: when she first met her husband Tyler, she was living under the stairs in a startup co-living house in San Francisco. Shortly after they began dating, Tyler, as a founding engineer at Brev, saw the company acquired by NVIDIA—earning the team a substantial payout. The podcast’s official account later posted a tweet offering San Francisco young women their first dating tip: “Lock him in before the acquisition.” Vivian described this kind of relationship as angel investing at the pre-seed stage. And how do you know if your partner is the right one? Her answer: you have to be willing to take the bet. It left me a little stunned. Of course, both women are highly successful professionals in their own right, and they genuinely explored how marriage can support career growth and the value of building a relationship when you have nothing. But I strongly dislike this narrative. It reduces the most important aspects of intimate relationships to a calculation of future economic value. You meet someone before they’re successful; later, they become wealthy—and suddenly, your romantic choice is framed as an extraordinarily successful early-stage investment. Even more absurd is that this rhetoric comes from two women who already possess significant resources and social standing. Silicon Valley elites have long used ROI to explain everything—and now even love is subject to this logic: marry before the exit, evaluate potential valuation when choosing a partner, and pick your life companion with the eyes of an early-stage investor. But what about all the ordinary couples who never had an exit, never struck it rich—what does their decade or two decades of shared life count for in this narrative? What I find most troubling is how it packages the rare luck of a few as a replicable life strategy. In the end, even love becomes a project that must prove your foresight.
