Category:Famous people from San Francisco
San Francisco is a city of under a million residents that has supplied California with an outsized share of its statewide officeholders and the technology industry with most of its founders. This category collects biographical entries on people connected to the city, and it splits cleanly in two: a political bench running back to the mid-twentieth century, in which most members were actually born in San Francisco, and a much larger contemporary layer of company founders who moved there and now work out of it. The second group is growing faster than the first, which is why the roster reads younger every year.
California politics, from City Hall outward
The political membership is unusual in how tightly its members are connected to each other. Dianne Feinstein was president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1978 when she announced the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, who is also in this category as the first openly gay man elected to public office in California. Feinstein became the city's first female mayor, led it for a decade, and then spent more than thirty years in the United States Senate, where she was the first Jewish woman elected and, at her death, its longest-serving member from California.
Two governors in this category were father and son, both born in the city. Pat Brown rose out of the San Francisco district attorney's office to serve as the state's 32nd governor from 1959 to 1967. Jerry Brown followed as the 34th and 39th, finishing four terms and sixteen years in the office. Gavin Newsom came out of the same city government to become the 40th governor. Nancy Pelosi represented the city while serving two separate terms as Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. London Breed, raised in public housing in the Western Addition, served as the 45th mayor. The category extends past city and state lines into the federal executive: Robert McNamara and Caspar Weinberger were both born in San Francisco and both served as United States Secretary of Defense, and Stephen Breyer, born and raised there, sat on the Supreme Court of the United States for nearly three decades.
The companies built from here
The business membership covers several distinct waves. Steve Jobs, born in the city, co-founded Apple. Paul Otellini, whose family had lived in San Francisco for generations, became the fifth chief executive of Intel. Marc Benioff founded Salesforce and put its tower on the skyline. Barry Diller built and rebuilt media and travel businesses across five decades. The consumer internet wave is represented by Katrina Lake, who founded Stitch Fix, Jason Citron, who co-founded Discord, and Apoorva Mehta, who founded Instacart. Dario Amodei, born in the city in 1983, runs Anthropic.
The current founder layer
Most of the membership added in recent years is not native to the city at all. It consists of technical founders, most of them accelerator-backed, who give San Francisco as their base: Gregor Zunic built an open-source library for browser automation, Angie Muller builds compliance and clinical documentation software for behavioral health providers, Nishant Hooda left Stripe's core API team to build web testing tools, and Sam Mendel and Eric Kim design and operate underwater data centers. They arrive from India, Canada, France, Belgium, Korea and Britain, and they cluster in the same few square miles. Reading the category top to bottom is the clearest available illustration of the difference between where people are from and where the work happens.
See also
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