Silicon Valley's Smoking Counterculture: How Cigarettes Became a Startup Networking Tool

In an industry obsessed with longevity hacks, cold plunges, and peptide parties, a scrappy counterculture is lighting up. A cohort of founders, engineers, and VCs in San Francisco and beyond are embracing cigarettes — not despite the health risks, but sometimes because of them. The behavior is partly social, partly transgressive, and surprisingly effective as a business lubricant in an industry that can be notoriously stiff and transactional.

The networking angle is real. Stephen Campbell, 27-year-old cofounder of Revamp AI, credits a chain-smoking karaoke night in Shenzhen — complete with rounds of Baijiu and belting Oasis — with cementing a major deal with a large Chinese tech company. Back in San Francisco, he's hired employees after sharing cigarettes with them. Jake Jolis, a general partner at LA-based Zeno Ventures, has noticed that founders who smoke tend to carry a laissez-faire attitude that makes them stand out from pitch-perfect, risk-averse founder archetypes. Two smoking founders he backed have performed extremely well. A seed-stage investor separately said watching a founder smoke Marlboro Reds at a bar made him feel more confident about the deal — proof the founder could 'hang.'

The demographics skew heavily toward immigrant founders and workers. With nearly 50% of H-1B applications tied to technical services, Silicon Valley's workforce imports smoking cultures from Europe and Asia, where rates are nearly double the U.S. average. Chinese founders, in particular, are flagged repeatedly — one founder notes they 'smoke religiously' regardless of whether they're building hard tech or plain SaaS. Popular imports include Mevius (a Japanese berry-flavored cigarette) and Chunghwas, a Chinese brand available in San Francisco's Chinatown. Revamp's Campbell switched from Marlboros to Chunghwas after deepening ties with China.

Smoking is also being wielded as deliberate provocation. Richard Wang of startup Clad Labs planted a pack of Newports in his product launch video specifically to generate outrage on X — health-conscious techies thought he was insane, actual smokers felt their culture was being appropriated. He smokes roughly one cigarette per year but chain-smoked 4-5 Newports for the shoot. The stunt worked as intended. Meanwhile, Avi Schiffmann, 23-year-old founder of viral AI wearable Friend, rolls his own cigarettes with Amsterdam tobacco during camera-off meetings inside his San Francisco apartment, describing the habit as 'a very fun fidget' rather than a nicotine dependency.

The trend sits in sharp tension with Silicon Valley's wellness obsession. U.S. smoking rates have cratered from over 40% of adults in 1966 to just 11.6% in 2022, and tech has been among the most aggressively health-forward industries. Yet some founders argue the inefficiency of a cigarette break is precisely the point — forced pauses, outdoor conversations, and accidental networking that no productivity app can replicate. One founder even invokes an essay by AI-adjacent writer Gwern Branwen exploring nicotine's potential nootropic benefits, and half-jokes that by the time lung cancer arrives, AI will have cured it anyway.