What are you building?

Every city has an opener. New York asks what you do; LA asks who you know; San Francisco skips the person entirely and asks about the product. The SF Standard's guide to speaking fluent tech bro canonized the observation: in this town, "what are you building?" comes before your name. Names are metadata; the build is the identity.

The question does an enormous amount of silent work. It sorts the room instantly (pre-seed, post-exit, LARPing), it converts small talk into diligence, and it is unanswerable safely: too little and you're dismissed, too much and you've just pitched a stranger at a birthday party. The truly fluent answer with something vague and confident ("agents, mostly") and return the question like a serve.

It is also the city's most honest sentence, because it contains the whole worldview: that everyone is mid-build, that the build is the interesting thing about you, and that the correct response to meeting a new human is to inquire about their roadmap. Field-tested nightly at Balboa and every mixer; the answer determines whether the follow-up is your name or someone else's eye contact.