Tech CEO says San Francisco techies are afraid of 'sex'

Last year's Sex Tech mixer in Los Angeles was a hit. This year, Amorus founder and CEO Elizabeth Dell says the event was pulled from Tech Week pages.

The founder of a fledgling app says that San Francisco's tech scene is afraid of sex, or at least the word "sex."

Elizabeth Dell, the founder and CEO of the romance and sex app Amorus — an app that gamifies sexting for long-term couples — is accusing Andreessen Horowitz (also known as a16z) — the wildly influential tech venture capital firm based in Menlo Park — of hiding her successful sex tech mixer during San Francisco Tech Week.

For the uninitiated, Tech Week is a series of luxe workshops, happy hours and parties like Dell's wrapped under the guise of venture capital and tech networking spearheaded by a16z. This is the first year Tech Week is being held in San Francisco; as in years past, it will also be held in New York and Los Angeles. In this year's lineup for San Francisco: a Barry's Bootcamp "sweatworking" session, a surfing event, an artificial intelligence pitch night with hot wings and bike riding down Golden Gate Park.

Dell, a former Hollywood film producer and recent convert into the tech industry, founded Amorus 18 months ago and has been adamant about getting sex tech — a genre of technology that constitutes everything from apps like hers to sexual health startups to smart sex toys — into the conversation.

"Part of this is to build community among the sex tech community, but part of this is also to bring this community to the wider tech community," Dell said. "… Just like prop tech [real estate and property technology] or space tech or fintech [financial technology] or whatever, I want sex tech on the list."

Romance and sex technology is big business. The sexual wellness market, according to one estimate, was valued at $51 billion in 2021; Match.com, the conglomerate that owns Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid, has a market cap approaching $10 billion. Yet, Dell says that investors on the whole are reluctant to invest in sex technology in the same way they would a real estate or financial tech startup — calling it too risque or salacious. Some investment funds, she said, even have rules against investing in dating apps.

Still, the interest is there. Amorus held successful events in Los Angeles and New York City for those cities’ respective Tech Weeks in 2022; the demand, she says, was such that their event in Manhattan had a line stretching the block. A post-event writeup by dot.LA, a co-coordinator for last year's Los Angeles Tech Week, boasted that the Venice patio where the event was held was "objectively too small for the number of people who show up."

When a16z announced it would hold a Tech Week in San Francisco, Dell gladly volunteered to hold a sex tech event for it.

"I’ll do one in San Francisco, LA and New York," she said. "It’ll be super fun. I love bringing the community together. We already had these two great events."

But when the 2023 Tech Week went live, Dell didn't find a "sex tech mixer" listed — as it was last year. Instead, she found a listing on the site for a "health tech mixer" held by Amorus.

Apparently #SexTech is too scary, even for TechWeek.Earlier this week, @Techweek_ launched its website highlighting events for SF Tech Week (5/30-6/4) and LA Tech Week (6/5-6/11). A thread🧵below ⬇️...

"I’m not hosting a health tech mixer," Dell said. "People who see that will get entirely the wrong idea about what I’m doing."

She says organizers told her that it was an issue of "compliance" — that having the word "sex" on the Tech Week website was an issue. (Representatives from Tech Week did not respond to a request for comment from SFGATE.) So, to compromise, Dell agreed to have the event renamed on the website to an "romance tech mixer" — a euphemism she still was not quite on board with. In a last-ditch effort, she took to LinkedIn and Twitter to gripe about sex tech being "too scary" for Tech Week.

"I am going to share this with the world because this isn't OK," she explained. "This requirement of the code-switching is not what I want to be doing with our industry."

Then, Dell says, organizers removed her event from the Tech Week page entirely. A Wayback Machine cache of the site dated April 14 shows the "romancetech mixer" still on the site. She posted her grievances on Twitter on April 17. By April 23, the event was removed from the Tech Week site entirely, according to the Wayback Machine. There remains no mention of a sex or romance tech mixer on the Tech Week website.

The event in San Francisco is still a go — event listing be damned.

Still, Dell is dismayed at the idea that, in a city with sexual progressivism hard-coded into its history and legacy, even the word "sex" is enough to cause enough anxiety that it needs to be pulled entirely.

"San Francisco has been a place where the other is allowed to thrive, and tech has built itself in this place in large part on that, on the back of the creativity, of the access, of the people who came here," Dell says. "We’re striving to find new and exciting and different things, and to have them turn around and say sexuality, pleasure, identity, these things are not allowed in our playbook, it's a slap in the face."

Culture | The rise and fall of Esprit, SF's coolest clothing brand Local | SF has 37 mini parks. These are the ones worth visiting.Travel | The best places to eat between SF and LA Food | How corner store cocktails in Ziplock bags became legendary in SF