Emily Sundberg, newsletter maven and New York media “it” girl, flew in Thursday from a frozen Gotham for a closer look at AI-era San Francisco.
Over five days, the author of the cult-favorite business-media-culture-gossip newsletter Feed Me (opens in new tab) took meetings at Anthropic, spoke to MBA students at Stanford, met “shitposter” donald boat (opens in new tab) at Substack HQ, and attended a sober house party at a $24 million mansion in Sea Cliff owned by the CEO of Midjourney, where guests drank coconut water and La Croix.
Sundberg had martinis at Bix, swam with seals in Sausalito, walked around Pacific Heights — writing later about the “monstrous homes” that looked like heaven in The Good Place, and vacant streets, where “private police drove in loops up and down the hills, protecting nobody from everyone else” — and cracked open Dungeness crab at Hog Island Oyster Co.
The scene at Sundberg’s bar party.
“The whole purpose of this trip is to have face time with the people who are reading my newsletter,” she said on the third day of her trip, drinking coffee in the lobby of Hotel Drisco.
She was staying there on the recommendation of Dylan Abruscato, a friend of Feed Me and president of TBPN (opens in new tab), Silicon Valley’s podcast-turned-media company of the moment. She wore a black turtleneck, blue jeans, and loafers — an outfit giving 2026 Manhattan as much as ’90s Steve Jobs.
Her first stop, just a few hours off her JetBlue flight, was Bar Part Time in the Mission, where she hosted a party for Feed Me subscribers and admirers, including Abruscato, Brian Gallagher, a senior food editor at The New York Times, and Broke-Ass Stuart (opens in new tab). About 200 well-dressed locals gathered to move through Sundberg’s orbit while drinking orange wine, devouring tacos from the El Tonayense truck, and snagging free Feed Me baseball caps.
It was a convincingly SF-by-way-of NYC crowd, with sheer blouses and indigo-dyed T-shirts replacing the puffy coats and cashmere scarves strewn around any New York bar this time of year. Sundberg wore a miniskirt and knee-high boots, her hair held loosely in a claw clip.
“It’s exciting to be in a room of people I’ve never met who read the same stuff as the people who I spend time with in New York,” she said.
Everyone got dressed up.
Faded red caps with Feed Me’s distinctly techie logo.
Sundberg says about 20% of Feed Me’s 100,000-plus readers are in California. She started the newsletter — dedicated to “the spirit of enterprise” — while working as a creative strategist at Meta, but after getting laid off in 2022, she went all in. Though her daily dispatches are centered on New York — where Sundberg, 31, has lived for 17 years (she was born and raised on Long Island) — it has found considerable reach beyond it.
Her California subscribers include state officials, venture capitalists, and executives at Apple, Meta, and OpenAI. To bring the reporting into their own backyard, she’s adding a monthly West Coast edition and plans to visit every few months.
What she found Thursday was a dialed-in scene of zillennials who looked like they knew how to work a party. “It was a gorgeous, interesting, employed room,” Sundberg said.
The hostess didn’t make a big speech; after names were checked at the door, readers were left to schmooze and circulate freely between half-moon booths and a checkered dance floor. “This crowd is cooler compared to the average happy hour,” said one man who works in tech. “I’d much rather be here.”
A former legacy media editor approached Sundberg, joking that she had a pitch for the newsletter, without specifying what it was.
Sundberg meets fans.
“You can pitch me fucking anything!” Sundberg replied — and she meant it.
The next morning, Feed Me included intel she had picked up that night: An Airbnb designer was running a fragrance brand; there was a new media venture in the city operated by Patrick McGuire, a former Red Bull executive. She aggregated news about RH’s 50,000-square-foot lease in Walnut Creek and the closure of Taix, Los Angeles’ oldest French restaurant, after nearly a century. “I remember eating mussels and fries in the parking lot with my ex-boyfriend,” Sundberg wrote.
Maybe it was the sunshine and warm-for-January temperatures, but Sundberg seemed suitably wowed by her journey west. “There are broad strokes being painted about San Francisco all the time, especially by New Yorkers — that it’s sterile or chilly or robotic,” she said. “I didn’t feel that at all.”
She sees a direct line between her New York crowd and her burgeoning San Francisco one. The newsletter’s appeal is in “the alchemy,” Sundberg said. “You get the line item about the Sweetgreen founder and the tip about the restaurant donating money to ICE, and the interview with the former Vice guy launching a media company. If you want hard business news, you can go to Bloomberg.”
As the evening at Bar Part Time wound down, the taco truck closed, the free drinks became a cash bar, and a small crowd lingered. A man wearing wide black trousers, a white knit cardigan, sneakers, and a Feed Me cap approached Sundberg and hugged her goodbye.
“Maybe we can hang out while you’re here,” he said.
“Yeah,” she laughed. “Let’s go see ‘Melania.’”
Hours after landing back in New York, she wrote from her couch in South Slope, Brooklyn: “I already want to go back.”