[EO] Why Tech Companies Keep Opening Cafes

And How Corgi, Cursor, and AngelList Actually Run Them

None of them is a coffee company

The hottest cafe in San Francisco right now is run by an insurance company.If you want to visit Corgi Cafe, be prepared to find it full. Walk in on a weekday afternoon and every table is already taken by builders hammering at their keyboards, some perched on chairs with laptops balanced on their knees, most of them slipping naturally into conversations about each other’s products. “Founder heaven,” as one recent visitor put it, is less hype than plain description.

Here is the strange part. Corgi does not sell coffee for a living. It is an AI insurance carrier valued at $2.6 billion, and the cafe, open only since February 2026, never closes.

Corgi is not alone, either. Over the past several months, Cursor has been throwing one-day cafe pop-ups around the world in what looks like a relay race. What began in September 2025 as renting the cafe next to its SF office for a single day has grown to 176 takeovers across more than 130 cities. When Cafe Cursor returned to San Francisco in June, 2,000 people signed up, and the line stretched around the block before it opened. For a day, my entire feed was Cafe Cursor.

Around the same time those pop-ups began, in September 2025, another cafe started with a tweet. Avlok Kohli, CEO of AngelList, posted a poll asking whether the company should turn the open ground floor of its San Francisco office into an actual cafe for founders. Two weeks later, Founders Cafe existed. Not everyone can get in, but everyone in the scene knows it.

An insurance carrier, a code editor, an investment platform. None of them sell coffee for a living, yet all three now run “cafes.” But when I asked the people who run these spaces how they measure the payoff, the answers were not the ones a CMO would expect. I sat down with all three to find out why and how the spaces actually run.

Why Tech Companies Keep Opening Cafes

Corgi Cafe, Cafe Cursor, and Founders Cafe: why tech companies keep opening cafes in San Francisco, and the playbook their operators shared with EO.

EO MagazineHyeri Jo