Stephen Campbell went to Shenzhen to save a deal going sideways. The cofounder of Revamp AI had flown in to meet a Chinese tech company, and the room was stiff in the way rooms get when both sides want the same thing and neither will say so first. What broke it open wasn’t a term sheet. It was barbecue, baijiu, and a night of chain-smoking.
The deal closed. Campbell has since hired people he met over a cigarette. He told Business Insider why it works: “When you’re smoking, you’re networking by accident.”
Startup founders are smoking cigarettes again, and not quietly. After two decades of the tech industry treating nicotine as a character flaw, a visible slice of Bay Area founders and engineers has started lighting up on purpose. The founder smoking revival is a counter-signal inside startup culture: a cluster of founders and engineers taking up cigarettes as a deliberate rejection of the industry’s wellness-tracking norms, and treating the smoke break as an unscheduled networking slot nobody has to be invited to.
It isn’t a health story. It’s a status story, and it tells you something uncomfortable about how founder relationships actually get built.
Last updated: October 2026
Quick answers
Why are startup founders smoking cigarettes again?
Founders are smoking again as a counter-signal against tech’s wellness culture and as a networking device. Cigarette breaks create unscheduled, low-stakes conversation with people they’d otherwise never meet, and the habit reads as proof that someone isn’t performing self-discipline for an audience.
Is smoking a networking trend in Silicon Valley?
For a small group, yes. Founders including Revamp AI’s Stephen Campbell credit smoke breaks with closing deals and sourcing hires. The ritual works because it has no agenda and a natural time limit, which lowers the stakes of approaching a stranger.
What is counter-signaling in startup culture?
Counter-signaling is advertising status by visibly skipping the status markers everyone else performs. In tech, that means a founder who ignores the recovery score and the cold plunge, signaling that their results speak loudly enough to survive a visible vice.
Why are tech founders smoking cigarettes again?
Tech founders are smoking cigarettes again because the habit has become rare enough to carry meaning. In an industry where the default performance is a sleep score, a protein target and a Sunday sauna, the cigarette is the one visible choice that can’t be read as self-improvement.
Richard Wang, cofounder of Clad Labs, put the logic plainly when he asked what could possibly be more bombastic right now than smoking cigarettes in the Bay Area. The answer, roughly, is nothing. That’s the point.
Three forces are stacked underneath it. The first is exhaustion with the self-improvement treadmill, which GJ has tracked across sleep investment, movement snacks and vagus nerve stimulators. Each of those started as a genuine tool and ended as a thing founders perform at each other.
The second is demographic. Silicon Valley runs on an immigrant workforce drawn from countries where smoking rates sit near double the American rate, so the habit never actually left the building. It just stopped being mentioned out loud.
The third is the oldest one in startup history: offices got quiet. Remote work and heads-down AI sprints stripped out the accidental collisions that used to produce introductions, and the smoke break is one of the few rituals that reliably manufactures them.
Workers describing the revival to Moneywise framed it in career terms rather than pleasure terms. The smoking pit, they said, is where the information moves: who is hiring, which round fell apart, which engineer is unhappy enough to take a call. That’s a reporting line, not a survey, and it should be weighted accordingly. But it matches what anyone who has worked in a building with a designated smoking area already knows.
None of these three forces require tobacco. They require a place to stand and a reason to be there. Tobacco just happens to supply both for about $11 a pack.
Is smoking actually a networking tactic?
The networking claim holds up better than the health claim. A cigarette takes about seven minutes, happens outside, has no host and no agenda, and gives two strangers a socially legible reason to stand next to each other without explaining themselves. That’s a structure most founder events spend thousands of dollars trying to fake.
Campbell’s Shenzhen story is the clean version. A tense negotiation became a personal one over shared cigarettes, and the deal moved. He’s since hired people he met the same way. Those outcomes are real, and they’re also the kind of thing that gets selected for in retellings.
Investors have noticed the signal. Jake Jolis, a partner at Zeno Ventures, has said he reads a founder smoking as a sign their guard is down, and he’s pointed to two founders in his portfolio who smoke and who have performed well. Read that carefully. He isn’t claiming nicotine improves judgment. He’s describing a founder who is willing to be seen doing something unsanctioned, which is a proxy for independence from consensus.
The selection problem matters. Nobody writes up the founder who smoked through four years of flat growth, because that story has no hook. Every anecdote in circulation right now is a success story told backward, and backward-told stories make weak evidence. Campbell’s Shenzhen night is genuinely useful as an illustration of how trust forms in a tense negotiation. It is not evidence that cigarettes close deals.
Here’s the catch. The same mechanism works without the cigarette. The thing producing the introduction is the unscheduled, time-boxed, agenda-free window, not the tobacco. GJ reported a version of this when founders started replacing conference panels with curated supper clubs, which solve the same problem with better odds of living to see the exit.
What is counter-signaling in startup culture?
Counter-signaling is what happens when a status marker gets so widely adopted that opting out becomes the higher-status move. Once every founder wears an Oura ring and quotes their HRV, wearing one proves nothing. Skipping it, visibly, implies you don’t need the proof.
This is the same dynamic GJ documented when male founders traded sneakers for loafers. The hoodie was a counter-signal in 2010. By 2020 it was a uniform, so it stopped signaling anything at all.
Smoking is a sharper version because it carries real cost. Anyone can skip a Whoop strap. Lighting a cigarette in front of a partner at a top-tier fund means absorbing a visible health penalty and a visible social penalty, and doing it anyway. One founder in Business Insider’s reporting, Lucas Harris of the trading app 10X, made the inverted observation: the people loudest about their health protocols are often the ones smoking in private.
There’s a longer history here than most founders realize. Robert Noyce, the Intel cofounder who got called the mayor of Silicon Valley, ran the chip industry in an era when the cigarette was just furniture. The Valley didn’t quit smoking because it got wise. It quit because the wellness economy gave it something better to perform.
That performance has a cost of its own. Some Bay Area workers now spend roughly $800 a month on wellness treatments partly to offset habits they believe help their careers, which is an expensive way to lose an argument with yourself.
The nicotine pouch era came first
Cigarettes didn’t reintroduce nicotine to tech. Pouches did, and they did it with the industry’s full permission. By late 2025 the Wall Street Journal reported that startups were handing out free nicotine pouches as a productivity perk, and Palantir was stocking them free for employees and guests over 21.
Two nicotine startups, Lucy Nicotine and Sesh, built branded vending machines filled with flavored products for Palantir. Alex Cohen, founder of the healthcare startup Hello Patient, described running two to three pouches a day. None of this was framed as a vice. It was framed as focus, which is how tech smuggles most of its habits past its own standards.
The commercial scale is not small. Philip Morris International reported in its second-quarter 2026 results that Zyn shipments in the US reached 2.9 billion pouches, up 1.8% year over year, while smoke-free products made up about 42% of company net revenues.
The sequence matters for anyone trying to read the trend. Tech didn’t rediscover nicotine in September 2026. It spent two years quietly building tolerance for it under a productivity label, and the cigarette arrived into a workforce that had already decided nicotine was acceptable as long as the framing was performance. Remove that groundwork and the smoking revival doesn’t happen at all.
So the pouch normalized the molecule. The cigarette does something the pouch can’t: it’s visible, it smells, it forces you outside, and it takes time. A pouch is a productivity hack you can hide under your lip during a standup. A cigarette is a public statement with a smoke break attached. The trend only makes sense once you see that founders moved from the private version to the public one on purpose.
What the smoking data actually says
Smoking is at its lowest recorded level in American history, which is precisely why it works as a signal. The CDC’s National Health Interview Survey put adult cigarette smoking at 9.9% in 2024, down from 10.8% in 2023 and from roughly 42% in the mid-1960s. Smokeless products including nicotine pouches sat at 2.6% of adults.
Scarcity is the whole mechanism. When 42% of adults smoked, a cigarette told you nothing about a person. At 9.9%, it tells you they made a choice against the current, and in a founder context that reads as either conviction or self-destruction depending on who’s watching.
It’s worth being precise about scale. Nobody has produced a survey showing that founder smoking rates are climbing. What exists is reporting on a visible subculture, picked up by Business Insider in September 2026 and syndicated outward from there. Treat this as a cultural signal, not a measured trend.
The four nicotine and wellness signals circulating in tech right now sort cleanly by what they cost and what they say:
| Signal | Annual cost | What it says | Where it happens | Main risk |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cigarettes | $3,000 to $5,000 | I don’t need the approval | Outside, visible, in company | Health, plus investors who read it as instability |
| Nicotine pouches | $1,000 to $2,000 | I’m running hot | At the desk, invisible | Dependence with none of the social upside |
| Wearables (Oura, Whoop) | $200 to $350 | I manage myself | On the wrist, in the group chat | Saturated, so it signals almost nothing |
| Sobriety-coded fitness | $2,000 to $10,000 | I’m built for the long game | Gym, retreat, run club | Time cost, and it’s now the default |
What the habit costs a founder
A pack-a-day habit runs the average American smoker $3,000 to $5,000 a year, and smokers carry healthcare costs roughly 40% higher than nonsmokers according to research published in the New England Journal of Medicine. For a founder paying for their own coverage between raises, that’s a line item that compounds quietly.
The career math is worse than the cash math. Stanford Medicine researchers have found that smokers take substantially longer to find work and earn less when they do, a finding raised in coverage of the trend and worth sitting with. A founder raising from institutional capital is in a job market whether they call it that or not. Most limited partners and most large funds still code visible vice as risk, and the partner who finds it charming is the exception, not the rule.
There’s an insurance dimension founders routinely forget. Smoker status changes term life premiums by a multiple, not a margin, and key-person life insurance is a standard condition in venture debt agreements and in some priced equity rounds. A habit that reads as personal can quietly reprice a financing.
Then there’s the thing nobody puts in a deck. Nicotine is an excellent short-term tool for suppressing the physical signals of stress, which makes it unusually well suited to masking exactly the condition a founder most needs to notice. GJ has written about shadow burnout, the version founders hide because the company still looks fine from the outside. A habit that makes the hiding easier is not a neutral habit.
Jolis reads a cigarette as a founder with their guard down. That same lowered guard is what makes the habit sticky. Both things are true at once, which is why the trend deserves analysis rather than either a scolding or a shrug.
How to get the networking without the nicotine
The useful finding inside this trend is that founders are starving for unstructured contact, not that they’re starving for tobacco. Everything the smoke break provides can be rebuilt deliberately, and the rebuild is cheap.
Four components do the work. The window is short, seven to ten minutes, so neither person is committing to anything. It’s physically outside the room where the agenda lives. It’s open to anyone standing nearby, with no invitation required. And it recurs on a predictable rhythm, so the same faces keep showing up.
Copy that structure directly. Block a standing 10-minute walk after your hardest meeting of the day and invite whoever is in the room. Y Combinator built an entire culture on office hours and unscheduled hallway time, and the hallway was always doing more work than the stage. GJ’s reporting on supper clubs replacing conferences and on longevity residences describes founders paying real money for the same thing a cigarette gives away free: a reason to be somewhere with no outcome attached.
Three specific formats work. A standing Thursday 5pm outdoor coffee at a fixed spot, posted publicly in your company Slack, recreates the recurrence and the open invitation. A 15-minute pre-meeting buffer where you take the other party outside before anyone opens a laptop recreates the agenda-free window. And a walk-and-talk default for any one-to-one under 30 minutes gets people out of the room where titles live. None of these need budget. They need somebody to go first.
If you already smoke, the honest move is to separate the two problems. Keep the ritual, change the input. The relationships you built in the smoking pit don’t evaporate when the cigarette does, and founders who have worked on emotional fitness tend to report that the break was always about the pause, not the nicotine.
And if you’re a founder watching peers take this up and wondering whether you’re missing an edge, the answer is no. The edge is the seven minutes. The cigarette is just the excuse most people need to take them, and you can build a better excuse by Friday.
