Having a magician at a holiday tech party seems to be the rule these days, not the exception.
Waymo, Google, Airbnb, and Figma all had magicians at their parties this year, joining a long list of tech companies that have brought some magical razzle-dazzle to their holiday parties in the past few years. So it’s no wonder why local magicians like Andrew Evans, David Gerard, and Emily Carter say the holiday season is their busiest time of the year.
Gerard, a former product marketer at Google who began doing professional magic full-time about two years ago, told Gazetteer SF he gets a lot of business from tech companies and from tech-adjacent industries. Gerard, who did a show at Waymo this week, said he thinks tech companies are so hype for magic because, for tech people “who have all the answers, you get them an experience of mystery.”
Gerard said he has also performed at private events for a number of tech executives, including a birthday party for Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and gatherings for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, and others he can’t name because he’s signed non-disclosure agreements. He loves performing for Bay Area techies, he said, because “they are so inquisitive and so analytical.”
“Doing an afternoon event for 50 Facebook engineers where they are just burning and trying to figure everything out, it makes you really good because your fortress has to be really solidified,” he said. “It’s my job to create these illusions that are impenetrable so that I can leave them with that feeling of wonder. In the Bay Area, people know everything or it’s only one Google search or OpenAI search away, and to give someone a piece of mystery where they’re just like, ‘I don’t know,’ can bring on new feelings that I think are quite healthy.”
Carter, a.k.a. Ms. Direction, expressed similar thoughts, saying good magic can reintroduce “mystery in a world that is pretty over-engineered.”
She recently began performing magic full-time after leaving her tech job this year, and described the holidays as “peak season for magicians overall,” noting the majority of her corporate clients are in venture capital and tech. The demand from tech, at least for her, is pretty seasonal, but it’s clear that “there are more gigs than there are [magicians].”
That leaves magicians like Evans, owner of The Magic Patio in the Mission-Bernal area, sometimes performing multiple shows a day to try to keep up with all the demand. He told Gazetteer he has done magic shows for Silicon Valley staples like Meta, Google, Figma and Airbnb, and expects to have averaged about one show a day for tech companies by the end of December.
Kathryn Ashcraft, Figma's vice president of workplace and real estate, said having Evans at the company's holiday party this year helped bring a more laid-back energy to the festivities.
"We LOVE a surprise and delight and figured there’s nothing better than standing with a great drink, chatting with your friends, and having a magician pop up to razzle-dazzle you with a cool effect," Ashcraft said in an emailed statement. "Plus, what's a holiday season without a little extra magic?”
When Evans first started performing for tech companies, he told Gazetteer, he felt nervous and feared “there would be a lot of pushback, or heckling or a lot of skepticism." Instead, he's found that “intelligent audiences fall harder.”
“People who are smart and think they will figure this out because they are smart just have that much more of a sense of astonishment when they can't,” he said. “It’s really beautiful to watch their reality crumble for a few minutes. And the best part in my experience is they are more than happy to let it crumble.”
