Man’s biotech detour led to pub crawl career

KPIX

By Andrea Nakano

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    SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX) — A San Francisco man has found success in an unexpected field and he’s helping local businesses survive.

Matt Seliga once had his sights set on medical school.

“I graduated college then moved to Baltimore,” he said. “I was working at Center for Disease Research which was at John Hopkins. Basically it’s DNA testing.”

He sent resumes all over the world to explore life outside his home state of Pennsylvania and ended up moving to San Francisco for a biotech job.

That was not the end of his journey.

Now he’s top dog in the world of pub crawls in San Francisco. He had long taken side jobs such as bartending to try to make new friends outside the biotech world. The idea of a pub crawl business came to him after he went on one in Washington D.C. Seliga admits the first 10 years were tough as he tried to build his business, Crawl SF.

“I went out every night and just went to every bar in every neighborhood and talked to people,” Seliga said. “I must’ve looked ridiculous.”

Crawl SF is in its 20th year. Seliga holds numerous events throughout the year but the wildest pub crawls happen during celebrations such as St. Patrick’s Day and Halloween. He sells tickets then his clients get wristbands which help them get cheaper drinks at participating bars.

“Halloween in 2022 was our largest event ever,” Seliga said. “We were actually talking to the Guinness Book of World Records. We didn’t actually end up going through the whole process to get them to come out and verify everything. The world record was 4,000 something but we had more than 14,000 people.”

Seliga built a family business from the ground up. His sister helps with planning and executing the events and his wife handles a lot of the marketing.

“He has so many ideas and he actually brings them to life and it’s been really, really cool,” Caitlin Seliga said. “We’ve done a lot of fun things together.”

And the family is growing.

Caitlin and Matt are expecting their first child next month and that means more ideas have started to float around Matt’s head.

“To go along with my child on the way, we’re actually looking into the concept of doing kid crawls,” he said. “Obviously they’re not going to be drinking.”

Seliga is thinking about creating a safe place for families to take their kids to celebrate days like Halloween.

Crawl SF and biotech couldn’t be more different but Seliga is enjoying life being his own boss and doing something that he loves.

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