Riley Walz auctions naming rights to a San Francisco alley he bought — Notion wins at $140K
Apr 7, 2026 with Riley Walz
Key Points
- Riley Walz, 23, bought a foreclosed San Francisco alley and auctioned naming rights to Notion for $140,000, converting a dirt strip into Notion Way.
- Walz crowdsourced 1,200 pixel drawings to paint the alley surface while running a separate naming auction with rolling five-minute bid extensions to prevent sniping.
- Auction proceeds fund future San Francisco projects rather than going to Walz personally, demonstrating how a year-old party joke scaled into a six-figure community campaign.
Summary
Riley Walz, a 23-year-old independent creator, bought a foreclosed alley in San Francisco's Sunset district and auctioned off its naming rights. Notion won with a $140,000 bid, turning an unnamed strip of pavement — Google Maps had labeled it "Dirt Alley" — into Notion Way.
The acquisition itself started with a stranger's mistake. A woman had bid $25,000 at a foreclosure auction thinking she was buying an adjacent apartment building worth roughly $1 million. She wasn't. When she knocked on tenants' doors to tell them she wasn't raising rent, she still believed she owned the property. A news story about the error caught Walz's attention. He and two collaborators, Patrick and Theo, tracked her down — ultimately reaching her by physical mail — and bought the alley for slightly more than her original bid, effectively bailing her out.
What they actually own is narrow: the road surface, roughly eight feet wide and 80 feet long. Easements mean they can't block the alley — a point illustrated live during the interview when a car drove through. But they can paint the surface and, critically, name it.
The project
Walz and his collaborators paved the dirt surface, built a website in a weekend, and ran two parallel campaigns. Anyone could submit a free 48-by-48 pixel drawing to be painted on the street — up to 1,200 submissions in total, moderated by a group chat that manually reviewed and removed anything offensive. The naming rights were auctioned separately to fund the project. WordPress held the top bid at $135,000 during the interview; Notion ultimately won at $140,000.
The auction used a rolling five-minute extension — any bid in the final five minutes resets the clock — designed to prevent last-second sniping.
Naming a private alley
Because the alley is privately owned, the sign itself is the legal source of truth for the name. Walz says updating Google Maps should follow from a photo submission. He adds, with some relish, that as a high school senior prank he installed an unofficial street sign for an unnamed alley in his hometown named after his track coach — and it has appeared on Google Maps for five years, referenced by the local mayor in a meeting.
Money and what's next
Walz says none of the auction proceeds go to him or his collaborators personally. Painting the mural will consume some of it; the rest rolls into a fund for future IRL projects in San Francisco.
Walz is already moving on. A Spotify Wrapped-style project breaking down U.S. government spending by tax category is apparently dropping the same weekend. His earlier Pokémon Go-style payphone game — pulling from a list of working California payphones, of which several thousand apparently still exist — drew calls from 300 to 400 phones, with a player named Maggie winning the leaderboard by one point after driving across the state.
The alley project began as a joke at a party roughly a year before it happened. A law student at the same party informally walked them through the legality. The gap between joke and $140,000 closing bid is the most useful data point about how far Walz's audience and execution have come.