In my early 20s, I was enamored with the startup culture. I had jumped on an opportunity to move from the east coast of Canada to pursue a nearly 2-year pilgrimage to the nerd-Ashram, San Francisco. After work, I would regularly go to some “unconference”, or a pitch competition, or hang out with friends at their fully decked out office offering free food and scenic views of the city or the water.
At first, I was impressed by just how few degrees of separation I was to my corporate heroes. My roommate was a world renown SEO guru who helped build a successful MOOC on digital marketing (before that term was coined) with Brian Eisenberg and Avinash Kaushik. I had read every one of the former’s books and followed the latter’s blog religiously, who would publish a new post every other Thursday. I remember attending a fireside chat in a relatively small venue where Marc Benioff was interviewing Marissa Mayer, talking about the latest buzz topic, “big data”.
One dark evening, I had stopped to catch my breath around the Ferry Building which marked the halfway point of my jog. Sweating profusely, I immediately recognized Elon Musk walking past me, who had just given a speech at a private Vogue event where he teased a second vehicle line. Musk was debriefing with his “hype guy” standing at shoulder height next to him, who vehemently approved of his performance of omitting any details of the new car, except that it was new and different, while keeping everyone biting their fingernails in anticipation of how his new EV was going to revolutionize the auto industry. Elon also seemed pleased with himself. I remember thinking that he was freakishly tall.
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I had a few brief encounters with Facebook monks during my pilgrimage. When I was looking for accommodation, I visited a house that was being rented by a group of 5 or 6 Facebook employees which had a spare room. They seemed to do everything together, from eating breakfast, to carpooling to their office, to working together, to winding down in the evening. I was scheduled to tour the house just as they were arriving home from their commute. Moments after unlocking their front door, one of fatter ones wearing a black Canadian tuxedo immediately picked up what was the largest bong I had ever seen, and took a hit. The monks instinctively formed a loose circle and invited me, whom they had met only moments before, to participate in their MJ Circumambulation. The large living room was jam packed with bongo drums and turn tables and a projector among bountiful high-end furniture and several smaller bongs littering the common area, probably intended for more intimate ceremonies. The walls were decorated with limited-edition signed prints of allegedly famous comic book illustrations.
One of the gentler souls of the group slid open the glass door that led to their steeply inclined back yard and invited me to admire the fruiting lemon trees that came with the place. A flimsy yard fence guarded us from a dangerous vertical drop, as the lot next door was a giant square hole in the ground. After a few minutes of meditation, we went back inside, and one of the taller monks showed me his room featuring a giant white board prominently displaying a detailed and yet to be solved graph theory problem that he was working on. Since there was nothing else of interest in his small room, we returned downstairs. With the THC kicking in, they started to gossip about one of the 30+ year old female directors who was discovered having an affair with an underling at the same level in the Facebook hierarchy that this cohort belonged to. It did not sound like there was any code of conduct prohibiting an office romance, but the people building the world’s largest social network clearly relished in the mash being produced by their company’s rumor mill.
The room for rent was recently available again because the previous contender turned out to be a scam that they fell for. The Facebook monks had agreed to rent the room to someone who claimed to be from the UK (thus justifying why they couldn’t visit) who requested their banking information to pay for 6 months rent upfront. Astonishingly, this group of late 20-year-olds who grew up in the era of chainmail and 56k dialup modems managed to never encounter anything resembling the Nigerian Prince shenanigans that would frequently make it to my spam folder. How innocent.
Up until that point in my life, I thought that once you graduated from university, suddenly everything became buttoned-up, serious. You had to work and be “presentable”. This was a professional frat house, carefully curated by bros of culture with tremendous means. I did not end up living with them, but I certainly was in awe of their life outcomes.
On a separate occasion, I was invited by an acquaintance who worked at Facebook to visit the Varanasi, the old headquarters at 1 Hacker Way. Walking through the main outdoor artery, I briefly locked eyes with Mark Zukerberg, who was engulfed in a phone conversation inside his all-glass corner office, open for all to see. There was a sign on the glass in front of him that read “do not disturb the animals”. Turning into one of the office buildings as we ate our free deluxe ice creams, we admired the graffiti on the walls that the employees sprayed themselves. My acquaintance swiped his badge on a vending machine which freely gave him a new pair of high-end headphones. The people working here had everything, I thought. They extremely well paid, given all the best perks, and most importantly of all, they were working on something that the world paid attention to. They had managed to make working and being into tech something cool and desirable, or so I thought.
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During my formative teenage years, I was introverted, and my interest in computer games and internet meme culture such as Ebaumsworld and Happy tree friends did not lend itself to any sort of social proofing. Years later, Silicon Valley felt like a sort of validation that I had never really experienced before. An army of nerds bringing technology to the rescue were on a furious mission to solve the worlds’ problems as they put it, one git commit at a time. They were confidently making up and changing all the rules as they went along, and no one told them how things ought to be done. It was glorious, gluttonous, exhilarating, intoxicating! I had decided at that time I wanted to work for and maybe even build my own startups someday. The Church of technology had flung its chromium gates wide open and sucked me in as I levitated into this brave new hexadecimal world.