Still, I had trouble admitting to my social group that I was moving across the country solely to work at a startup. It was embarrassing to articulate how excited I was to see what the fuss was about—it seemed, among my countercultural and creative friends, shrewd and cynical to be curious about business. I was selling out. In reality, I was not paying attention: those who understood our cultural moment saw that selling out—corporate positions, partnerships, sponsors—would become our generation’s premier aspiration, the best way to get paid.
At the time, though, it was corny to be openly enthusiastic about technology or the internet. For the most part, my friends were late and reluctant adopters. They had accounts on the social network everyone hated, but only used them to RSVP to poetry readings and DIY shows they had no intention of attending. Some defiantly carried flip phones without internet access, preferring to call those of us with desk jobs whenever they were out and needed directions. No one owned an e-reader. As the tides turned digital, my milieu was grounding itself firmly in the embodied, tangible world.
Out of self-protection, I stuck to the narrative that I was moving across the country just to try something new. I had never even lived outside of the tristate area. San Francisco had a great music scene, I said, unconvincingly, to anyone who would listen. It had medical marijuana. Working in analytics would be an experiment in separating my professional life from my personal interests. The startup gig was just a day job, I claimed, something to support me while I was otherwise creatively productive. Maybe I would start the short-story collection I had always wanted to write. Maybe I would take up pottery. I could finally learn bass.
It was easier, in any case, to fabricate a romantic narrative than admit that I was ambitious—that I wanted my life to pick up momentum, go faster.
When I arrived back in San Francisco, with a fresh haircut and two fraying duffel bags, I felt intrepid and pioneering. I did not know that thousands of people had already headed west for a crack at the new American dream, that they had been doing so for years. I was, by many standards, late.
It was a moment of corporate obsequiousness to young men. Tech companies were importing freshly graduated computer science majors from all over the world, putting them up in furnished apartments, paying their cable and internet and cell phone bills, and offering hundred-thousand-dollar signing bonuses as tokens of thanks. The programmers arrived with a flood of nontechnical carpetbaggers: former Ph.D. students and middle-school teachers, public defenders and chamber music singers, financial analysts and assembly-line operators, me.
I had booked another bedroom using the home-sharing platform, this time in the South of Market neighborhood, several blocks from the office. The room was on the garden level of a duplex, adjacent to a concrete patio and accessed through an alley, just past the recycling bins. It was decorated with the same lightweight, self-assembly furniture as my friends’ bedrooms back in Brooklyn. The woman who operated the rental was an entrepreneur in the renewable-energy space and described herself as never home.
A few small boxes of my books, bedding, and clothing were already at the analytics startup, stacked in a supply closet. I had been self-conscious about spending down the relocation stipend, wanting to save money for the company. A part of me worried that if I spent too much, the offer would be rescinded. I didn’t want my new manager to think I was frivolous. Others had expensed new furniture, meals, weeks of rent, but I didn’t know that. I was still operating according to publishing austerity.
The home-sharing platform offered an aspirational fantasy that I appreciated. Across the world, people were squeezing out the last of strangers’ toothpaste, picking up strangers’ soap in the shower, wiping their noses on strangers’ pillowcases. There I was as I had always been, only sleeping in a stranger’s bed, fumbling to replace a stranger’s spring-loaded toilet-paper holder, ordering sweaters off a stranger’s Wi-Fi network. I liked examining someone else’s product selections, judging their clutter. I wasn’t thinking about how the home-sharing platform might also be driving up rents, displacing residents, or undermining the very authenticity that it purported to sell. Mostly, the fact that it functioned, and nobody had murdered me, seemed like a miracle.
I had given myself a few days to get adjusted before starting the job. In the mornings, I bought coffee at a laundromat, consulted a crowdsourced reviewing app to find something to eat, and returned to my bedroom to spend the rest of the day reading technical documentation for the analytics software and panicking. The documentation was indecipherable to me. I didn’t know what an API was, or how to use one. I didn’t know how I would possibly provide technical support to engineers—I couldn’t even fake it.
The night before my first day of work, too unmoored and overwhelmed to sleep, I scrolled through previous guests’ reviews of my room and realized that the apartment was owned by one of the founders of the home-sharing platform. I looked up the founder’s name and read an interview in which he detailed how designers could follow in his footsteps and become entrepreneurs. He called them “designpreneurs.” I watched a video of him delivering the keynote at a tech conference, breathing excitedly into the mic. I learned that he and his two cofounders had raised over a hundred million dollars, and investors were desperate to give them more.
I looked around me at the blank walls, the closet door tilted on its hinges, the bars on the window, eager to identify hints of his success. But the designpreneur hadn’t slept in the room for years. He had moved into a gleaming, art-filled warehouse conversion close to his office. He’d left nothing behind.
* * *
The analytics startup made a pickax-during-the-Gold-Rush product, the kind venture capitalists loved to get behind. History saw the Gold Rush as a cautionary tale, but in Silicon Valley, people used its metaphors proudly, provided they were on the right side of things. Pickaxes were usually business-to-business products. Infrastructure, not services. Just as startups in New York were eager to build off their city’s existing cultural legacy, by creating services for media and finance—or, more commonly, creating sleek interfaces to sell things that would require more time, money, energy, or taste to buy elsewhere—the same was true of the Bay Area, where software engineers sought to usurp older technology companies by building tools for other software engineers.
It was the era of big data, complex data sets facilitated by exponentially faster computer processing power and stored, fashionably, in the cloud. Big data encompassed industries: science, medicine, farming, education, policing, surveillance. The right findings could be golden, inspiring new products or revealing user psychology, or engendering ingenious, hypertargeted advertising campaigns.
Not everyone knew what they needed from big data, but everyone knew that they needed it. Just the prospect incited lust in product managers, advertising executives, and stock-market speculators. Data collection and retention were unregulated. Investors salivated over predictive analytics, the lucrative potential of steroidal pattern-matching, and the prospect of bringing machine-learning algorithms to the masses—or, at least, to Fortune 500 companies. Transparency for the masses wasn’t ideal: better that the masses not see what companies in the data space had on them.
The analytics startup wasn’t disrupting anything so much as unseating big-data incumbents: slow-moving corporate behemoths whose products were technically unsophisticated and bore distinctly nineties user interfaces. The startup not only enabled other companies to collect customized data on their users’ behavior without having to write much code or pay for storage, but it also offered ways to analyze that data in colorful, dynamic dashboards. The cofounders had prioritized aesthetics and hired two graphic designers off the bat: men with signature hairstyles and large followings on a social network for people who referred to themselves as creatives and got excited about things like font sizing and hero images. In general, it was hard to say what, exactly, the designers did all day, but the dashboards were both friendly and elegant. The software looked especially pleasing, trustworthy, airtight. Good interface design was like magic, or religion: it cultivated the mass suspension of disbelief.