Valley of the Gods Read online

  In the morning, entrepreneurs walk down Palo Alto’s oak-tree-lined streets to offices atop retail stores and restaurants or drive their Priuses to cafes such as Fraîche for cups of Blue Bottle artisanal drip coffee, homemade oatmeal, and local Clover milk yogurt with candied walnuts and berries. Bicycles fill University Avenue, some ridden by commuters, others by company cycling teams wearing matching Day-Glo jackets.

  Farther from Palo Alto, where Sand Hill Road turns into Portola Road, early-morning bikers race through Portola Valley while their wives ride horses at Portola Farms. The fitness expert of choice is CrossFit, whose trainers take techies cycling up winding Old La Honda Road. One of the tour notes is the former home of the late Ken Kesey, the author and hippy/psychedelic movement leader. But it’s only that: a tour note. In 1964 Kesey created a commune, the Merry Pranksters, at his house. Then he led them on a cross-country tour proselytizing their acid-fueled religion in a 1939 International Harvester school bus (and flogging the imminent publication of his new book, Sometimes a Great Notion).

  Offhand, it’s hard to think of two more opposite types of literate young men. The techies’ one true obsession is work. The Pranksters’ one true obsession was not working, which Kesey called “moving off of dead center,” and taking hallucinogens until, as he also put it, you “junked it out through the other side.” Today the techies drive their electric Tesla roadsters to work down El Camino Real, the thoroughfare that connects all the different Silicon Valley cities of Atherton, Woodside, Mountain View, and Palo Alto. Women who work take breaks between conference calls to go shopping at the Stanford Shopping Center, full of high-end boutiques. The Left Coast Ladies Who Lunch do so over Clif Bars while walking the Dish, the popular hiking trail on Stanford property—and “Ladies” means over age twenty-nine. In a place where the fashion is function and the affectation is efficiency, Silicon Valley’s new lifestyle is not for the weary.

  Instead of socialites, Silicon Valley has technolites. Far from chairing the charity ball, the modus operandi of the upwardly mobile female is to match her hobby with PayPal, sell jewelry or embroidered dog beds or pastel belts online, launch a website, and then anoint herself CEO. She, along with female power execs, wears the understated uniform of Lanvin flats, Majestic tees, James Jeans, and cozy cashmere sweaters. Already reminiscent of West Palm Beach’s City Center, the Stanford Shopping Center’s palm-tree-covered walkways have a casual, woodsy feel, and offshoots lead to gourmet farm-stand-meets-food-shop cafes.

  At the Village Pub in Woodside, the tech execs scarf down thick pub burgers with fries and duck-and-lentil salads, eating fast so they can run back out to their Priuses in under an hour. It is a place where socializing and networking are interchangeable, and the greatest proof of upward mobility is dwindling time. “The social aspect is not a vehicle for us to get anywhere,” says Garnett, the founder of My Little Swans, an online platform for luxury travel. “Here it’s all about having money and no time,” she explains. Garnett, a petite blonde, is also an investor and former software engineer. “If anyone talks about their golf handicap, you’d look at them and say, ‘I’d never invest in you because you spend too much time on the golf course.’ ” Instead, less time-­consuming passions persist, such as collecting art and wine. Garnett says that she and her husband acquire art because it doesn’t require as much time as, say, golfing all day would. As for cars, “Do we all own Ferraris? Yes,” says Garnett. “But would we drive it into a start-up’s parking lot? No.” She laughs. “We’d drive the Prius and keep the Ferrari in the garage.”

  In San Francisco, most children of the elite families go to one of a handful of private schools, but in Silicon Valley, most tech parents, including venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, send their kids to the alternative Nueva School (and so did the late Steve Jobs). There students focus thematically on, say, ancient Greece or American history one semester at a time, rather than on traditional subject categories.

  Working women have their centers of power too: from Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg’s women’s salons to the speakeasy basement parties hosted by venture capitalist Aileen Lee.

  If the early wave of billion-dollar companies such as Google and Facebook brought about a new social identity, it’s the billionaires themselves who have launched a movement. From Tesla CEO Elon Musk to Peter Thiel, the tech titans at the helm of these enterprises have created an aspirational culture of optimistic young graduates who want to change the world, not just make money. Unlike wannabe Wall Street worker bees whose first stop from New York’s Penn Station is Thomas Pink or Charles Tyrwhitt for shirts, then Tourneau for a watch, and finally Tiffany for their monogrammed belt buckle, the only outward signs of tech success are laptops and ideas. The billionaires themselves dress indistinguishably from Stanford students. They drive around in jeans and fleeces, just perhaps in faster cars. The other distinguishing characteristic their particular fantasy evokes, more than the typical West Coast daydream of being a Hollywood producer or director, is freedom. As a tech entrepreneur, there is no studio head to report to, no investment banking board, and no shareholders unless their company IPOs—which basically means retirement, at least from that particular venture.

  It’s a tether-free life that has permeated Palo Alto, and it is visible on every street. Coffee shops such as Coupa Café in Palo Alto and Hobee’s in Sunnyvale typically host diners and their laptops for hours on end. All of them are trying to come up with the next Facebook and honestly think they can. It’s a place where risk aversion doesn’t exist; what Silicon Valley lacks in nightlife excitement it makes up for with its day jobs’ thrills, most of which entail gambling every day on what the next big idea will be.

  New technology is always present: for instance, now an increasing number of restaurants from Palo Alto to San Francisco International Airport have iPads replacing waiters.

  After a long day of coding, eating, and exercising, nights out end early. Palo Alto is dark after ten o’clock, save for the rows of lit windows where engineers are still working well into the next morning. For most, though, they’re saving energy for the weekend ahead. Google, Airbnb, and Twitter all have fitness and yoga classes. Palo Alto’s retail space is punctuated by fitness storefronts run often by wives of successful area financiers, such as Dianne Giancarlo’s the 3rd Door, a now-shuttered private training club where clients could come by for thirty-minute “body slams” designed to fit in with the start-up schedule.

  The excesses crammed into such little leisure time are often experiential. For example, Mint founder Aaron Patzer doesn’t buy big houses; instead, he takes “epic” trips. Over Pingg.com, an invitation app, Patzer said he and thirty other entrepreneurs, including his friends AdBrite founder Phil Kaplan and Tesla’s Elon Musk, were organizing an event two hours north where they would all bring their own equipment, including zip lines for rappelling.

  Patzer spent his days off, before leaving Intuit, working toward his pilot’s license. The weekend before, he and Barney Pell, founder of the semantic search company Powerset, had gone for a ride on Pell’s new dirigible to test its lunar landing radar. The boy was not kidding. If Silicon Valley’s newly minted millionaires keep up the velocity, a few weeks, months, years from now, they’ll land on the moon. Palo Alto has become the promised land, and even more than in Ken Kesey’s heyday, crazy is a compliment.

  In Silicon Valley, arriving to the area without a pedigree has no stigma. As of 2014, every day, hundreds of people were arriving there, from the East Coast, Europe, Asia, all wanting to create the best new company—or at least make money off it. They gravitate to the area where their specialty, or basic skill, lies. Hard-core engineering and enterprise software companies are based mostly in the southern valley, in Cupertino and Mountain View. Then there’s biotech, in Mountain View and slowly creeping up to Menlo Park. Consumer Internet companies now rule certain areas of San Francisco, such as the booming Mission District, where Twitter has taken ov
er entire city blocks—and those are San Francisco city blocks, not the measly blocks of Manhattan, the former home of the American business elite.

  These days, being a part of a place where entirely new industries have disrupted the old—all by children, and aspiring children—is too tempting to pass up. The only question is: Once you get to the promised land, how do you make it there?

  * * *

  I. “Robber Barons and Silicon Sultans,” The Economist, January 3, 2015.

  1

  Asperger’s Chic

  John Burnham wanted to mine asteroids. He had always been a little bit different. Instead of reading school textbooks or his summer reading list, he read Plato, Aristotle, and a modern-day “neoreactionary” thinker who goes by the pen name Mencius Moldbug. A self-declared libertarian and “self-directed learner,” motivated to study on his own, Burnham felt like he didn’t need teachers to tell him what to do. He was a terribly behaved student.

  By the spring semester of his senior year of high school in 2011, John had been rejected or wait-listed from all ten colleges he applied to except the University of Massachusetts, just over ten miles away from where he lived in Newton, Massachusetts. He didn’t really care, though, since the idea of enduring another four years of dull lectures and drearier tests was less than appealing. It was a distraction from what he had always wanted to do, which was to go into space—and reap trillions of dollars from the valuable minerals that existed in asteroids.

  Burnham wasn’t delusional. He knew what he was talking about. While most of his classmates read Tess of the d’Urbervilles and The Great Gatsby, he was researching nickel, cobalt, and platinum on S-type (silacaceous) asteroids. With bright blue eyes, blond hair, and a seemingly permanent smirk, he was popular with girls and distracted himself with brief high school flirtations, but John still had plenty of time for his loftier interests. As he procrastinated doing the homework assignments he found pointless, he scoured the Web, stumbling across bloggers whose ideas were at least more interesting than those of his current teachers.

  His favorite was called Unqualified Reservations, written by the reactionary blogger Mencius Moldbug, whose real name is Curtis Yarvin. An engineer living in Silicon Valley, Yarvin described himself in his blog’s “About Me” section with the words “stubbornness and disrespect.” Burnham was hooked.

  One night, when John was up reading Patri Friedman’s blog, he came upon a new posting announcing a call for applications to a fellowship called 20 Under 20. Sponsored by the Thiel Foundation, it offered twenty students under twenty years old $100,000 to drop out of school, forgo college for the duration of the fellowship, and start their own companies. Drop out of school? Burnham didn’t have to be convinced. He wasn’t sure what his mother and father, a Congregationalist minister and a financial investor, respectively, would think of the idea, but he was curious to find out more.

  The Thiel Foundation turned out to be the charitable arm of an empire belonging to Peter Thiel, founder and chairman of the Founders Fund, a major Silicon Valley venture capital firm that had invested in companies such as Spotify, the music streaming subscription service, and the ride-sharing service Lyft. Burnham clicked from article to article: from the Forbes magazine piece that described Thiel’s chef and butler to the Fortune article calling him one of best investors in the country.

  In 2011 Thiel was a youthful forty-three. He had just announced the fellowship in fall 2010 at a conference called TechCrunch Disrupt. The conference was sponsored by TechCrunch, a website dedicated to news and gossip about the valley, and also served as a tech company directory, listing founders, investors, and financing rounds. At first, Thiel’s announcement was a way to call attention to what he considered the waste of time and money spent on a college education. He also railed against the political correctness he thought universities propagated. By selecting a group of high school students who would otherwise have gone to four-year institutions to start life early, he hoped to prove that the college model was outdated. Burnham was already familiar with some of Thiel’s projects and often outlandish ideas. While he ran his hedge fund, Clarium, or funded Silicon Valley start-ups by day at the Founders Fund, Thiel also had a penchant for pursuing original causes, no matter how crazy they seemed.

  One of these was the Seasteading Institute, a project to create a libertarian community at sea, where people could buy a man-made island and govern themselves. The head of the Seasteading Institute was a then thirty-four-year-old former Google engineer named Patri Friedman, grandson of the economist Milton Friedman. Patri’s ideas regularly popped up on Moldbug’s blog, and vice versa. Burnham often read Friedman’s libertarian musings, and when he saw the fellowship advertised on his site as well, the seventeen-year-old knew he had to apply.

  The application asked questions such as “What do you believe that no one else does?” Burnham had a ready answer: just about everything. While on the surface he seemed like a typical high school senior, with a cheery demeanor and outgoing personality, it was as though he lived on another plane that hovered over everyone else his age. His mind was up in the sky.

  As Burnham saw it, the application wasn’t only an entrée to Silicon Valley but also a way to reach a farther frontier: space. If anyone could help him get there, it was this Thiel character, with the big ideas, contrarian outlook, and a willingness to back crazy concepts. Winning the fellowship would present a way out of even more years of inculcation of an educational canon that had never made sense to him, as well as a chance to focus full-time on these bigger-picture problems that he would soon hear as a steady refrain throughout Silicon Valley as “changing the world.” John didn’t just want to be a Thiel Fellow. He needed to become one. Otherwise he was going to backpack around Europe instead.

  In Silicon Valley, he thought, people might take seriously what his friends and teachers ridiculed back in Boston. There, they too might believe they could live on Mars someday. Out west, in the promised land, they wouldn’t look at him like he was crazy when he talked about the money that could be made from mining asteroids.

  So he started writing his answers. Why did we need to go to space? “At the core of the Earth is the most unbelievable mother lode of heavy elements,” he explained. The problem was accessing them. “Dense elements have over the eons sunk into the depths of the Earth.” Burnham had long wanted to figure out a way to dredge up at least some of these. He didn’t understand why no one had done so already.

  He thought more about that application’s first question. While most people didn’t think we urgently needed to get to space, most people also believed in a set of basic beliefs that he didn’t. Take democracy, for one. Why, he wondered, did everyone believe in it so blindly? Instead, John thought, democracy was really oligarchy: government by a select few. He’d borrowed this idea from Moldbug’s blog and then looked for the same concept in Plato. “Plato is magnificent,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Some of his political views had been informed by reading about the history of the French Revolution and the writings of Edmund Burke, an Irish-born political thinker and member of the British Parliament in the eighteenth century. Burnham grappled with the idea of how monarchy and democracy are similar, about how they are both the rule of the many by the few.

  He wondered why none of his friends asked the questions he did and why his teachers were always telling him his interruptions were bothersome. He didn’t think he was all that different from the people he read, only the people he met. Was he too influenced by these blogs, by the opinions of others? he wondered.

  The next question was one that Burnham had been thinking about for as long as he could remember: “How would you change the world?”

  • • •

  He had researched a number of asteroids. He didn’t understand why so many people had been against NASA’s spending more than $224 million on its unmanned mission to the asteroid Eros 433 in 1996, for example, when he
felt certain that the platinum and gold floating up in that asteroid would be worth trillions. The spacecraft took four years to reach the solid space rock, then orbited it for another twelve months, gathering essential data.

  Why hadn’t technology improved? Why couldn’t a payload of 487 kilograms of spacecraft, sensors, and electronics be stored on Eros 433 for less than hundreds of millions of dollars? he wondered. He had studied every aspect of Eros. The wind there was solar wind. The hill was shallow, and the wind as strong, so why couldn’t they use solar sails to move it? he asked.

  Burnham figured the only expensive part would be getting up there. He had heard about Virgin Group founder Richard Branson’s space tourism company Virgin Galactic, but wasn’t particularly excited about it­—and that was before one of their spaceships crashed. He saw it as a vacation for only the wealthy. And the teenager had high hopes for SpaceX, a rocket company founded by Elon Musk, a friend of Thiel’s and a cofounder of PayPal, as well as Blue Origin, a space exploration company funded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

  If the government wasn’t doing anything about it, at least these guys were, he figured. But what none of them was doing was developing a robot to mine the asteroids. Burnham wanted to make that happen. “I don’t think this should actually be terribly impossible,” he wrote on his Thiel fellow application. All the robot would have to do was dig.

  Burnham figured that the robots would excavate the minerals and then bring them back to Earth to be processed. Eventually they could be processed in space, but he thought it should probably happen on Earth first even though some of the minerals might be destroyed in the process. He had already thought about how to get these chunks of rock from Earth’s orbit to its surface. Maybe foils, parachutes, or balloons could work, he mused. The chunks would have to be small enough to burn up in the atmosphere, and their orbit would have to degrade into the ocean. “I’d hate to cause another Tunguska event over a major city, or even a small town,” he said in his application. “Bad publicity.” He was referring to what happened over Siberia in 1908, when a large asteroid believed to weigh 220 million pounds and traveling 33,500 miles per hour disintegrated five miles up in the sky, setting off an explosion as powerful as the atomic bomb later dropped on Hiroshima, Japan—times 185.