Valley of the Gods Read online

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  That evening, the after party would take place in an unkempt, practically abandoned building like Huffman’s converted garages, which had become work spaces by day and raves by night. Molecular biologist and Thiel fellow mentor Todd Huffman and his wife, Katy, had been working on creating a better, faster way to see images on a microscope. They worked with various fellows on their biology projects and welcomed them into their unorthodox fold.

  Both had pink hair and wore matching outfits: usually grey T-shirts and black pants. Huffman said that the occupants of Langton Labs were on a spectrum from fully monogamous to fully polyamorous. “San Franciscans have words for relationships the way that Eskimos have words for snow,” he joked. “Langton Labs is a good cross section of the community.” During the weekdays, they worked in the basement of a community that Huffman founded called Langton Laboratories. But what they ended up creating turned out to be much more. Langton Labs was an alternative institution that served as part living space with sixteen bedrooms with mattresses, crammed chockablock into nooks and crannies of an old row house on Langton Street in the Mission, and part all-year stage design studio for Burning Man.

  Burning Man is a thirty-year-old festival in the middle of the Nevada Desert that had gone from being a small, cultish campground for alternative artists to a sprawling experimental playground for anyone who wanted to feel like they fit in while in what they considered their “rawest” state. That could entail painting their naked bodies in a shimmery gold tint, wearing furry horns, and riding around on a bike covered in fluorescent streamers. In recent years, Silicon Valley had gravitated to the festival, especially for its symbolic breaking of social codes.

  Here at Langton Labs, Huffman hoped to extend that feeling. He and Katy weren’t outwardly after money. Their aspirations were larger: they wanted to hack living. Down the street was their work space, where other start-ups’ machinery overflowed off every counter and desktop and shelf. Those were just the core group who worked here. The community that revolved around the space could be as many as three hundred people. Huffman didn’t know. He said he would accept anyone who wanted to “break [his] own boundaries.”

  For most young people in Silicon Valley—comprised disproportionately of men—breaking boundaries meant drumming up the courage even to speak to a romantic interest. It was a place many young men thought of as a “technical wasteland,” where eligible women were few and far between. Like going to college, here nerds were suddenly placed in a new world with no adult supervision, where transgressing at work was encouraged as much as transgressing in life. Granted, not everyone in Silicon Valley was polyamorous, not all couples had open marriages, but those that did felt more than comfortable crowing about it. It was like the gluten-free joke “How do you know if someone’s gluten-free?” Answer: “They tell you.”

  Fetching Laura Deming was always being recruited for these kinds of activities. People were always trying to “open her eyes” to new ways of thinking and living. She was a Silicon Valley geek’s dream.

  The valley was different from San Francisco, of course. Down in Palo Alto, men far outnumbered women. Those stuck there would often couple up as soon as they could, like bears finding mates for the long, cold winter. Coding all day left little time to play, plus bars in Palo Alto tended to close around ten. Those looking for excitement (or a date on the fly) would head into the city—mostly to the Mission. All sorts of experimentation was available there.

  Burnham, at first stuck down in suburban Atherton, where most women in his neighborhood were married and in their midforties, relished these trips into the city. By late April 2014, any party was a good party. Even if Todd Huffman’s style wasn’t necessarily his—no one at sailing camp on the East Coast would dare wear his hair with a pink curl in front or wear such a dull black-and-grey outfit.

  They also wouldn’t plant sensors under their skin to alert cryogenics facilities if anything were to happen to them. Huffman, on the other hand, had not only sensors in his body but also instructions tattooed on his torso explaining how he should be frozen in a thermos at Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the cryonics organization, should he expire.

  Huffman, thirty-seven, grew up in Long Beach. He was an early participant in Langton Labs when it started seven years ago. He moved in six years ago and was on the lease for one of its two warehouses. He added the lab building down the street a few years later and made money by charging rent to the dozens of people living and working there. Sixteen people lived in the housing section, off open living rooms through corridors and over Burning Man dance floors and bike space.

  The morning after one of their famed parties, they were sitting downstairs in their lab testing their new microscope. Research labs at universities sent the Huffmans tissue for them to image and process the data. They said their machines could image the tissue hundreds of times faster than a human could, and do as much imaging in one day as a human technician could in a whole year.

  The ways that technology could revolutionize science had Huffman fired up—and also pointed to the possibilities of machines outrunning us, he thought. It made him wonder why we were sticking to our own petty human rules, if so much more was possible. Wasn’t there something more? he wondered. Here he could prove there was.

  Huffman said that three of his live-in entrepreneurs were dropouts of PhD programs. “No full-time or founding team have completed a PhD,” he said. “To me there needs to be the world after academics, but academics is a paved road, and then it stops.”

  Where that road stopped, the path to San Francisco started. Here there was a level of energy and tolerance for risk that had so far been unparalleled in other places. “You can find lots of smart places like any of the national labs at universities. They have the depth of knowledge, but they don’t have the tolerance for risk, and they don’t have the fiercely independent traditions,” said Huffman. Here it was these traditions that had defined the new set of people who pursued experimental living with religious intensity. With a group that knew no bounds, these pseudo orgies, raves, and newfangled salons created a bizarre, warped version of regular life, with a wider lens on normality. Here institutions and routines such as raises, rents, mortgages—marriage—were as inconsequential, breakable, and flexible as the industries technology disrupted.

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  Huffman saw his purpose as far higher than mere style or culture. He thought of his role as creating a new zeitgeist for an adventurous Silicon Valley demographic. “There’s such a high density of intelligent, well-educated people here,” he said. “This zip code has the highest level of education in the world.” Because of this, he believed that anything was possible technologically. He pointed across the street to a nondescript glass door in an old warehouse, where a couple was leaning against the wall sipping lattes. “Right over there—they’re building satellites,” he said. “They’ve launched twenty-eight satellites.”

  He conceded that there were places outside of Silicon Valley that were trying to do the same thing, but they didn’t have the same interactivity. At the MIT Media Lab or the Harvard Innovation Lab, people weren’t sleeping on the floor next to their microscopes. They weren’t partying in the hallways in between teacher conference rooms. There was not as much autonomy—and far too much bureaucracy at any of these “legacy institutions,” aka universities.

  There, according to Huffman, people couldn’t switch frames as easily—or beds, for that matter. Talents were more siloed. Here social life reflected work through creativity and trial and error. While his roommates built robots that assemble electronics, created circuit boards, and empowered machines, they were becoming what he considered “fully alive.”

  In his estimation, the entire East Coast was stuck in a zombie state, and the young fellows he mentored, such as Burnham, Deming, and Proud, could make it in Silicon Valley if they only let go of the structures they used to know.

 
; Meanwhile, Burnham’s old mentor, Patri Friedman, was having more and more trouble in his experimental community. His wife had asked for a trial separation. Friedman wasn’t sure what that meant for both his family and his belief in polyamory. He wasn’t happy about it.

  3

  Hippy-Dippy Coding Communes

  By the end of the summer of 2011, John Burnham was starting to realize he had to give up on mining for asteroids, at least for now. He was disheartened to realize that the founder of the XPrize Foundation, Peter Diamandis, had already started working on it years before, with far more capital and expertise. John was also getting lonely down in Atherton. Aside from Patri Friedman and occasionally some of the fellows, he never really saw anyone he knew.

  He went to a few other Thiel events where he met more potential mentors: some during Friday lunches in Palo Alto, and others on retreats by the Thiel Foundation organizers. “Some of them I got along with really well—some people really like me, some just can’t stand me, some people really dislike me, and I just have to accept that,” he remembers thinking. Mostly, though, his social life was disheartening.

  He was worried that Diamandis and his asteroid mining company would eclipse any effort he made. “They actually have a decent chance of getting it done,” he admitted. “I’ve been doing planetary mining research since I was sixteen, but they have the capital.” So instead, Burnham dropped the idea and started interning at Moon Express, a company dedicated to researching how to mine minerals on the moon. There he worked in business development, mostly typing up marketing materials. After a few months, he left to intern at Cosmogia (now called Planet Labs), another space industry firm that he refused to talk about. “I have an NDA”—a nondisclosure agreement—he explained.

  That job didn’t last long, as it didn’t take much for Burnham to realize that working in an office as part of a staff was not for him. “I put on a pretty good show of being an extrovert,” he said, “but I can’t learn with people in the same room.” Conventional employment simply wouldn’t work for him. “I end up staying up all night and doing all the work, then going into the office and being like, ‘Well, what do I do now?’ ” he said. “I had a wonderful experience, but I’m just a crappy employee.”

  So Burnham decided he should try out one of the new co-living spaces he had heard about. It wouldn’t be quite so lonely, and maybe it wouldn’t be a bad place to find his next big idea. It was a new way of living that harkened back to the hippy days of the 1960s, when some young people lived together in communes. But the big difference was that these weren’t places for kicking back and tuning out. In today’s co-living communities, people worked hard, often all night. Coding and programming into the wee hours almost came with the rent.

  In Silicon Valley, working together and playing together wasn’t just a college motto. The twenty- and thirty-year-old inhabitants had taken dorm culture and amped it up further than they ever could on campus.

  Instead of the earlier progression of going to college to live among students, then leaving campus for a big city with a roommate or two, and finally living on one’s own, in the Bay Area, that pattern often went backward. Instead of the adult trajectory in which each new dwelling increasingly resembles the life of an adult human with a career and a family, Silicon Valley’s housing steps went the opposite way, where the more advanced and enlightened you were, the crazier your idea, the more “disruptive” a living situation you could find.

  In the late aughts, these selective housing units started springing up through the valley. Much like that first Hewlett-Packard garage spawned thousands of other companies started in garages, the movie The Social Network’s depiction of a co-living house, where dozens of nerdy engineers worked on building Facebook until Justin Timberlake, as Sean Parker, turned their coding session into a rager, co-living communities had taken hold. The object of these wasn’t for roommates to live among their kind or for other grown-ups to partake in shared responsibilities. It was still a way to save money, but to do so in a techie-chic way. Just as there was no shame over working in a garage if you’re building the next Google, there was no shame in sleeping on a shelf in a pool house if you have a wacky start-up vision to balance out your lack of bedroom.

  Two other fellows in Burnham’s class, Alex Kiselev and Jeffrey Lim, were living with a half dozen other local entrepreneurs in a co-living mansion in San Francisco they had named the Glint (spelled TheGlint). Alex was working on developing an open-source spectrometer, a tool used to measure spectra, while Jeffrey tried a number of start-up ideas but ended up working as a software developer at Ripple Labs. Thanks to TheGlint, Burnham now had ample opportunity to meet the right people. In the evenings, it would host area venture capitalists to speak and have dinner, such as Bing Gordon of KPCB; Senem Diyici and the Mavi Yol Quartet “for a night of music and experimentation”; and Cynthia Ong, founder of LEAP (Land Empowerment Animals People), for a “flash fund-raising event” aimed at empowering the people of Sarawak, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo, that had become, according to the housemates, victim of “heavy timber exploitation followed by massive grabbing of Native Customary Right land for oil palm plantations.”

  TheGlint had even loftier aspirations. Kiselev and a few friends rented the space to make it part home, part ideas salon. They called it a “hero accelerator.” Heroism had become another buzzword in Silicon Valley—almost as popular as disrupt and transgress and super fun. It was even the name of a new university started down in Palo Alto by venture capitalist Tim Draper. At Draper University, students lived in dorms called “Hero City,” where instead of learning English and math, they took classes called “Vision & Future” and “Special Powers.” A year later, Draper would be among the unfortunate investors who’d put money into Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes’s company whose much-ballyhooed blood testing machine was later found not to work as claimed.

  At TheGlint, the fellows worked on their own but still lived together. Since the beginning of the fellowship, Kiselev had been toiling on an “inexpensive high-performance liquid chromatography system,” a tool to make it easier for scientists to analyze lab samples. Over the past year, he and a number of other Thiel fellows had lived there on and off. Perched on a hill in Twin Peaks, in San Francisco, the four-story modern home had a view of the city skyline. With white minimal décor, spiral staircase, Spartan leather couches, electric fireplace, a pile of sneakers in the entryway, and dorm-like tapestries, it looked like a scene out of Home Alone. But instead of throwing frat parties, TheGlint housemates philosophized for fun.

  At that time, along with Burnham, Kiselev, and Lim, lived Tom Currier, a twenty-year-old who was awarded a Thiel Fellowship for making his father’s Porsche electric. He launched his own company called Black Swan Solar, where he had developed a heliostat, or “death ray,” that bounced sunlight to one central point and could ultimately be used as an alternative source of energy.

  TheGlint turned out to be a major connector for the fellows, especially Burnham. There, he met a friend, Greg Ryan, who convinced him to abandon his asteroid mining plans and to instead help him start a company that would convert cash into commodities and allow customers to purchase items with gold.

  It was John’s first “pivot”: the tech term for scrapping your current idea, as in moving from mining asteroids to creating an app to pay in gold. “The space industry,” he said, “is not the most conducive to entrepreneurship, and I’m not the right person to do the idea.”

  Burnham said that through their commodities app, he and Ryan would make currency irrelevant. “You could in practice buy coffee with gold,” he explained, once they had set up their app, which they named Daric. “The reason to do this is, you don’t want to store your money in fiat currency, given the current policy of quantitative easing.” John had just turned nineteen a few weeks ago. It fit right into his libertarian ideology. “Storing your money in dollars is actually quite dangerous.” Burnham’
s company would issue its customers debit cards for their Daric bank accounts. The merchant would be paid in cash, and Daric would deduct the same amount in gold from the user’s account. The eventual user base would trade gold with one another.

  Burnham said he had been interested in commodities for a long time. “I was sitting on my father’s IT desk freshman year of high school,” he recalled. “My interest in asteroid mining really came out of my interest in finance.” Stephen Burnham was an executive at Marco Polo Securities, an online private equity exchange for emerging markets. “My dad’s version of homeschooling was ‘You’re going to work at my company and learn a lot of math and read a lot of books,’ ” said Burnham. “I think I did the equivalent of three and a half years of math in freshman year.” By the following year, young John had flipped through the AP economics textbook and thought, “This is lame; it doesn’t tell you any of the cool stuff.” At TheGlint, he had found a kindred spirit in Ryan.

  TheGlint was hardly the only co-living house in Silicon Valley designed to foster ideas and blend work and life. These shared pseudodormitories—without adult supervision, of course—had become so popular in Silicon Valley that some companies started offering networking nights consisting of “innovation mansion tours.” Tropo, a cloud communications company, took its customers on a “progressive”—a term usually used to describe a frat party’s progression from one specialty drink to another in different dorm rooms down the hallway—to three of the local mansions. In addition to TheGlint, there was Factory Zero, a San Francisco townhouse where members of the early seed venture capital firm Memento lived; and the Villa, a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion in the Noe Valley neighborhood.