The Silicon Tech Bubble is built on Lies! Teens getting played as cheap labor Suckers in Silicon San Francisco VC Schemes
Attention teen dropouts racing to SF: The tech bubble is lying to you
By Mark Morford
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The tech bubble is lying to you
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Image 1 of 6 |The tech bubble is lying to you
I cannot fathom why more women of substance and dynamism don’t seem to want to get into the tech sector. Just LOOK at this raging diversity, this hive of creative activity, this awesome way to spend your day, all day, every day! So invigorating.
Image 1 of 6 – The tech bubble is lying to you
I cannot fathom why more women of substance and dynamism don’t seem to want to get into the tech sector. Just LOOK at this raging diversity, this hive of creative activity, this awesome way to spend your day, all day, every day! So invigorating.
I cannot fathom why more women of substance and dynamism don’t seem to…want to get into the tech sector. Just LOOK at this raging diversity,…this hive of creative activity, this awesome way to spend your day,…all day, every day! So invigorating.
King of the Milquetoasts, and also a billionaire many times over. Is this the dream?
Image 2 of 6 – The tech bubble is lying to you
King of the Milquetoasts, and also a billionaire many times over. Is this the dream?
King of the Milquetoasts, and also a billionaire many times over. Is…this the dream?
The pied piper of the “hey kid why not drop out of college and come burn through your prime impressionable years building a tepid startup that will probably fail,” one Peter Thiel, billionaire libertarian meta-capitalist, or something.
Image 3 of 6 – The tech bubble is lying to you
The pied piper of the “hey kid why not drop out of college and come burn through your prime impressionable years building a tepid startup that will probably fail,” one Peter Thiel, billionaire libertarian meta-capitalist, or something.
The pied piper of the “hey kid why not drop out of college and come…burn through your prime impressionable years building a tepid startup…that will probably fail,” one Peter Thiel, billionaire libertarian…meta-capitalist, or something.
Disrupt! Where tech pundits, coders and VCs go to imagine themselves thinking outside the box, when the box is all most of them really know.
Image 4 of 6 – The tech bubble is lying to you
Disrupt! Where tech pundits, coders and VCs go to imagine themselves thinking outside the box, when the box is all most of them really know.
Disrupt! Where tech pundits, coders and VCs go to imagine themselves…thinking outside the box, when the box is all most of them really…know.
Valued at something like $17 billion. Or is it 50? Does it matter when it’s just made up?
Image 5 of 6 – The tech bubble is lying to you
Valued at something like $17 billion. Or is it 50? Does it matter when it’s just made up?
Valued at something like $17 billion. Or is it 50? Does it matter when…it’s just made up?
SO much more fun than coding for some lame SF startup. Until, of course, you implode, and break up the band, and tastes change and no one gives a damn and you end up fat and angry and OD’d in a Subway sandwich shop in Pasadena. Otherwise, super cool!.
‘Twas the age of Guns n’ Roses and bad cocaine, you see, tight jeans and stack-heel boots and just the right amount of black eyeliner to go with your shredded T-shirt, all required costumery for littering the Sunset Strip at midnight with cheap flyers (Kinko’s, goldenrod) promoting your glammed-out hair-metal band, the one with the pouty lips and epic hair glued in place by more Aqua Net than 10,000 New Jersey senior proms, combined.
And lo, it was glorious.
It was also fabulously doomed. Every youngblood in the L.A. music school I attended (Musicians’ Institute, Hollywood) wanted to be Eddie Van Halen, everyone wanted to make epic rock, fill stadiums, inspire millions, be swarmed by girls, shred riffs to delight the gods, hang out with Tommy Lee and Slash in stripper-crammed opium dens of debauched awesomeness. I mean, who wouldn’t?
We practiced hard. We partied dumb. We prowled the gritty byways of Hollywood Boulevard long before it became the overblown, Vegas-wannabe tourist trap it is now, scarfing scurvy pizza slices at 1:00AM, honing our skills with girls, building camaraderie, trying with all our might to appear like badass street rockers and not the product of comfy middle-class suburbia nearly all of us so clearly were.
In short: It was a fast, awesome, entirely stupid ride, shallow as Bret Michaels and twice as vain, so intellectually vacuous that, within a few years, I hurried back in the welcoming arms of academia, where I fell in mad love with real learning and eventually graduated, in my late 20s, summa cum laude from Berkeley. What a ride.
Like this! Only more broke.
Why share all this silliness? Because there appears to be a strange parallel afoot. Because I recently found myself entranced by Nellie Bowles’ terrific profile over in California Sunday magazine, a tale of the new hordes of “lost boys” of San Francisco, all these naïve, clean-cut, mostly white teenaged computer whizzes from affluent families who are dropping out of college (and, increasingly, high school) to move to San Francisco.
They’re here to code, of course. To found companies. To singe their brains with a million lame logos. Which is to say, not for the fame, or the girls, or the fun drugs, or the free love (different era, but still).
They’re here for the money. Hundreds of them, stacked on top of each other in viciously expensive SF apartments, sleeping on the floor, living out of backpacks, all for for the startup score, the “dream” of landing vast heaps of VC capital that comes from building yet another app, portal, algorithm for the sake of their multimillionaire captors, all to bring them, if not sex or depravity, then surely the tech equivalent – way too much cash, way too soon.
This is the tech bubble’s newest, most sinister message: Who needs college, really? Who needs exposure to a broad range of ideas, cultures, religions, literature, ways of being in the world exactly at the time you’re most open and impressionable to discovering them? Come and burn away the most supple years of your life at a mediocre startup that will almost certainly fail! Bury your face in a screen and work like a slave on something to make egomaniacal capitalist drones like Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel even richer! Because tech!
Too harsh? Maybe. I’m sure it’s not that bad. I really do want to champion these boys, to think they’re here taking charge of their lives, creating cool stuff, taking risks, breaking free from the bonds of normal.
But that’s not what it feels like. It feels like the opposite, sort of deadly, like they’re unwittingly adding a new, far more damaging form of bondage before they’re even ready for it – money.
Here’s what the “tech startup dream” doesn’t tell the average dropout coder: All that VC/buyout money – assuming you score it – doesn’t offset the fact you’re locked to a screen for 16 hours a day, destroying your body, widening zero horizons, exploring zero life alternatives, having awkward teen sex with no one, sapping your life force, curdling your soul.
And for what? To be the next Zuckerberg? The King of Milquetoast? It’s like wanting to be the next Toyota Camry.
I’m happy to be proven wrong? The thing is, while my L.A. stint was all kinds of tawdry and ridiculous, it was also full of intrepid, raunchy adventures. We played clubs, partied in seedy hotels, worshiped women, worked graveyard shifts in recording studios next to real rock stars, hacked our own clothes and did our own hair, bootlegged beer and cheap vodka like pros.
And we practiced, studied the legends, honed our scales until the wee hours, thrilled by music, by our freedom, by all the dumb sex and laughter and endless possibility. Money had little to do with it, mostly because we didn’t have any.
These tech boys seem… different. They, too, sit around practicing – in quiet, pale clusters, coding their apps and designed workflows, numbly engaged in the most harmful activity known to humankind – slumped behind a screen, spines collapsed, eyes blurry, anima fading fast – all for someone else’s project, for the sake of rich, older white males who pat them on the head, buy them coffee and take them on free trips to their Tahoe condos. Cool? I guess?
In L.A., we plastered our dingy apartments with photos of rock stars, concerts, half-naked females, Ferraris and Marshall stacks. In SF, the tech boys plaster their walls, too – with Post-It Notes, scribbled with fantasy dollar sums, dreamy VC payouts and, well, that’s about it.
They do not appear to go outside. All food is delivered via app. There are few girls. Social skills appear limited to learning the right buzzwords to impress titanically self-important VC kingpins you never hear much about because, well, mostly because they’re wildly uninteresting. All they have is money, after all.
Here’s my question: Do these boys really have a clue what they’re doing here? And who they’re doing it for? And the engine behind it all? Do the realize how much they’re missing, everywhere else?
King of the Milquetoasts. Is this the dream?
Perhaps this is the crux. It seems like these boys are being lied to. Tricked. Told that broad, free-form education outside the tech bubble is for suckers, largely because it won’t make you a dumb pile of cash by age 25 that you have no idea how to use and just makes you into a shallow, entitled clod no one likes to be around.
It’s capitalism’s most successful lie, isn’t it? Money is everything. Success in business is the only real measure of your worth, your happiness, your value in life. And by the time you wake up and realize it isn’t? Probably too late.
Let’s be fair: Some of these boys claim to be having tons of fun. They love the hackathons, the “secret” projects, friendships, hanging around “famous” VC bros. And of course there are lots of terrifically cool, smart people in tech. And who knows? Maybe some really will invent the thing that transforms, say, education, or energy, or politics. Totally possible.
This is merely to point up the palpable sadness that seems to run through their story, a weird sense of lifelessness and awkward entitlement, borne of capitalism’s ruthless one-dimensionality.
It makes you want to ask them: “Do you know how much more there is to life than inventing the next SnapChat, or PayPal, or Candy Saga Crush Hunt IV? Worlds more. Galaxies more. You have no idea.
“San Francisco is not the wild frontier it appears to be. It’s just a silly bubble full of made-up money and too many hoodies, signifying nothing.
“Go see the world. Mess with your boundaries. Throw out what you think you know. Trip up your sexuality, your lineage, your gods. Be amongst the trees, the oceans, the mountains of Other. Don’t skip college; dive into it even deeper, study astronomy and poetry and trickster hallucinogens in the desert. Figure out who you are before it’s too late, before money or some billionaire tech schlub decides it for you. Hey, it’s what Bret Michaels would have wanted.”
Categories: Culture, not too broadly, I mean obviously right?, Notes & Errata, Only depressing if you lack perspective, Spotlight, Truth or something like it, Your technology will see you now
The Real Teens of Silicon Valley
Inside the almost-adult lives of the industry’s newest recruits
By Nellie Bowles
Photographs by Michael Schmelling
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“Do you know Zach Latta?” asked Fouad Matin, 19, on the roof of San Francisco’s unofficial tech teenager headquarters one recent night. “You know he rebuilt Yo’s backend. He’s baller.”
We watched the sun set over Twin Peaks, and Matin told me about his high school dropout friends like Latta, 17, who served as lead engineer of Yo, a viral messaging app that simply sends the message “Yo.” A large steel vent, on which someone had written the words Boob Mansion, pumped out hot air and the smell of tortillas from a vegan Mexican restaurant downstairs. Matin warmed himself under it.
When I’d arrived that afternoon, Dave Fontenot, 22 and the group’s elderly leader, met me at the door of a dingy-looking building in the Mission District. He led me up the narrow stairs, past pink salt lamps and a fog machine left over from a Himalayan sunset–themed party the previous weekend. The stairs open to the first of two expansive living rooms with utilitarian decor. Residents, who pay between $950 and $1,450 and range in age from 18 to 23, keep their mattresses on the floor with plain white sheets tangled at the feet. They stack their few personal effects (deodorant, sports shoes) in plastic drawers along the wall. Fontenot told me that all his stuff fits in a single backpack; others, hanging out on worn-out sofas, claimed to have smaller backpacks. They all wanted to show me. Scattered on the tables were business self-help books like Make Yourself Unforgettable, a guitar with a sticker that read fuck it, ship it, a projector, and some chocolate wrappers. On the wall was art that their property-management company, also started by a teenage entrepreneur, had picked out for them, like plastic stag heads and photos of ostriches. They call their house Mission Control. As I stood surrounded by a coterie of teens, I didn’t have the heart to ask if they knew about the nearby, internationally famous sex club, Mission Control.
Jared Zoneraich, 17 and finishing some high school assignments, was sprawled with his laptop on a couch. He asked Fontenot if he could come along for the tour. “Not until you finish your homework,” Fontenot chided.
We walked past empty beer bottles and chalkboards scrawled with 7.5m > 250k, the words energy, control, status, and eco, and drawings of squids. Fontenot — who wears his hair in a faux-hawk and said he’s famous for his pajama bottoms but had put on trackpants for my benefit — led me up a metal ladder to the gravel-and-tar roof where we met Matin, who had dropped out of school and moved to the Bay Area on his own when he was 17, to watch the sunset, as is their ritual.
“We don’t consider this a hacker house,” Fontenot said, handing me a fake mustache on a stick designed as a prop for selfies. “We don’t consider this a frat house or a co-working space. This is our home.”
Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and radical libertarian, stoked San Francisco’s latest Peter Pan moment. In 2010, his foundation launched a fellowship that awards $100,000 each to 20 young people per year who skip or drop out of college. One of his slogans: “Some ideas can’t wait.” The fellowship attracted outsize attention, instantly becoming an elite brand around which other dropout teens began to rally. “The fellowship is a flag, like a beacon,” said Matin. “Even if you don’t do the fellowship, it legitimized our work.”
Danielle Strachman, the Thiel Fellowship’s program director, seconds this notion. “Peter Thiel, PayPal — these are things [parents] understand,” she said. I met her and Michael Gibson, the fellowship’s vice president of grants, in a conference room inside the Thiel Foundation’s sleek, modern headquarters in the Presidio, a former military outpost, many of whose old whitewashed buildings have been converted into startup space. When the fellowship was announced, “it was a media maelstrom,” said Gibson. “One of the biggest fears these young people have is being unintelligible to their parents — and to everyone, really. One of the things the fellowship did was make it intelligible.”
More than 430 people applied the first year. By 2014, thanks in part to a shortened application, that number increased to 3,100. “When the fellowship first started, it was young prodigies, geniuses,” Strachman said. “But there are so many people dropping out now, it’s more normal-looking teens.” Of the 84 fellows so far, only eight have gone back to college, and two of those later dropped out again. Alums include the founders of Streem (acquired by Box), Propeller (acquired by Palantir), and Flashcards+ (acquired by Chegg).
The fellowship officers, meanwhile, have come to see themselves as a protective layer between the teens and talent-hungry venture capitalists. They worry that many of these suitors aren’t looking to develop original thinkers, but to recruit programmers for their existing portfolio companies. “We really want [the fellows] to be entrepreneurs,” Gibson said. “Teens have a greater risk tolerance. They can live in conditions we would find inhospitable. They have a fresh mind; they have so much optionality, youth, and stamina.”
Teens have also proven to be exceptionally creative coders, the Thiel officers said. Eighteen-year-old Conrad Kramer, a current Thiel fellow and co-founder of the file-transfer service DeskConnect, is famous among his peers for winning the two most prestigious collegiate hackathons in the country while still in high school. Kramer won the University of Pennsylvania’s PennApps in the fall of 2013 and, together with his team, the University of Michigan’s MHacks III in 2014 for a task-automation app called Workflow. When it launched, Workflow was the most purchased iPhone app for four days. By charging up to $5 per download, Kramer and his co-founders, 20-year-old Ari Weinstein and 19-year-old Nick Frey, have so far mostly managed to avoid taking venture-capital money.
But despite their success, young founders face challenges the fellowship officers might not have expected. “We have young people email us with all sorts of things, from ‘I need help figuring out what to do here,’ or ‘I got dumped,’” Strachman said. “One kid raised $40,000 and had a first date on the same day.” In certain cases, she and the other officers will step into a parental role, mentoring the fellows in personal finance, etiquette, how to write an email, how to set up health insurance. Sometimes the guidance is more granular.
“I recently had a whole meeting with one young man just for table manners,” Strachman told me. “We had a bowl of chips and salsa for the table, and he starts out by salting them so much — I mean, beyond anything normal.” She explained that it was polite to ask before salting communal chips. She has also talked to fellows about appropriate cologne use.
Jackson Greathouse fall stood out at the Mission Control party, dressed as he was in a tight gray blazer, tie, and selvage jeans, with slicked-back hair. I was sitting on a couch jammed between teens who told me that the 19-year-old Fall dresses everyone for meetings with venture capitalists. I buttonholed him in the kitchen. He said his role in the extended family of teenage tech workers is fashion consultant, the trusted tailor of the Lost Boys. His friends send him before-and-after selfies, and Fall will recommend outfits — he’s a fan of the linen blazer — as well as shopping services like Trunk Club. “First impressions matter here especially. That day you could run into a million-dollar funding deal,” he said. Most of the teens wear “free T-shirts from hackathons. … It’s about self-respect.”
There are other motivations for requesting Fall’s services. “Jackson dresses me for girls,” Orbuch said.
When I visited Fall at his cliff-side shared home in Bernal Heights a few weeks after the party, he made himself an espresso in the kitchen, which has a sweeping view of the city and the water beyond. Fall grew up in Oklahoma City — “where the wind never stops rushing down the plains,” he sang to himself — and got into tech through friends he made online. At age 12, Fall kept a blog where he posted video podcasts with tech celebrities like the writers Leo Laporte and Gary Vaynerchuk. At 13, he discovered a Facebook group called Millennial Generation Entrepreneurs, and he saw something astonishing: People his age were dropping out of school and moving to San Francisco.
At the end of his junior year, Fall left high school and worked various design jobs. He moved to L.A. last year, when he was 18, and took a bus to the Bay Area to visit a friend who was interning at a startup called Relcy. While he was there, Fall came up with a new design strategy for the startup. His friend’s CEO was so taken with his idea that Fall was told to cancel his bus home — “like a fairy tale,” he said.
Fall’s current house has five permanent residents and usually two people crashing; he estimates that the average age is 21. There’s a pool table, a Nespresso machine, a wooden piano against the wall, a bookshelf with inspirational business books (the usual suspects: Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup, assorted Dale Carnegie), an Xbox 360, and two fireplaces. With the exception of some scattered beer cans, it’s pretty clean.
Across town from Bernal Heights, in a South of Market warehouse one February evening, Ashu Desai, who dropped out of college at 18, was trying his best to build a replica of the college-dorm common-room experience. He’d set up cards for poker on long work tables and had rigged a projector for Super Smash Bros. Over soda, a dozen kids played Texas hold ’em and the fantasy card game Coup.
While some teenagers come to San Francisco with hit apps already under their belts, most arrive with just ambition and a blind faith that this booming industry will shape them into the workers it needs. So Desai co-founded Make School, a two-year degree program to replace college. “It’s not that there’s no need for education, it’s just not the right kind,” said Desai, who’s now 22.
“For the first time in human history, high school students can build something that impresses not just peers but adults,” says Jeremy Rossmann, Desai’s co-founder. “You’re used to being a high school kid that’s subordinate to a college kid that’s subordinate to an adult. But half the winning teams at the collegiate hackathons have a high school student on them.”
Desai, while still in high school, made an iPhone game that sold 50,000 copies. “Who cares about grades after that?” he said. He enrolled at UCLA but struggled to focus, skipping classes and eventually dropping out, much to his parents’ horror. “My parents were both from India, and since we were kids, their goal for us is HYPS,” he said. “Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford.” But along with Rossmann, a friend from high school who dropped out of MIT, Desai was accepted to the incubator Y Combinator. That helped on the parental front. “YC was a license to drop out,” Desai said. “It’s a credential.”
Now, with investments from Andreessen Horowitz and Tim Draper, Make School, which has been in beta this past year and officially launches in September, has developed a curriculum meant to span the software-developer skill set. Classes including Version Control, Etiquette and Process in the Open Source Community, and Applying to Y Combinator are taught in person in the warehouse where Desai was hosting game night. Students this past year have stayed in a house in Palo Alto, but starting in September they’ll live in San Francisco. Between the two years of instruction, they’ll do a six-month internship.
Teaching students how to make apps has turned out to be the easy part, Desai said. His challenge is filling in for everything else college does. “How can we socially prepare people for the real world?” he said. “How do we teach the soft skills — networking, pitching, speaking?” Nutrition and Exercise is a required class.
Make School students pay nothing upfront but commit to paying for the program later. Desai assumes that his graduates will make about $100,000 each of their first two years out of school, plus $45,000 during their internship. The school skims a percentage off this total to make about $80,000 from each student. “But we only charge if you see returns,” Desai said.
Masakazu Bando, 20, joined Make School’s pilot last year and got a dream job, while still in class, at a social bookmarking startup called Papaly. He hasn’t gone back to MIT. Another pilot student, 19-year-old Lynne Okada, said she was having trouble imagining being back in school at U.C. Santa Cruz: “The life I’m living right now is just so much more fun.”
One young man came to the game night with his dad, who peered around the room as everyone settled in. But with a look from his son, he sneaked out to wait in the car.
Zach Latta, of Yo fame, lives with eight roommates, including three other teenagers, in the Castro. Not long after the Mission Control party, I stopped by his old Victorian, above a coffee shop and next door to the Castro Country Club, an LGBT community center. It has seven bedrooms if you count the closet (“it’s an expensive closet,” Latta said, suggesting I check out the Business Insider story on it).
Latta wore black jeans and a gray zip-up that hung loose on his lean frame. Growing up in L.A., he learned HTML while he was in the third grade and was always a star student, taking computer-science classes at a local community college.