Valley of the Gods

by Alexandra Wolfe

  They had another five minutes until their next speaker arrived, so they started to pack up their containers of quinoa and veggie chips and drank the last sips of their Kombucha teas. Stephens, in pale-grey fitted jeans and a loose boat-neck yellow ­T-shirt, directed the group of twenty-somethings down the stairs to the lower level of the house, where backpacks were strewn about a makeshift conference table. Signs of sleep the night before were visible through a door in the back of the room, where air mattresses and crumpled sheets were crammed against the wall.

  The first speaker of the afternoon was a software engineer and early Facebook employee named Todd Perry, who wore the Silicon Valley uniform of thick-rimmed, black-framed glasses, jeans, and a grey T-shirt. He didn’t look much different from his audience, who wore the same kind of outfit, just slightly hipper versions, with ripped jean shorts on the men, lower-cut tank tops on the women, and various shavings and piercings.

  The blue curtains blocking the view of the patio looked as though they had been pasted on the windows with Elmer’s glue and were about to fall. But Perry didn’t use the slide projector, so he didn’t mind the brightness. He was talking to the group about how everyone should forget college and learn to program instead. Perry ended up at Facebook because he’d met Mark Zuckerberg at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, a boarding school, where he was Zuckerberg’s teaching assistant. The campers, who were all chugging blue energy drinks and caffeinated soda and clacking away on their laptops, gasped.

  Perry, who left the company two years before the IPO, started by asking their thoughts on the relevance of the famous social network. “Facebook has replaced business cards,” said a young man named Simon. “All you need is a name.” Next was Celine, who said, “We use Facebook mostly for cheating.” Perry laughed. “We post answers in groups.” Perry was particularly interested in those who said Facebook was over. Considering that he quit before getting his million-dollar payoff, Perry seemed somewhat bitter. It turned out, he left to become a female lounge singer named Suzy. Despite appearing with a straight, Asperger’s-chic quality today, he dressed up as his blonde-wigged alter ego in the evenings.

  Now Perry was describing his path to Silicon Valley. His interest in Nintendo and then Final Fantasy, a science-fiction video game that any self-respecting engineer seemed to have grown up playing, was a common route to coding. He passed around his early journals to show how he learned to program. They documented how he first taught himself by figuring out how the video game Super Mario Bros. was built. When Perry got to his stint at Facebook, he focused on his admiration for Mark Zuckerberg and what qualities it took to make him who he was today. “Zuck was doing the Lean Startup for years in middle school,” he explained, referring to entrepreneur Eric Ries’s program for building a start-up without much overhead and iterating on your idea until you get it right. He explained that everything about the Facebook founder and CEO, from his Star Wars–themed bar mitzvah to his participation on the fencing team and the math contest club, represented the iterative way that Zuckerberg’s mind worked. Perry then described how Mark’s favorite math teacher at Exeter used to forbid his students to use calculators, and anyone who had to use one was forced to do push-ups. Zuckerberg decided to write code for all his homework and just do the push-ups anyway. “He still got into Harvard,” Perry said, laughing.

  The ability to code gave these engineers, who in large groups remained quiet unless asked a specific question based on their expertise, a confidence that they were more highly developed than other people. They possessed a cockiness unexpected from computer science geeks. If you couldn’t program, you couldn’t speak their language. In that sense, Perry said, the 2010 film The Social Network was an accurate portrayal of what happened, especially in the nerd-versus-frat competition. In 2005, when the good-looking, crew-rowing Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, were trying to combat the more technologically savvy competition of Facebook, they wrote a program to scrape the email addresses Facebook had already signed up. Zuckerberg took the program as an attack and spent all night writing a JavaScript obfuscator to break the Winklevi’s—how the Mark Zuckerberg character jokingly refers to the Winklevoss twins, as though Winklevi (pronounced “winkle-vie”) is the plural of a Latin -us ending—code. He launched it at three in the morning and then went to Jack in the Box for hamburgers. That was the quality of Zuckerberg’s that the Oscar-nominated film missed, according to Perry, because it made Zuckerberg all about business. “The movie banned the trait that made him successful: his ability to find humor in code.”

  As a leader, Zuckerberg didn’t feel confident running Facebook until 2006, when he refused to sell it for a billion dollars, explained Perry. “He was not a good motivational leader but led by example. Then in 2006 Viacom was offering to fly him everywhere, and he took all the meetings, upset all the people, and in parallel released the newsfeed feature”—a continual stream of updates that was controversial at first among users. But within Facebook, it made a statement. “From then on, he was the leader of Facebook,” said Perry.

  When it came time for questions and answers, the campers, trying out what it would be like to “hack” their own education, wanted to know what they could do to be like Zuckerberg if they hadn’t started coding at age ten. Perry said it was never too late and that now, with the rise of digital media, “even humanities people need to know how to code. Programming makes you sharper and prevents you getting old and rigid. It’s more like creative writing than it used to be.”

  After Perry was done, the group had a five-minute recess before the second session. The campers checked their email, and then ran upstairs to make coffee and take a bathroom break in the marble-­tiled ground-floor facility equipped with an oversize Jacuzzi.

  The next stop was a visit to IGN Entertainment Games, a gaming company that had organized a meet-and-greet with the dropouts over pizza in its office in San Francisco’s SoMa, or South of Market (Street) area. The group broke up into four different cars. Some jumped into a bright-blue Prius they’d picked up behind aluminum fencing at a City Car Share lot.

  Despite a few wrong turns, they ended up on Brannan Street and arrived at IGN. Elevators brought them up to life-size mannequins of Alien versus Predator and other video game characters. After the Hackademic Camp group waited in a lounge area strewn with arcade games and vending machines that sold healthy treats (all baked, not fried) for only twenty-five cents, they were greeted by a team called Code Foo. The mostly Asian interns explained their rotating six-week training program coding for the company. Meanwhile, the campers, including students from prestigious colleges such as UC Berkeley and Yale University, glanced around at the video games on the wall and eyed the front door for the pizza delivery man. Code Foo even accepted college dropouts—or anyone who could impress IGN with his or her engineering skills. The recruitment ad for the program read: “Flipping burgers to scrape together enough cash to buy Portal 2? Blow our minds while you’re here, and we’ll hire you.” Those accepted would spend six weeks programming and then another six weeks learning the core competencies needed to work there full-time. If they could show they were up to the task, IGN would hire them.

  Just before the two sides of IGN staffers and campers broke the divide like at a high school dance, a manager ran up and realized they had brought out kegs of beer even though most of the campers were under twenty-one. They quickly removed them.

  5

  The All-Meat Lunch

  Underage guests were a recurring problem at the Silicon Valley happy hours. To find the youngest untapped talent, companies often looked for employees to pluck far before their pre-freshman weekends. Many recruiters didn’t want to wait until students started college, let alone graduated. Android, the mobile operating system, paid students to hand out Android pajamas to their friends. Tech recruiting firms sent letters to talented engineers urging them to leave school to work for start-ups, just as the NFL would recruit a promising f
ootball player. From free food, to company T-shirts, to six-figure starting salaries, early hires leaving school were incentivized not only in the short term but also with equity in the fledgling companies they might be leaving school to join. These days, instead of Wall Street investment banks taking out their summer interns to steak houses and strip clubs—the frattastic havens of the old-boy network—­Silicon Valley companies took computer science majors to nice restaurants and entered them in raffle contests for iPads.

  In the past few years, tech companies added room in their hiring budgets for college dropouts, such as former Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s 3D Robotics. As tech start-ups turned from small businesses into corporations—some nearly the size of Wall Street investment banks—they had to hire engineers quickly. Silicon Valley has always favored the young, since they are more likely to stay abreast of the newest computer science programs, but now, having to hire a lot of people for expanding companies, tech giants were seeking the self-taught. It turned out that many tech CEOs preferred someone who had learned autodidactically rather than from a professor at an Ivy League school. The first issue was that technology was improving faster than educators could teach it.

  Pinterest was just one of the companies trying to find talent before institutions held it captive. Whenever Quixey cofounder and chief science officer Liron Shapira wanted to convince his summer interns not to go back to college in the fall, he took them to a regular event he hosts called the All-Meat Lunch for College Avoiders, acronymed AMLCA. At the Espetus Churrascaria in San Mateo, Shapira provided unlimited meat to any college-age job seekers who had decided to do one of the following: not go to college, drop out of college, or delay college by a year. He first posted the challenge on his blog in June 2012, asking, “Go to college or eat unlimited meat?”

  “Think of someone you know who just graduated from college,” he asked in the post. “Chances are, they’re still hunting hopelessly for an ‘entry-level’ job. Well, you know what would make their job search a lot easier, and land them a job that’s much better than entry-level? Taking four years of their life to build job skills.” Shapira clarified that he didn’t consider college worthless—just a bad way to spend four years of your life. “Espetus Churrascaria is a high-end Brazilian BBQ restaurant with great food, atmosphere, and service. They have an all-you-can-eat lunch with seven types of steak,” he said. “So ask yourself, do you want to go to college, or eat unlimited meat?”

  Since then, Shapira had hosted about a half dozen lunches at Espetus. Shapira himself dropped out of UC Berkeley after interning at Slide, a company that created third-party apps for Facebook that sold to Google. He ended up finishing the degree eventually, but “I just did it for the social signaling,” he said. “I didn’t do anything too heroic, and I’m largely a hypocrite. At the time, I had no alternative.” He would tell Quixey interns that he was advising them not to go to college only because they were extremely talented—“three or four standard deviations from the mean of the bell curve.” Otherwise, going to college for the average person was a rational decision.

  The lunches, he said, “don’t change a lot of minds, but help people realize college shouldn’t be the default option.” Most people who attended, he said, were already considering doing something like taking a year off or starting something new, and the conversations they had with Shapira nudged them toward that decision. What Shapira, a Thiel fellow mentor, was trying to prevent was “status quo bias”: the idea that the human mind assumes the status quo is the best option. “If you’re extraordinary,” he reiterated, “then don’t count on college to set up your life’s challenges.”

  Shapira said the problem was that when you’re seventeen, you think of yourself as a child who has to tread along through a system. “What if you thought of yourself as an adult, and you just have to go on with your life?” he posed. He would tell young people that instead of following the track they think they should be on, to look at senior positions they’re interested in and start learning the skills that will get them there.

  He thought the idea of applying for entry-level jobs was ridiculous. Instead, he told young people to think of their ultimate goal first. Climbing corporate rungs was so ten years ago. “Looking for an entry-level position is a sign that you haven’t planned your life,” said Shapira. But that is the period of time, around eighteen years old, he said, that job seekers had three years of leeway to train for whatever it is that they wanted to do. “If you acted like that at eighteen, you’d spend your time wisely, versus if you were in college, you’d spend your life different—wasting your time until you were twenty-two,” he said. “College gives you nothing that can help you with your life aside from this piece of paper that will make your job search slightly less hopeless.”

  Shapira thought that watching classes on YouTube or Khan Academy, an online education platform, was just as good as going to college—and possibly more effective. “There’s a simple way to go to your computer and learn more efficiently than in any classroom,” he said. “I think we’re seeing the beginning of a revolution.”

  • • •

  The Thiel fellows had already begun thinking this way, but for many of them, going from a structured school system to fending for themselves in Silicon Valley was daunting. Some of them joined the area’s incubators, which, in a typical Silicon Valley accelerated pace, had become a sort of West Coast Ivy League. In Silicon Valley, education was based on your proximity to start-up incubator or to a Silicon Valley god. Who do you learn from? What corporation do you work with? To what circles can you pin your education? Here respect came from the extended networks you knew.

  At incubators, instead of learning old code from older professors, participants can meet like-minded young techies on the cutting edge of computer programming. With incubators such as Y Combinator, Techstars, and 500 Startups becoming more relevant signaling mechanisms to the tech industry than an Ivy League degree, many teens think that getting into an incubator is more likely to give undergrads the skills they need to get a job in an increasingly tech-focused economy than a handful of humanities courses in a liberal arts college. Plus, the incubators were becoming more and more selective, and producing tangible ­results—like the billions the Dropbox and Airbnb founders made. Whereas college degrees used to provide students with insurance that they would have a credential to fall back on, graduates were finding that the more reliable safety net was the ability to program. In the second Silicon Valley boom period of 2010 to 2015, employers couldn’t find enough candidates to fill their job openings, and as undergrads increasingly couldn’t find jobs, the only people who could fill the chasm were those with computer science skills. The fast track to get them all together: an incubator.

  Each of these incubators was shorter than the Thiel Fellowship and somewhat more structured. The meals and events were highly encouraged, and the leaders had office hours that students could book online. It was a more appealing format to some of the fellows, such as Burnham and Jonathan Marbach, who applied to Y Combinator online. Started in 2005 by angel investor Paul Graham, “YC,” as it was called in the valley, accepted a smaller percentage of applicants than Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Though it had no central headquarters, and was run from Mountain View, those admitted to the three-month program had access to a valuable network of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors, possible cofounders, and a constant stream of high-powered speakers. At the end of every section was a “Demo Day” where participants presented their company ideas to investors.

  By 2012, Y Combinator had launched over a billion dollars in business, hatching companies such as Dropbox, Airbnb, and Loopt, the latter a now-defunct location sharing service for mobile phones. Y Combinator has two classes, or cycles, each year, during which companies moved to the Bay Area for mentorship and programming partners. Both of the three-month cycles revolved around building new companies. And though there was no fixed YC home, participants met one an
other and possible mentors at weekly events where a different Silicon Valley god would come speak. The atmosphere of the weekly dinners recalled High Table, the Oxford University tradition where students meet with their professors for dinner once a week, but the vibe was decidedly Silicon Valley. Meals were on rolling white tables instead of long candlelit tables for twenty. Instead of black tie, the aspiring founders wore T-shirts and carried laptops to show off what they had coded over the course of the week.

  Jonathan Marbach went through Y Combinator as soon as he finished his last semester at Wake Forest. He left college to do both YC and the Thiel Fellowship. His attendance there was the reason why the team split. He applied to YC from college. After he was accepted, he moved out to Silicon Valley on January 1, 2012. There he spent his days trying to come up with a new idea that would solve one of the world’s problems. “The biggest thing we could think of was email overload,” he recalled. “The direction we went was figuring out a way to automatically filter distracting emails that we want to see on our own time, leaving only important ideas in our in-box.” The program’s advisors worked with him and his partners to craft the idea, but by the end, it seemed that most people didn’t want to switch over from Gmail, and they had few users.

  Once YC ended, his new partners lost interest and moved on to other companies, breaking up the team. Marbach moved back to New York to be closer to his family. “In Silicon Valley, I wasn’t very closely connected to anyone,” he lamented. “It was tough to coordinate anything.” Without a car, being so far from the other fellows made it difficult to keep up with them. In retrospect, YC was the best part of Marbach’s fellowship. He said the partners in it were company founders themselves, and he found Graham more accessible than Peter Thiel was. “I could meet with him whenever I want if I just submitted a form,” he said. “He even emailed me out of the blue saying, ‘Hey, John, how’s it going?’