Valley of the Gods

by Alexandra Wolfe

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  Alpha Girls and Beta Boys

  Nearly a year into her Thiel Fellowship, in spring 2012 Laura Deming was having little luck raising money for her fledgling Longevity Fund. She hadn’t gone back to school, but she had returned to a college campus to work out of a Stanford lab testing mice to figure out ways to make them live longer. The lab turned her onto new talent. There she looked for promising young scientists and companies that her longevity venture firm could invest in. It gave her solace to be near Stanford, even if she wasn’t technically a student.

  Deming enjoyed living among the other fellows in Palo Alto, but she hadn’t quite figured out how to come up with new concepts in the lab and meet potential donors who would invest in her fund—and at the same time source new biotechnologies to extend human life. Then there was her social life to worry about. It was all rather overwhelming. She decided to become a fruitarian.

  In her longevity research circles, she was used to meeting scientists who were always tweaking their diets to see how they would feel. Laura came across people practicing calorie restriction as well as more typical diets of limiting carbs or fat. Some of her tech friends saw their bodies as machines, constantly adding and taking away food groups to test productivity differences. One had tried eating only fruit. So to raise her energy, she swore off all meat, bread, and dairy for the sixth months of her fund-raising efforts. Her dainty body became an even fainter wisp, and she slept less and less each night. But her focus and clarity increased, and she found she could get much more done during the day. Deming also found that her new diet fit in with a strange social landscape that was proving different from the one she was vaguely aware of at MIT, where she had started working in a lab at age fourteen. At MIT, she was comfortable among the scientists in their spectacles and white lab coats. The research assistants found her somewhat of a curiosity. Here was a tiny little prodigy passionate about testing the life-spans of mice.

  But in Silicon Valley, everyone was some version of a tiny little prodigy. And they all acted like their bodies were nuanced machines in need of a special treatment, which included an enlightened diet, fitness regimen, or mating system to make it run better and code faster. Being a fruitarian helped her fit into a place where baseline nerdiness wasn’t nearly enough. You had to be weird in some specifically difficult way that made you more productive at the same time.

  Deming fit that bill. So did Noor Siddiqui, at least for John Burnham. Noor applied to be a 2012 Thiel fellow, the year after Burnham, in secret. She didn’t want to tell her parents, or anyone else for that matter. Her mother and father, both born in Pakistan, had moved to the United States to get a better education. They hoped their children would have the same opportunity. They moved to Washington, DC, where they studied at George Washington University. They wanted Noor to go not only to college but also to graduate school. She tried bringing up the fellowship when she read about it online, but they opposed it and told her not to apply.

  Her father in particular thought teenagers should be in school. They wouldn’t know what to do with $100,000 and at that age couldn’t know what their lives would be like. But Siddiqui had an idea of what she wanted to do. Having been to Pakistan, she saw what poverty in that part of the world is like—and then saw the comparative advantages in the West. She wanted to find a way to connect poor people in the East to wealthy employers. The idea appealed to the Thiel Fellowship organizers who chose Siddiqui to be a finalist.

  She was so enthusiastic about it that her parents consented. “Once she’s through with the fellowship, it will allow her to go wherever she wants,” her father said. Still, he wasn’t happy about the way she’d be living, which was even more socially lax than he thought college would be. He didn’t like how close she’d be living and working with boys. Noor had considered living at TheGlint, with some other Thiel fellows, but he disapproved.I

  During the fellowship, she would be mentored by previous fellows, which was how she met Burnham. He offered to help her navigate the program. Soon the two were dating. But there was little time for socializing. Siddiqui was supposed to be working on her idea. She did this mostly from home in Virginia, in a room she called “the cave.” She covered it with pages torn from magazines and inspirational quotes from Abraham Lincoln, Paulo Coelho, George Bernard Shaw, and Coco Chanel.II

  Her relationship with Burnham helped the transition, but she tried to keep it secret. She soon learned that she was lucky to have found someone among the group. Few really dated one another. Even Deming was growing frustrated with the dearth of eligible gentlemen, despite all the attention she got, as well as the ostensibly favorable 10:1 male-to-female ratio.

  Deming soon realized that being female in Silicon Valley was different than it was on the East Coast. The conversations women had with one another and with men were different to start—as were the clothes they wore and the social circles they aspired to join. In Palo Alto, few girls wore heels or dresses or skirts. And walking down University Avenue, you’d be hard pressed to find a single lingerie shop. Most ready-to-wear clothes were for camping. Wrap or shawl? Forget it. Polar fleeces were for throwing on when the sun went down.

  She found that walking through Mountain View, Sunnyvale, or Palo Alto in a dress was akin to getting ready for the prom at noon—or it would label a woman as an East Coast visitor or maybe a costume party guest. Jeans were the uniform for both sexes. Men did better if they wore Steve Jobs’s favorite kind of sneakers to prove that they had something in common with the tech master—whose legacy lived on in his stock price and user interface.

  Women’s jeans could be loose or tight, but pants were essential. For women, proving that you were not a slave to stereotypes of sexuality was essential. The more that brand logos were replaced with company logos, the better. Instead of flaunting Coach, Gucci, or Polo brands—big no-nos—any logo or slogan should refer to a start-up (even start-ups that were, by their bank accounts, bigger than the brands they were replacing, such as Facebook, Google, and Apple). The earlier the T-shirt was made in the company’s history, the better—2005 was almost nascent, for example—since that would signify how much equity you might have and how wealthy you could indirectly say you were. Wearing a Facebook T-shirt made in 2007 was a stronger symbol than driving a Ferrari, since a Ferrari costs about $200,000, while an early-stage employee at Facebook in 2007 could have made tens of millions of dollars after the IPO.

  Instead of attractive athletes or suave businessmen, the most desirable men in Silicon Valley for women looking at that kind of thing were numbers five, six, and seven employees at big tech companies. Standing on line at University Café one day, a girl nearby pointed to a pudgy redhead and squealed, “He was number five!”

  Women don’t wear the nautical look or the drapery dressing of an East Coast resort town. Sailboat dresses or anchor patterns would signal Virgin America commuter. The less cutesy, feminine, and frilly you could be as a Silicon Valley woman, the better. Of course, all women like to feel attractive, which you are allowed to do, as long as it is mostly through toning, rather than an expensive dress. Skirts are okay as long as they have pockets, similar to jeans, or somehow resemble construction-type attire, showing one’s toughness. “Someone told me I was dressing like an idiot, because I had basically gotten a bunch of teenagerish dresses from college and was parading around in them without thinking about how I looked,” she remembered. “The advice was basically to look more professional—lose any short skirts and start wearing blazers and stuff.” She thought she followed it for the most part, but instead of blazers she wore combat boots—and definitely kept the miniskirts. Anything delicate or lacy or detailed showed weakness.

  San Francisco is a little bit different. Though Twitter and the mobile payment company Square had taken over the Mission District, remnants of an older world remained. San Francisco attire is more nuanced. With a more even sex ratio and more opportunities for socialization, as well a
s the San Francisco society holdouts acting as a foil for the new tech set, the transgression and disruption there often take the form of costume parties—at least on the fringes.

  • • •

  By the height of the second tech boom, from around 2010 to 2015, tech companies such as Facebook and Alibaba had hundred-­billion-dollar IPOs, San Francisco society was finding itself in a strange position. Its members used to chair the museums and opera houses, but now they couldn’t donate nearly as much as the tech CEOs. In fact, they couldn’t even keep their old institutions afloat. They had to befriend those techie couples to keep the board humming. At the same time, the techies were willing to fraternize with the old guard for validation. Back in their parents’ garages, they’d never dreamed of chairing the museum ball or running the hospital benefit. But now they had made it.

  There may have been vestiges of an appreciation of gender differences in San Francisco, but down on the peninsula, it was a different story. There androgynous dress extended to mating behavior. Men were too busy coding to be men. When they were really working—in “flow”—coming up with a program, racing against the clock to build something before the next person took their idea, their physicality basically was irrelevant. They acted nothing like the testosterone-fueled bankers on the East Coast. Their feet were planted. Their sexual rage didn’t come out in boozy pool parties but on late-night online “dates,” if they were lucky. Silicon Valley was a sexual wasteland, many coders found at first.

  While Deming wasn’t opposed to the favorable ratio—she said she never felt out of place being the only woman at a party, or in her house, even where many of the male fellows became her good friends—she soon realized that many women around her were angry about the lopsided gender ratio in Silicon Valley, which has been counted as 60 percent male and 40 percent female, but felt a lot more male heavy. The women complained that men were “beta,” while women were “alphas”—especially those who followed Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In cause, the movement inspired by her bestselling book that encouraged women to lean in and take control of their careers.

  Sandberg, however, dressed like a Washington bureaucrat, which many thought she aspired to be. It led other women to feel that they should act like they could play with the boys and not have to dress like they wanted to attract them. Deming didn’t particularly look up to Sandberg. She admired scientists and philosophers more. But in Silicon Valley, she found that women commonly mated with younger men because of the social demographics. The young men were the wealthy ones, having grown up working as early-stage employees at big tech companies. Single women preyed upon them at places like the Rosewood Hotel.

  Many of those who were married didn’t talk about their husbands much. They didn’t want to be the “wife of.” Successful women in Silicon Valley wanted to be known as such in their own right. One of these women, Aileen Lee, was among the relatively few female venture capitalists Deming had heard about. She was intrigued by Lee’s new fund, Cowboy Ventures.

  Lee had been living in the area for over a decade and was part of the inner cabal of Silicon Valley women. “I’m obviously thinking a lot about gender,” she acknowledged, sitting outside on the deck behind the Rosewood. “People are racially sensitive and disability sensitive, but they’re just not gender sensitive. I mean the Tinder situation?”

  She was talking about Whitney Wolfe, the cofounder of Tinder, who had recently left the company to start Bumble, a competing dating app. Then there was Ellen Pao, the KPCB partner who had charged the venture firm with harassment. Pao said she was routinely passed over in favor of male partners, excluded from all-male company ski trips, and subjected to harassment from a male partner, but her suit failed, and she had to pay her former employer more than $200,000 in legal fees. She ended up opening a conversation about gender equality in Silicon Valley. On top of those scandals was Evan Spiegel, whose emails were leaked to Valleywag.

  Lee left to start her own firm, Cowboy Ventures, in 2012. Its mission would be to seed early-stage companies that improve daily life through technology. Leaning in over the lounge table between us, she said she found herself tougher on women, because she thought they needed to be tougher in this world.

  “There is an attitude that is, ‘Boys will be boys,’ and there’s no societal consequences,” Lee was saying. She thought the public should boycott companies that treated women badly, the same way people boycotted South African companies during apartheid.

  Lee argued that women were responsible for much of the online purchasing on the Internet. They drove the success of many successful e-commerce companies. They played more social and casual games online than men. She saw them as responsible for the success of many tech companies. In a widely shared article on TechCrunch, she posted that female users drove most traffic and made many companies successful—a feat for which they weren’t properly recognized:

  If you are already targeting female customers, have great women working in your company, and are seeing strong commerce and social network effects, congratulations. You are likely trying to figure out how to handle hypergrowth right now. Plus, your office probably smells pretty good. Women are the routers and amplifiers of the social web. And they are the rocket fuel of ecommerce. The ongoing debate about women in tech has been missing a key insight. If you figure out how to harness the power of female customers, you can rock the world.

  Two years later, though, she thought Silicon Valley had made some improvements in its attitude toward gender. In part because of the dustup over Pao, Lee thinks companies are now more sensitive to gender. “The number of women in venture capital has actually decreased in the past decade,” she said in fall 2016, “but the awareness and sensitivity has hopefully improved in the past five years,” she added. “If you look at tech companies, they are starting to report their diversity numbers publicly. We’re very far as an industry from being a reflection of our country and from reflecting the college graduate population, however.”

  To make up for it, it seemed, boys would be boys, and girls would be boys. Husbands’ last names were often not taken, and girls stuck together. They graduated to queen tech bees such as Sandberg.

  In the same circle as Lee was Andreessen’s wife, Laura Arrillaga-­Andreessen. She too still lived near and worked on Stanford property. Her father had developed the land around Silicon Valley. Even though she and Andreessen together were worth billions, Arrillaga’s tastes were in keeping with other success stories of her ilk. For example, she didn’t hesitate to advertise her preference for Taster’s Choice coffee.

  She didn’t brag about expensive tastes and played down any signs of wealth. The only thing that she, and many Silicon Valley people, advertised was busyness. Braggadocio included comments about not having any time and being overly enthusiastic about nonleisure activities, such as one’s job. Arrillaga-Andreessen had been a philanthropy professor at Stanford for nearly twenty years but had recently launched an online course and a giving website. “I think this whole convergence of philanthropy and technology is so exciting I can’t stand it, and it’s the reason I never seem to be sleeping and always seem to be drinking Taster’s Choice and yelling when I talk,” she said.

  Arrillaga-Andreessen, forty-six, was the first person to teach philanthropy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business when she joined the faculty in 2000. In 2014, she started the Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen Foundation, an organization that she said operates as a philanthropic innovation lab. It aims to democratize giving by providing online resources and programs to make donating more accessible to people at all levels of wealth. As her field increasingly moved online, so did she: in fall 2014 she released her massive open online course and made the six-week online program in collaboration with Stanford free to all.

  For now, Arrillaga-Andreessen was trying to figure out more ways to encourage people to donate, working seven days a week on philanthropy. She kept a disciplined schedule, waking up at
seven in the morning to have breakfast and exercise, and then working from eighty thirty until seven in the evening before breaking for dinner with her husband—usually a microwaved meal in plastic Costco TV trays, she said. Then they worked for another three hours together “side by side.” Afterward, she would read a book for one of her three book clubs. She also lightened her day with daily dance parties at her foundation’s office. “One of the great parts of running an organization,” she said, “is mandating that we all dance once a day.”

  Arrillaga-Andreessen knew Thiel and was familiar with the fellowship. Deming was impressed by what she had achieved—and by what was possible in the valley. She liked the women’s lives she heard about.

  These people she met there, weirdos for sure, existed to break every rule and disrupt every institution: automotive, with electric cars and sharing apps; marriage, with swapping wives and husbands; and politics, with pervasive libertarianism. Here she could do whatever she wanted, she thought. And if her fund took off, even live forever.

  * * *

  I. “Jumping off the College Track,” by Jessica Goldstein, Washington Post, ­August 3, 2012.

  II. Ibid.

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