Brotopia

by Emily Chang

  The stories I’ve been told by nearly two dozen people who have attended these events or have intimate knowledge of them are remarkable in a number of ways. Many participants don’t seem the least bit embarrassed, much less ashamed. On the contrary, they speak proudly about how they’re overturning traditions and paradigms in their private lives, just as they do in the technology world they rule. Like Julian Assange denouncing the nation-state, industry hotshots speak of these activities in a tone that is at once self-congratulatory and dismissive of criticism. Their behavior at these high-end parties is an extension of the progressiveness and open-mindedness—the audacity, if you will—that makes founders think they can change the world. And they believe that their entitlement to disrupt doesn’t stop at technology; it extends to society as well. However, few participants have been willing to describe these scenes to me without a guarantee of anonymity.

  Sex parties are just one aspect—albeit an impressively excessive one—of today’s sexually open Valley culture. Everyone, it seems, is experimenting with their sexual lives and relationships. A thriving hook-up culture is fueled by apps such as Bumble and Tinder. Open relationships are common and there is an active polyamorous community. For the large population of young heterosexual men in tech making six figures, there is also the pay-for-sex scene that includes strip clubs, easy access to online escorts, and a new type of prostitution promoted by numerous “sugar daddy” websites where men pay women regular stipends for their companionship.

  If this activity was just relegated to personal lives it would be one thing. But what happens at these sex parties—and in open relationships and at strip clubs as we’ll see later—unfortunately doesn’t stay there. The freewheeling sex lives pursued by men in tech—from the elite down to the rank and file—have consequences for how business gets done in Silicon Valley.

  SEX PARTIES OF THE TECH AND FAMOUS

  From reports of those who have attended these parties, guests and hosts include powerful first-round investors, well-known entrepreneurs, and top executives. Some of them are the titans of the Valley, household names, men whose faces have graced the covers of tech and business magazines. Billionaires abound. The female guests have different qualifications. If you are attractive, willing, and (usually) young, you needn’t worry about your résumé or bank account. Some of the women work in tech in the Bay Area, but others come from Los Angeles and beyond, and are employed in symbiotic local industries such as real estate, personal training, and public relations. In some scenarios, the ratio of women to wealthy men is roughly two to one, so the men have more than enough women to choose from. “You know when it’s that kind of party,” one male tech investor told me. “At normal tech parties, there are hardly any women. At these kinds of parties, there are tons of them.”

  Over the last two years, numerous sources have told me that this culture has become rampant, though this has been the hardest chapter of this book to report by far. Many potential sources, especially women, abruptly canceled meetings with me the day of. Others asked me not to reveal their names, fearing retribution.

  Still, I believe there is a critical story to tell about how the women who participate in these events are often marginalized, even if they attend of their own volition. One female investor who had heard of this culture before I approached her told me, “Women are participating in these parties to improve their lives. They are an underclass in Silicon Valley.” A male investor who works for one of the most powerful men in tech put it this way: “I see a lot of men leading people on, sleeping with a dozen women at the same time. But if each of the dozen women doesn’t care, is there any crime committed? You could say it’s disgusting but not illegal; it just perpetuates a culture that keeps women down.”

  To be clear, there is a wide range of parties for experimental sexual behavior. Some, devoted entirely to sex, may be drug- and alcohol-free (to encourage safety and performance) and demand a balanced gender ratio. Others are very heavy on drugs and women and usually end in group “cuddle puddles,” a gateway to ever-so-slightly more discreet sexual encounters. The path by which women are lured into these sex parties differs. One female tech worker told me she fell into a high-flying, open-minded crowd after attending a party for the Bravo reality show about Silicon Valley. “I was invited to some villa in the city, I had just graduated from college, and it sounded cool and glamorous,” she said. That took her on a series of unexpected adventures, including a sex party where several tech founders and engineers were in attendance and food was being served off the bodies of naked women. A few years later, this same woman met an investor who was trying to sell off some of his shares in a multibillion-dollar start-up on the secondary market. She introduced him to prospective buyers and received a commission for her efforts. The pair started dating, and the investor took her to exclusive dinner parties, one of which ended up being a sex party. When I asked for more details, she grew quiet. Talking about these events to anyone on the outside, she said, is “seen as the ultimate betrayal.”

  Men show up only if directly invited by the host, and they can bring as many women as they want, but guys can’t come along as plus ones (that would upset the preferred gender ratio). Invitations are shared via word of mouth, Facebook, Snapchat (perfect, because messages soon disappear), or even basic Paperless Post. Nothing in the wording screams “sex party” or “cuddle puddle,” just in case the invitation gets forwarded or someone takes a screen shot. No need to spell things out, anyway; the guests on the list understand just what kind of party this is. Women too will spread the word among their female friends, and the expectations are hardly hidden. “They might say, ‘Do you want to come to this really exclusive hot party? The theme is bondage,’” one female entrepreneur told me. “‘It’s at this VC or founder’s house and he asked me to invite you.’”

  Perhaps this culture is just one of the many offshoots of the sexually progressive Bay Area, which gave rise to the desert festival of free expression Burning Man, now frequented by the tech elite. Still, the vast majority of people in Silicon Valley have no idea these kinds of sex parties are happening at all. If you’re reading this and shaking your head, saying, “This isn’t the Silicon Valley that I know,” you may not be a rich and edgy male founder or investor, or a female in tech in her twenties. And you might not understand anyway. “Anyone else who is on the outside would be looking at this and saying, ‘Oh my God this is so fucked up,’” one female entrepreneur told me. “But the people in it have a very different perception about what’s going on.”

  This is how the night goes down. Guests arrive before dinner and are checked in by private security guards who will turn you away if you’re not on the list. Sometimes the evening is catered. But at the most intimate gatherings, guests will cook dinner together; that way they don’t have to kick out the help after dessert. Alcohol lubricates the conversation until, after the final course, the designer drugs roll out. Some form of MDMA, a.k.a. Ecstasy or Molly, known for transforming relative strangers into extremely affectionate friends, is de rigueur, including Molly tablets that have been molded into the logos of some of the hottest tech companies such as Tesla and Snapchat. Some refer to these parties as “E-parties.” “People ingest Molly like candy during these events,” says a woman who has partaken. Sometimes guests will mix the bitter powder with a fruity drink or stir it into a coconut.

  MDMA is a powerful and long-lasting drug whose one-two punch of euphoria and manic energy can keep you rolling for three or four hours. “When you’re on it, you feel like you love everybody,” says one female entrepreneur. As dopamine fires, connections spark around the room, and normal inhibitions drop away. People start cuddling and making out. These aren’t group orgies, per se, but guests will break out into twosomes or threesomes or more. They may disappear into one of the venue’s many rooms, or they may simply get down in the open. Night turns to day, and the group reconvenes for breakfast, after which some may have intercourse again. Eat,
drugs, sex, repeat.

  These sex parties happen so often among the high-end, premier VC and founder crowd that this isn’t a scandal or even really a secret, I’ve been told; it’s a lifestyle choice. This isn’t Prohibition or the McCarthy era, people remind me; it’s Silicon Valley in the twenty-first century. No one has been forced to attend, and they’re not hiding anything, not even if they’re married or in a committed relationship. They’re just being discreet in the real world. Many guests are invited as couples—husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends—because open relationships are the new normal.

  While some parties might be devoted primarily to drugs and sexual activity, others may boast just pockets of it, and some guests can be caught unawares. In June 2017, one young woman—let’s call her Jane Doe—received a Paperless Post invite for “a party on the edge of the earth.” The invite requested “glamazon adventurer, safari chic and jungle tribal attire” for the party, to be hosted at “Casa Jurvey by the Sea”—the home of venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson in the resort beach town of Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco. It turned out that this was the afterparty for his venture capital firm, DFJ’s Big Think “unconference,” an exclusive gathering for folks in the tech industry. But two invites went out for the same event, a moody, provocative Paperless Post invite, tiger and all, and then a separate, official email from Jurvetson’s firm. This second invite was a straightforward email from DFJ inviting guests to a daytime retreat that included “expert-led breakout sessions” and “The Afterthought” party at Jurvetson’s home. This was just four months before he would leave the firm amid allegations of misconduct.

  In photos of the party posted to a private group on Facebook, Tesla CEO Elon Musk—a longtime friend of Jurvetson’s—appears, wearing a black armorlike costume adorned with silver spikes and chains. Jurvetson is sporting a feather vest and hat. Google co-founder Sergey Brin was also there, bare-chested in a vest, as was Jonathan Teo, Justin Caldbeck’s business partner, who later referred to the party as “Magic” in a Facebook post. Ironically, the gathering was held just a week after sexual harassment allegations against Caldbeck had been reported, but that didn’t seem to discourage certain guests from participating in heavy petting in the open.

  “It was in the middle of the Binary thing,” Jane Doe told me, referring to the scandal at the VC firm. “And it was all so ridiculous.” Doe found herself on the floor with two other couples, including a male entrepreneur and his wife. The living room had been blanketed in plush white faux fur and pillows, where, as the evening wore on, several people lay down and started stroking one another, Doe says, in what became a sizeable cuddle puddle. Photos reveal a group of men and women lying close together, kissing and massaging one another. In a later Facebook comment, Jurvetson referred to one snapshot of the scene as “deep cuddle.” One venture capitalist, dressed up as a bunny (it’s unclear how this fit into the edge-of-the-earth theme), offered Jane Doe some powder in a plastic bag. It was Molly. “They said it will just make you feel relaxed and you’re going to like being touched,” Doe recounted to me.

  Nervous, she dipped her finger into the powder and put it in her mouth. Soon, her guard dropped. Then, the male founder asked if he could kiss her. “It was so weird,” she said. “I’m like, ‘Your wife is right there, is she okay with this?’” The founder’s wife acknowledged that, yes, she was okay with it. Jane Doe, who considers herself fairly adventurous and open-minded, kissed the founder, then became uncomfortable, feeling as if she had been pressured or targeted. “I don’t know what I’m doing, I feel really stupid, I’m drugged up because I’d never taken it before and he knew I’d never taken it,” she recalled. She tried to escape to a different area of the party. “I felt gross because I had participated in making out with him and then he kept trying to find me and I kept trying to run away and hide. I remember saying to him, ‘Aren’t people going to wonder?’ And he said, ‘The people that know me know what is going on and the people that don’t, I don’t really care.’” Before dawn, she jumped into her car and left. “What’s not okay about this scene is that it is so money- and power-dominated. It’s a problem because it’s an abuse of power. I would never do it again.”

  While this particular woman felt ambushed, at more private affairs, if it’s your first time, a friend might fill you in on what you’re signing up for, and you are expected to keep it to yourself. You know that if you do drugs with someone you work with, you shouldn’t mention it to anyone, and the same goes with sex. In other words, we’re not hiding anything, but, actually, we kind of are. You get invited only if you can be trusted and if you’re going to play ball. “You can choose not to hook up with [a specific] someone, but you can’t not hook up with anybody, because that would be voyeurism. So if you don’t participate, don’t come in,” says one frequent attendee, whom I’ll call Founder X, an ambitious, world-traveling entrepreneur. This is the same general spirit at play in the orgy dome at Burning Man, popular among techies. “No spectators” is the slogan out on the playa, and so it is back home.

  They don’t see themselves as predatory, of course. When they look in the mirror, they see individuals setting a new paradigm of behavior by pushing the boundaries of social mores and values. “What’s making this possible is the same progressiveness and openmindedness that allowed us to be creative and disruptive about ideas,” Founder X told me. When I asked him about Jane Doe’s experience, he said, “This is a private party where powerful people want to get together and there are a lot of women and a lot of people who are fucked up. At any party, there can be a situation where people cross the line. Somebody fucked up, somebody crossed the line, but that’s not an indictment on the cuddle puddle, that’s an indictment on crossing the line. Doesn’t that happen anywhere?” It’s worth asking, however, if these sexual adventurers are so progressive, why do these parties seem to lean so heavily toward male heterosexual fantasies? Women are often expected to be involved in threesomes that include other women; male gay and bisexual behavior is conspicuously absent. “Oddly, it’s completely unthinkable that guys would be bisexual or curious,” says one VC who attends and is married (I’ll call him Married VC). “It’s a total double standard.” In other words, at these parties, men don’t make out with other men. And, outside of the new types of drugs, these stories might have come out of the Playboy Mansion circa 1972.

  Regardless, a select few at the very top believe it’s their obligation to tear down traditional sexual expectations. They are just expressing who they are. Founder X summed it up this way: “You build your own team and you get to build your own reality. Why wouldn’t that mentally spill over into your sexual life?”

  I had a wide-ranging conversation with Twitter co-founder Evan Williams about the peculiar mixture of audacity, eccentricity, and wealth that swirls in Silicon Valley. Williams, who is married with two kids, became an internet celebrity thanks to his first company, Blogger. He pointed out that he was never single, well-known, and rich at the same time and he isn’t part of this scene, but recognizes the motivations of his peers. “This is a strange place that has created incredible things in the world and therefore attracts these types of people and enables these types of people. How could it be anything but weird and dramatic and people on the edge testing everything?” On the one hand, he said, “If you thought like everyone else, you can’t invent the future,” yet also warned that sometimes this is a “recipe for disaster.”

  Rich men expecting casual sexual access to women is anything but a new paradigm. But many of the A-listers in Silicon Valley have something unique in common: a lonely adolescence devoid of contact with the opposite sex. Married VC described his teenage life as years of playing computer games and not going on a date until he was twenty years old. Now, to his amazement, he finds himself in a circle of trusted and adventurous tech friends with the money and resources to explore their every desire. After years of restriction and longing, he is living a fantasy, and his
wife is right there with him. In fact, they’ve introduced several newbies, including Founder X, to this brave new world.

  Married VC’s story—that his current voraciousness is explained by his sexual deprivation in adolescence—is one I hear a lot in Silicon Valley. They are finally getting theirs.

  FOUNDER HOUNDERS

  There is an often-told story that Silicon Valley is filled with women looking to cash in by marrying wealthy tech moguls. Whether there really is a significant number of such women is debatable. The story about them is alive and well, however, at least among the wealthy men who fear they might fall victim. In fact, these guys even have a term for the women who pursue them: founder hounders.

  When I asked Founder X whether these men are taking advantage of women by feeding them inhibition-melting drugs at sex parties, he replied that, on the contrary, it’s women who are taking advantage of him and his tribe, preying on them for their money.

  On their way up to a potential multimillion-dollar payout, younger founders report that more and more women seem to become mysteriously attracted to them no matter how awkward, uncool, or unattractive they may be. Alexis Ohanian, who co-founded Reddit, remembers going to bars with his co-founder, Steve Huffman, in the early days before their company was well known. They’d be proudly wearing T-shirts bearing the Reddit logo, but they had no luck with the ladies. As Reddit became more recognizable, however, the T-shirt attracted more and more attention until eventually Ohanian stopped wearing any Reddit-branded swag. In fact, when he went on dates, he would not mention Reddit at all.