Voices from the Valley

by Ben Tarnoff

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  Table of Contents

  A Note About the Editors

  Copyright Page

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  Introduction: The Everyone Machine

  This book is a tell-all about an open secret: platforms are made by people. For many people, it can be easy to miss.

  There is the matter of word choice. “Platform” instead of “publisher.” “AI” instead of “statistics.” Tech companies have many reasons to speak as if their products run themselves.

  To obscure the human work involved in training an algorithm or moderating a social media feed is both a sales pitch and an evasion. The pitch, for investors, is scale: a tech company will grow at superhuman speed. The evasion is of liability: a tech company will not be held responsible for what it breaks by moving this fast. For users, this is part of the promise, too: no gatekeepers, just a frictionless exchange of ideas, goods, and services. May the best meme win. Pay no attention to that man inside the black box!

  This book will introduce you to the people behind the platforms. These are people whose work, in one way or another, shapes almost everything you do—how you find a job or a lover, get approved for a loan or flagged for a police stop, rave about a movie or fight about a president. In recent years, the power of the major tech companies has become impossible to ignore. For the first time, many politicians and pundits are attacking them as monopolies that inflict a wide range of harms on society, from promoting fake news and hate speech to eroding our privacy and attention spans. And as moments of conflict or crisis arise in some companies, dissidents and other malcontents have spoken up: leaking audio and screenshots, talking to reporters, walking out on the job. But it remains relatively rare to hear the ordinary people at those companies talk in ordinary ways about what they do. In this book they’ll speak to you in their own words.

  * * *

  One set of voices you will hear belongs to tech’s most privileged caste: the full-time employees (FTEs). These are the people whom bestsellers mean when they ask, Are you smart enough to work at Google? They traverse the San Francisco Peninsula in company buses with tinted windows.

  Their employers are notoriously secretive. Their offices sit behind many layers of security. A host of services—cafeterias, laundries, fitness studios—keep them on campus. Many of them went to school together; many of them date one another. Some of them get married.

  The tightness of the social networks they inhabit imposes high costs on sharing anything with outsiders. In case these costs are not enough of a deterrent, the FTEs have also signed a nondisclosure agreement. For the purposes of this Agreement, confidential information includes all information that your employer treats with confidentiality. You can’t enter an office of a major tech company without signing a promise to take any code you might see on a screen, diagram on a whiteboard, or slogan on a wall with you to the grave. BE OPEN, the walls of Facebook read.

  Most tech companies pride themselves on the free flow of information among their employees. But they insist that it stay there. As a result, media coverage of tech has historically followed a few scripts. It was never hard to find gadget reviews or business reporting—to figure out what to buy your stepdad for Christmas or how much a startup raised in its Series B. But journalists trying to tell a deeper story quickly ran into the wall of the NDA. There, they often found they had to make do with what industry PR gave them.

  When it came to executives, founders, people at the top, what PR encouraged was hagiography. Many reporters took the bait: the paeans to Steve Jobs, who was pictured presenting the first iPhone in the posture of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, were only the most on the nose. The fact that the people at the top were the only ones allowed to talk to the media reinforced the idea that they spoke for everyone.

  When it came to the rank and file, it was hard to get anyone on record. Mostly, you heard whispers of extravagant and eccentric lifestyles: kombucha on tap at the campus cafeteria and kale at the poké bar, weekends spent microdosing before participating in meticulously planned orgies and other forms of rationalized libertinism—tales from a smart-watch world in which the only taboo left was wasting time.

  I want you to make our readers hate themselves, one magazine editor told a friend he had commissioned to write a story about the perks that tech companies were using to lure recruits.

  Not long after, he left the magazine to go write copy for a tech company.

  * * *

  Not everyone in tech gets the perks, of course. In this book, in addition to FTEs, you will hear from another group of people: contractors. Historically, the media has ignored them. But the industry needs them to function.

  This large and ever-shifting category includes people whose jobs have always been outsourced. They drive the shuttles with the tinted windows; they guard the entrance to HQ and cook the food and serve the coffee to keep the engineers working late. But increasingly, tech companies are also outsourcing what used to be full-time roles.

  Many white-collar workers like recruiters and designers are now contractors, too. Elsewhere, invisible masses perform new kinds of digital piecework, like labeling data to train machine-learning algorithms or taking down videos that violate a platform’s terms of service.

  Contractors are a fast-growing percentage of the overall tech workforce: at Google, for instance, they constitute the majority. They often endure low wages and difficult working conditions. Nonetheless, many of them also take pride in their craft.

  The tech industry places a premium on “technical” skills. But one recurring theme of our conversations is that all work involves technique, whether it is preparing steak for several hundred people or massaging bodies that hours of coding have turned into slabs of concrete.

  The contractors in this book have some of the deepest insights into the tech industry and the deepest roots in the Bay Area. They remember the last bubble—the way it changed the landscape and their neighborhoods, the lavish lawns that newly minted millionaires planted and the friends who had to move away so that their homes could be demolished to make space for conference hotels.

  * * *

  Journalists and scholars are starting to pay more attention to more of the people who make up the tech industry. This book aims to give you a fuller picture of their lives, by letting them explain where they came from and why, what they do and what they still hope to do. It also shows how their lives intersect. This book aspires to be representative. It is not exhaustive. It could not be, because Silicon Valley is now everywhere.

  Every city wants to have a tech hub. Silicon Beach, Silicon Alley, Silicon Hills, and Silicon Desert—these are ones you may have heard of. Countless other aspirants have not made it as far. But all over the world, politicians and businesspeople are trying to replicate the legendary ecosystem of Northern California. Silicon Valley has long seemed like the last refuge of the American dream.

  By the same token, every company wants to be a tech company. JPMorgan Chase empl
oys fifty thousand technologists, two-thirds of whom are software engineers. That’s more engineers than are employed by many big tech firms. Does that make JPMorgan Chase a tech company? The boundaries are becoming difficult to draw.

  We still talk about “the” tech industry. But increasingly, tech is a layer of every industry. One by one, farms and factories and oil fields are becoming “smart.” As we reap what we sow, sensors feed data about the seasons into the cloud.

  You, too, are being fed to the cloud. As tech enters every industry, it is also entering every aspect of life. Platforms are not only made by people. They are made of people—including you.

  It has become almost impossible to avoid being a source of data. You can stay off social media and shop local, and maybe you should. But, as you make your way to the café to meet your old friend, your phone will ping the nearest cell towers. Leave your phone at home, and the security camera on your neighbor’s house will capture your face and relay it to Amazon.

  Speak, whoever you are. Your voice is in the Valley, too.

  1

  The Founder

  In Silicon Valley, the founder is a sacred figure. Starting a business is seen as the highest form of human achievement. Most startups fail, of course. For the founder, however, failure is never a source of shame. Rather, there is something ennobling about it.

  Yet this reverence for the founder feels increasingly untethered from the realities of the industry. Silicon Valley is no longer a scrappy place, if it ever was. It is a land of giants, and their appetite for startups is immense. Huge corporations are constantly acquiring their smaller competitors, or companies that might someday grow into their competitors. This is not only to protect their position, but to nab some of those revered founders themselves, in the hopes that regular infusions of entrepreneurial blood will keep them young and nimble. They, too, were startups once.

  We spoke to a founder who cut a successful path through the ecosystem. This person learned to code, landed at an elite university with deep links to tech, became a founder, and failed upward into a company that was too big to fail. Yet along the way, the founder grew disillusioned. Successes started to feel more like failures. Silicon Valley started to feel strange.

  How did you start writing code?

  I went to a perfectly fine public school in Texas. We had a computer science course, but the teacher didn’t know anything about programming. We had a textbook, though, and if you were sufficiently self-motivated, you could work through the exercises and then take the AP exam. Fortunately, there were a few of us who really liked to code. So we got together and taught the course ourselves. We all passed the exam, and it helped me get into an elite institution for college.

  What did arriving at that elite institution look like?

  It was weird. There was a big cultural gap.

  I resented my family for not having prepared me for the experience. There were all these kids who went to private schools who were years ahead of me in math. I was angry that I didn’t get those opportunities, and that came out as resentment toward my parents for a while.

  I remember going to my college girlfriend’s parents’ house and feeling intimidated by the food they ate and the way they talked. But I also knew I wanted to emulate it. Throughout college, I put a lot of pressure on myself to make sure that nobody could say I wasn’t supposed to be there. That was the particular form that impostor syndrome took for me: it wasn’t about the fear of not being a good programmer, but the fear of not belonging.

  The path that college put me on created some distance between me and my parents, though. They have never been anything but proud of me, but they stopped understanding me sometime in college. And in the years since, the gaps between our worlds continue to grow wider.

  To this day, when I call my mom on the weekend, she still asks me if I’m off that day, because she doesn’t know that people only work Monday through Friday in offices. That’s just not context that she has—and I didn’t have it, either, before I left for college. My stepdad says if I ever wanted to move back home I could find work because there’s a local guy who fixes computers.

  Apart from the culture shock, what was college like?

  The school where I went wasn’t friendly to failure. It was a meat grinder. When you walked through campus around finals week you saw kids sitting on the ground crying.

  Still, it’s the kind of place where you make connections that end up mattering a lot later. You meet people who will go on to start companies in Silicon Valley, or who will become higher-ups at bigger firms. It’s also the kind of place where recruiters track you from freshman year, have dinner with you at department-sponsored events—that sort of thing.

  That industry interest made me feel special. And when I became a teaching assistant for a computer science course, that interest intensified. I had to do a work-study as part of my financial aid, and it was either serving food in the cafeteria or teaching computer science. But teaching paid well—fifteen dollars an hour, which blew my mind, since my high school job had paid four dollars an hour plus tips.

  Plus the job was super fun, and the industry attention felt great. Big firms would come in and lavish the teaching assistants with gifts—embarrassing gifts. Sometimes we would go buy cheap tricycles and ride them down a steep hill and play a sort of human Mario Kart. Microsoft found out about it and bought us the highest-quality tricycles available. I think it’s actually gotten worse since I’ve left. These days companies send stretch Hummer limos to pick kids up for fancy dinners.

  So you must’ve been pretty well set up for a job in tech by the time you graduated.

  After I graduated I had a few options of places to work. I chose an older, more established company. That ended up being one of the worst decisions I’ve ever made in my life. I spent two years there while my friends were jumping on rocket ships. Then I decided to start a startup with somebody I knew from school.

  My cofounder and I had been talking for several months about doing our own thing. In college, everybody was expected to go start a startup—that expectation had been drilled pretty deep into us. We lived in a big house with a bunch of friends, and we turned an extra room into an office. We had a really nice routine. We worked there every day, and tried to prototype things very quickly.

  This was around 2009, when mobile apps were taking off. It was the era of “SoLoMo”—“social local mobile.” The iPhone had changed everything: there had been programming platforms for phones before, but they were garbage. Everyone wanted to build something for the App Store. The tech giants were way behind the curve, however—the Facebook mobile app was horrible, for example. It seemed possible that the bigger players just weren’t going to make it on mobile, and that created opportunities for startups like us.

  So we tried to build a bunch of different apps. None of them found a huge amount of success. But the last one we tried, a social app for making plans with friends, did well enough to get some attention from TechCrunch and other places in the tech press.

  It was fun, but scary. Because we always knew that if one of the tech giants got their shit together, they could eat our lunch if they wanted to. I remember waking up one day and seeing a new product announcement from Facebook that I was convinced would put us out of business. I ran to my cofounder’s room, freaking out. It turned out we were fine. Still, I had that feeling of “Holy shit, we’re fucked” a lot. We lived in constant fear of getting scooped.

  But you didn’t.

  Not exactly. But after a year, we were still living off our savings. It was clear that we either needed to get funding, get a job, or get acquired.

  Around this time, we went to an up-and-coming company to ask them whether they would give us access to their private API.1 They said, essentially, “No way. You’re a tiny company that doesn’t matter.” But they also said they’d be interested in acquiring us. We were very surprised to hear that. We didn’t even really know what it meant. But we decided to pursue it.

  What t
hey were offering is what Silicon Valley calls a “talent acquisition.” They wanted to buy the company, but they weren’t going to take our technology. They weren’t going to take our code. They just wanted to get the two of us working for them. They put me and my cofounder through an interview process, and it was the same standard interview process I’d already been through before. But at the end of it, they made an offer with a slightly different format. It was clear that we were talking to people who worked in their M&A [mergers and acquisitions] department rather than in recruiting. Those people have the authority to write bigger checks, and they’re supposed to be thinking about what the company is going to need a little further down the line.

  We were very green, so we didn’t know what a good offer looked like. But we did know that we should go get at least one competing offer, to see what our options were. So, using our network of contacts from college, we reached out to somebody who had the ear of a few VPs at a bigger company that made similar acquisition offers. We said, “Hey, we have this offer from one of your competitors. They’re moving fast. Can we start a conversation with you?”

  Recruiters famously don’t make the process very fast for people. You can do an interview and not hear back for a month, for instance. It’s frustrating for most people coming in the front door. But it’s very different if you have an offer from a competitor. An offer from a competitor is always the best way to get their attention, even if they have ignored you in the past. And doubly so through the M&A route.

  How old were you at the time?