[michaelochurch]

Tech entrepreneurship is still fairly young, but in that short time, we've already invented our own unique brand of cool: young, credentialed, hot, saying the right things. Oh wait: those are the values of society at large. We've already abandoned all pretense of disruption. This is just the next iteration of the elite, where your value as a person hinges on how well you project your own narcissism.

I had a chronic illness in my teenage years and 20s, hit a nadir around 24, and recovered by 27-28. I'm healthy now, but didn't have the start that's "expected" of people with +4 sigma talent. It's obvious, since I'm 30 and not earth-shatteringly successful, that I have some kind of health story... but I prefer not to get into the details with people I barely know. I don't want it to be the first conversation, but in the contemporary Valley, it would be. ("If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?")

Silicon Valley used to be for weird people. It was about second chances (and third, and fourth) and outer-range creativity and acceptance of weirdness. People were too busy building for the cool-kids shit and high-school drama that dominates now. That Silicon Valley was worth defending, and protecting. This iteration, this Disney-fied new one, is worth attacking, humiliating, and bringing to its undignified end.

[oceanplexian]

Nail on the head.

We live in a bizarre world where everyone that founds a startup is often a credentialed, healthy Stanford grad re-implementing an unremarkable idea in network effects. Is it mobile or social? No? You might as well get on the next flight out of here.

To me, it seems utterly remarkable that our industry has grown up from kids running computers in their basement to a new breed of slick, Macbook-toting framework programmers that couldn't set up WiFi or SSH to save their life.

The things that I moved here for have been gamified and manipulated. In the process we've not only damaged our own industry, but destroyed San Francisco's cultural identity and pushed out the artists and misfits that make this such a special place.

[seiji]

("If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?")

I wonder that of myself all the time. I don't have any medical problems other than the tragedy of living inside my own fucked up head.

I find the cheap ways of getting rich untenable (abusing users, SEO affiliate ad crap, stealing personal information, facebook viral shitfests), and the hard ways are too much for my unconnected self to tackle alone (remaking credit card processing, remaking flight finding, anything requiring network effects to get off the ground).

But, for now, I'm not homeless and I have a view of Manhattan from my window. It could be worse.

[mattgreenrocks]

So did I.

I felt that if I wasn't 'great,' then I was squandering my life, and that I always had to hustle more. I'd internalized a bunch of toxic messages (some from well-intentioned family), lived in a fast-paced area that focuses on power (DC), had impostor syndrome, and was a nerd when growing up. It was easy to think that once I reclaimed my 'rightful' place, that life would be as it should be.

It should be little surprise that I was well on my way to predicating my identity on my career. I placed enormous pressure on myself to succeed, and rapidly started viewing many facets of life as inherently zero-sum. I became reductionistic in many areas, and my interests narrowed, as I pursued only things that I was good at.

It was all an enormous lie. I'd bought wholesale into a weird, Nietzsche-Darwinian belief system where I had to become the ubermensch before I could allow myself to be human. I had to become someone so I could see myself as someone worthwhile. I had to achieve so I could rest. I had to be the best, lest I become undesirable.

In short, I believed I was not worth loving until I'd received a certain amount of external validation. I'm still being broken of this, but the break/repair/rebuild cycle is much better than the desperate grasping. Fuck status. We think we have to waste our lives accumulating it, when it's really borne out of fear of the future.

[AndrewKemendo]

Very interesting writeup because I see shades of that in my own personality. So how are you overcoming this?

[mattgreenrocks]

This is probably a life-long pursuit, but in the short-term:

1. My wife is very supportive of my ambitions while not letting me be consumed by them. The vulnerability and accountability are key here.

2. Regular time doing wholly non-constructive things: video games, reading, guitar, etc. This took some time to acclimate to, but now I can play a game or the like and lose track of time, as well as not feel guilty.

3. Killed my Twitter account, which was sort of the symbol of my personal brand. Not sure what I'm going to do there.

4. Pulled back from open source work for now, as it got too close into the realm of 'being someone' in a particular community.

5. Meditation and prayer is huge. Admitting I have a problem is still hard but there's a huge relief that comes from being honest with yourself.

6. I work at a lifestyle company, which is fairly unheard of on the East Coast. This helps a bunch with being flexible about when and where I work.

I still make time to do side projects and such, but the effort is mainly directed towards learning and fun over developing my personal brand. I'm still strategic about it, as I'd love to do more Clojure in the future, esp. professionally.

Hope this helps.

[AndrewKemendo]

Thanks for the writeup.

2. Regular time doing wholly non-constructive things:

So how did you get started doing that? I have a reeeaaly hard time with that one, to the point that I even see time with the family as non-constructive. It feels like time spent doing anything that is not pushing one of my goals forward is actively stopping forward momentum (including posting comments on the internets) so I end up getting frustrated at having wasted time and get depressed that I haven't done anything. Its a tough cycle.

[mattgreenrocks]

I know the feeling. I have a few things I'd like to work on myself.

But the bit about your family? Sounds like a red flag to me.

Do things for yourself on a regular basis. Make time to exercise and spend with quality people. Talk about this issue. It's very tough to fix by yourself; you effectively been mentally rooted for now. Understand it will take time to fix, and the process of recovering will feel strange. I'm convinced half of it is showing up and resisting the temptation to do just one more thing.

Optimize for happiness, and trust productivity will flow out of that.

[ktd]

>It's obvious, since I'm 30 and not earth-shatteringly successful, that I have some kind of health story...

What?

[seiji]

If you're in SV/SF, over 26, and haven't made at least a million dollars for yourself through an exit yet, you're not in the cool crowd. Bonus points for an Official Exit and not just an acquihire.

Your street cred can wain though. The Powerset acquisition by Microsoft was okay for the time, but now it shows up as essentially an acquihire. If that sale was going through today, it would probably be a $200 million to $500 million acquisition instead of the $50 million bauble they got at the time.

[ktd]

I'm in SV/SF, and this attitude is completely silly. That isn't to say that it doesn't exist, but I would say it's far from the norm, even in tech circles.

[mattgreenrocks]

It is often self-inflicted, which makes it difficult to get over. But the culture reinforces it subtly as well.