RW

I moved to SF when my co-founder, Laura, and I were trying to get more people to eat bugs. At the time, we had been peddling our cricket chips, or Chirps, to conservative Bostonians whose preferred diets consisted of Sam Adams and beef burgers, and most of them thought we had gone crazy. In fact, I remember meeting with a potential angel investor who very plainly told us after a pitch — “I’ve been an investor for 10 years and this is the worst idea I’ve ever heard.” He probably thought he was doing us a favor, but alas, our relentless optimism, untested after incubating our idea on campus, did not waver for even a second, and his words were oil on water.

Laura and I visited SF for a week to “test the waters,” and we arrived on a sunny day in April, in time for Earth Day, and it was as if fate had opened her arms to us, and we were finally home in her warm embrace. We brought Chirps everywhere we went, and it seemed like everyone wanted to try cricket chips. At first, I was shocked by how open people were — there were no recoils of disgust, and we were greeted mostly with curiosity and stoned excitement. Yes, we were in the land of Alice Waters and the organic food movement, but also… we were asking people to eat crickets! My confusion melted away when we were walking down the Mission one day and someone dressed head-to-toe in a Darth Vader costume walked by us and no one else gawked, let alone noticed, except me. The spectrum for weird here was just much broader than anything I had encountered, and at once I vibrated with excitement and fear.

Very quickly after, Laura and I hauled our cricket costumes and leftover inventory to the West Coast, and we embarked on our new lives in a 70-person co-op on Folsom St., where a housemate was mugged on average once a month. None of that mattered to us. The city opened up to us; we were two young women “trying to change the world, one cricket at a time,” and we were welcomed everywhere. We won every pitch competition, were collected by community leaders who were enamored with our boldness, irreverence, and founder-status, and gained access to the most private of circles. After all, we were innovators, world-changers. The highs never troughed the four years I worked on Chirps in SF. We were barely making any money; in fact, we made $22K a year and lived in pretty shabby conditions, but we were never home and never alone! We floated from friends’ houses to fancy conferences to fun co-working spaces where we were entertained by other founders. It was an intoxicating way to live, but it was also Uncanny Valley. In reality, Chirps never hit mass market, and I was tired of being a bad CEO who didn’t really know what I was doing. I lusted after the founders who had millions of repeat users, because I wanted to create something people couldn’t live without, and I was worried that I was carrying a torch that would eventually burn out.

So I left Chirps in 2018 and handed the keys to Laura, and I embarked a path to learn how to be an operator who could deliver outcomes. Over night, the city changed. I was no longer the CEO/co-founder of a world-changing startup; I was now a confused generalist who had never worked in tech, and no one knew what to do with me. Without a succinct and snappy pitch, I was no longer celebrated in the same circles. My new employers started me at the bottom of the rung — as an intern, an IC — and people started treating me differently. My CEO “mentor” now saw me as a confused wannabe tech employee who didn’t think from “first principles.” I wanted the wrong things too much, and my curiosity wasn’t sufficient, nor was my Silicon Valley vernacular. Rose, you can’t just feel someone’s vibes, you needed to mentally model them with low certainty and high confidence. The city that once shown so brightly and full of possibilities revealed its shuttered windows and doors, and I stepped through the matrix and saw the rungs of status that hung over every interaction and relationship. It was sickening, but the downfall was hard, because there is no high like the high of being adored by those you adore.

Are you the next Elon Musk or are you going to fund the next Elon Musk? This is the fundamental question that determines on which rung you reside in the social hierarchy of our one-ladder monoculture. At the end of the day, people in SF are starved for attention and love. How can you not be if you are quickly measured, in almost every interaction, by how many steps you are away from the fundamental question. People trip over each to signal their seemingly autistic obsession with graphical databases, or furiously write about how they are writing a manifesto that will inspire the next generation of builders. The Silicon Valley dream is so tantalizing, and we all know someone who made the thing that made them lots of money and forever cemented their value in our society. So if they did it, why can’t you? The motivation behind everything then becomes about the individual and the hero’s journey, and every failure or insecurity is hidden away unless sharing it serves the purpose of authentic relating to gain access to new connections who will get you closer to the Silicon Valley dream.

This leads to an extremely disconnected society, despite the myriad of salons, community houses, parties. How can there be so many opportunities for connection with so little connection? Do people even know what connection here means? I saw a tweet about how connection is about having hard conversations. That made me laugh out loud. Please, no more structured, authentic relating games. PLEASE! How about just hanging out with people, for no reason at all except that you care about them? Do most people in SF even know what that means? How about shooting the shit and riffing off of each other with no other purpose except to have a good time? Is that even possible here? My ex once bemoaned that he hated catching up with people and preferred to see people every 3-4 weeks to exchange new ideas, because if he saw them more frequently, then they wouldn’t have new interesting ideas to share and he wasn’t interested in their lives outside of their ideas. SF is a revolving door — one side is a dream of endless wonder and promise and the other is a nightmare where you are alone and you never really mattered to anyone at all. It’s unclear which side of the door you’re on until you opt out of the ladder completely.

I now rarely crave attention from people who don’t have a real interest in getting to know me. I have no interest in building relationships with people who don’t show up when it’s inconvenient for them. In fact, I sometimes relish in people’s blatant motivations, because it makes decisions easy for me in terms of who to invest in and how to spend my time. SF is a beautiful city in that it’s a catch-all for ideas, no matter how improbable or edgy. I could spend endless days wading in and out of interesting conversations, and the stimulation is intoxicating. SF serves an important function in the world as a manufacturer of entrepreneurs and dreamers, pushing the world into the next generation before the general population is even aware of where society is moving. But the moment I opted out of the ladder, I found others like me who can riff and banter, who show up for each other, no matter how busy they are. There are whole populations of techies in SF who care about people and have the skills for long term relationships — they tend to be offline and hang out with people in the real world instead of being terminally online and alone. These are my people, and it’s this intersection of real relationships and unreal ideas where I have found happiness in SF. Uncanny Valley has become, for me, a city full of caring friends with hot takes and hot meals. I can now say that I truly love San Francisco, because I made it mine and did it my way.