The primary externality Airbnb generated was RISK

This exploded into public awareness when a host found her apartment absolutely destroyed by a guest

Which, you know, of course: a system like that is bound to fail spectacularly on occasion.

But what shocked me was how unprepared Airbnb was to make their host whole again. They were dodging accountability and only public shame, orchestrated by the host’s desperate PR campaign, could make the difference

It drove me bonkers.

These guys were getting absolutely rich off the backs of the communities that hosted them.

And they couldn’t take care of someone when things went wrong?

It was such a breach of the basic, reciprocal, implied social contract we should all adhere to.

And what I was learning was that all of Silicon Valley business culture was premised on that kind of breach. Move fast and break society if it earns you a better valuation next round

I didn’t like that at all.

Man, Steve Huffman tried to open the door for me, too.

Sometimes I look back and wonder if I fucked up. He’d invite me to hang at the beach with his YC buds.

But I just couldn’t get excited about them and their world. I couldn’t play the game the way they all expected. It wasn’t for me.

We haven’t talked in years. I got pretty mad at him and Alexis, after they returned to Reddit. I felt they had a greater responsibility to community health.

At the time, Steve… disagreed.

Today all those guys are RICH

I mean, beyond fuck-you money, this is fuck-everyone money. And powerful, in that they can do more or less what they want any given year, and have access to anyone else they need to meet or influence.

Meanwhile, I’m not rich.

It feels like I could have been, if I’d made different choices. But I couldn’t do that any more than I could have sprouted wings.

It’s one of the enduring heartbreaks of my life that I found the Valley so inimical to my values.

So now I live in the woods, almost as far from San Francisco as you can get and still be in the US.

I’ve got a fiber connection and half a prayer everything I know about software and technology strategy can still matter, can still pay some bills.

It’s hard to spend a lifetime really learning something, knowing it down to your bones, only to find the Mecca of its practice so hostile to the vision of the future you hold dear.

It’s been quite a walk through the desert.

@danilo

Don't worry that you took a bad path for your field: every field is now like this. If you'd become a medical doctor, a civil engineer, a worker in retail, or whatever, you would have gone through the same thing.

@naught101

Not many people in any real field go into it in order to rip people off, but that is what most of them end up doing in our society. For doctors, they slog through a medical degree, then they rip people off for insurance companies by seeing them for too short a time and not trying procedures that are too expensive, and for pharmaceutical companies by prescribing their meds whether they are the best ones or not, and if they rise in the hierarchy they learn to rip off more and more people.

@RichPuchalsky

What you're describing is very different from inventing new and cleverly obfuscated ways of ripping people off en mass which is the driving foce behind the SF Bay Area VC startup culture.

@naught101

@ericjmorey @naught101

Eh, that's kind of part of the self importance of techies to think that VC startup culture is uniquely bad. The people who figured out how charge megabucks for ambulance rides whether the patient had insurance or not have killed a lot more people than VCs have.