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This is a very special promotional piece I produced, as a way of sharing with you some of my most meaningful work from 2011.
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Diaspora was supposed to be the “Facebook killer.” Then
22-year-old cofounder Ilya Zhitomirskiy committed suicide.
E.B. Boyd reports on how his death has touched a nerve in
Silicon Valley – and forced one of its biggest secrets out
in the open.
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One winter night in 2010, four New York University
students went to a lecture about the growing threats to
personal privacy in the Facebook-Google era. They emerged
from the auditorium determined to save the world. Their
weapon would be Diaspora, a new kind of open-source
social network that would protect private information by
replacing a single corporate behemoth with a so-called
federation of pods. Users could join whatever pod they
wanted, and if they didn’t like how they were being treated
at that one, they could pick up their personal data and
move somewhere else. Deep human connection without the
Big Brother overtones—that was the utopian promise.
The students figured they’d need a few months and
$10,000 to build a prototype. But Facebook had just made a
huge misstep—a series of features that seemed to imperil
users’ privacy to a stunning degree. As outrage ricocheted
around the web, Diaspora went from being an intriguing
but untested concept to the media-proclaimed “Facebook
killer,” and the money started rolling in. The NYU students
ended up with 20 times more than they had sought in their
fundraising appeal on Kickstarter—even Mark Zuckerberg
made a contribution. “I think it is a cool idea,” he
told Wired. “I see a little of myself in [those guys].”
In the Hollywood version of the story, the four
friends would’ve holed up in their dorm rooms banging
out code until they’d created a site that lived up to
the hype. They would’ve become famous and, despite
their professed indifference to money, fabulously rich—
worthy, perhaps, of an Aaron Sorkin sequel. In the un-
forgiving environment of the newly booming Silicon
Valley, though, the reality was far more grueling, dis-
heartening—and, ultimately, tragic. Last November, some
18 months after moving to San Francisco with his three
cofounders, 22-year-old math whiz Ilya Zhitomirskiy was
found dead in his Mission home, an apparent suicide.
Of the Diaspora founders, the sweet-faced
Zhitomirskiy had seemed to be the most optimistic and
idealistic. A unicyclist and ballroom dancer whose
family had emigrated from Russia when he was a child,
he was fascinated by artificial intelligence and by
technology as a powerful agent for good. Cheerful and
outgoing, he threw epic parties and had an uncanny
ability to connect with complete strangers, whom he
would often keep up late into the night, talking about
his dreams of making the world a better, freer, place.
“There’s something deeper than making money off stuff,”
he told an interviewer back in 2010. “Being a part
of creating stuff for the universe is awesome.”
But for Diaspora, as for most startups, the
challenges proved daunting. There were long hours at the
keyboard, frustrating meetings with potential investors,
and sniping from bloggers about the gushy treatment from
New York magazine and the New York Times. IEEE Spectrum,
a respected technology magazine, got a look at an early
version of Diaspora’s software and deemed it “vacant”
and “amateur.” That same month, Google unveiled its
own curiously Diaspora-like social network. Soon the
Kickstarter money ran out amid questions about how it
had been spent, and, without explanation, PayPal briefly
froze the account the partners were using to raise more
funds. Then in October, on the eve of the planned beta
launch, one of the startup’s key players abruptly quit.
All of which would have been hard on entrepreneurs
twice the age of the Diaspora founders, never mind kids
barely out of their teens with little experience to steel
them against the startup life’s inevitable pressures and
setbacks. “They had failed. Publicly,” wrote a comment-
er on Hacker News, the forum of the tech incubator Y
Combinator. “This can be very devastating psychologi-
cally to someone who has always succeeded in life.”
Indeed, a lot of the chatter following
Zhitomirskiy’s death focused on the depression that
frequently accompanies startup stress, and some speculated
that this may have been a factor in his suicide. “I met
this kid [Zhitomirskiy] at a half way to halloween party
at NYC Resistor,” a Valleywag commenter wrote. “He was
sharp and passionate but had a glassy eye look I know
my self from my own hypo mania / depression [sic].”
Suddenly, Diaspora had become a new sort
of symbol for the tech community—not just the anti-
Facebook but a reminder of the emotional impact of
the New Boom on the very young, and potentially very
vulnerable, entrepreneurs at the center of it.
Silicon Valley likes to say that it celebrates
failure—that a willingness in the culture to take huge
risks and learn from mistakes is why great innovations
happen there. You can crash and burn in the Valley, the
lore goes, and still have venture capitalists lining up
to fund your next company; there are plenty of people
who even insist that you haven’t really earned your
entrepreneur stripes until you’ve failed at least once.
But failure is one thing when you have a track
record of success and a wide network of contacts; it’s
quite another when you’re 22, just out of college, far
from your family and friends, and completely green.
Or maybe, egged on by self-proclaimed disrupters like
investor Peter Thiel, you’re one of those high school
geeks who didn’t even bother with college. Maybe you
have a condition—Asperger’s syndrome, say, or bipolar
disorder—that makes you well suited to the intellectual
and creative challenges of the tech life but also makes
it much harder for you to cope when adversity strikes.
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If anything, the myth of the young geek
genius sets people up for failure, says Rich Aberman,
cofounder of the online-payments company WePay. Today,
WePay—which offers individuals and small organizations
simple, user-friendly ways to collect money and sell
goods—looks like a Silicon Valley success story, with
nearly $10 million in funding from the likes of PayPal’s
Max Levchin. But the first year, when Aberman was 23
and the startup was struggling, was harrowing.
The idea for WePay began when Aberman was
trying to arrange a bachelor party in 2008—14 guys
spread across the country, $4,200 in expenses, and no
efficient way for the group to collect and distribute
the money. Seeing an exciting opportunity, he and a
college pal, Bill Clerico, put their respective plans
for law school and Wall Street on hold. Aberman was
inspired by a 2006 BusinessWeek cover story about Digg
founder Kevin Rose (“How This Kid Made $60 Million in
18 Months”). “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, all he did was
come up with a great idea, and he built it, and he made a
ton of money,’” Aberman says. “‘That’s not that hard.’”
Only afterward did it occur to Aberman that he
didn’t know how to code: “You spend three weeks learning
how to program, and you realize it’s going to take you
another 10 years to get good enough to build something
saleable.” He and Clerico had no idea how to catch the
interest of VCs or the media, either, but they had
already gone all in—failure was not an option. “It’s
impossible for you to draw a bridge from where you are
now to where you’ve made promises about where you’re
going to go,” Aberman says. “That feeling leads you to
paralysis.” Suicide, he says, can seem like “an escape.”
The tendency of entrepreneurs to overidentify
with their company compounds the pain of failure, says Cass
Phillipps, a veteran of a doomed startup who now organizes
the FailCon conferences, which analyze how companies go
wrong. Halfway through her own startup’s first year, it
was clear the idea—a plan to aggregate conversations in
online forums—wasn’t working, but one of the partners
resisted the decision to shut down. “He felt like his
personal worth was being judged by our startup’s value.”
The tech-blog culture, with its breathless
coverage of fundings and launches and its tendency to
ignore promising ideas that bomb (except to viciously
tear them apart), can amplify the pressures and feed
the insecurities. Then there’s the terror of having to
concede defeat to the people whose money you’ve been
burning through. While some entrepreneurs say that the
Valley’s top VCs can be a founder’s best source of support,
taking funds from angels or investors who can’t afford
a loss, or who aren’t willing or able to help a startup
through the inevitable rough patches, can be a huge
liability. “The ones who give you money and walk away
aren’t in the trenches with you,” says Ben Huh, founder
of the humor site I Can Haz Cheezburger. “When things
start going south, it can feel like they’re putting more
pressure on you rather than helping you find a way out.”
Yet the industry that makes a fetish of dis-
secting every angle of startup success has been remark-
ably close-mouthed about the emotional vulnerability of
its workforce and the psychic toll of the entrepreneurial
process. The result, noted a Valleywag commenter, is that
people who are hurting believe “it’s just me who is weird
and sick.” “Oftentimes, my clients do not tell anyone
in their lives that they’re seeking psychotherapy,” says
Dr. Sarah Villarreal, a psychologist who counts founders
among her Silicon Valley clientele. “That exacerbates
the feeling that they’re alone in their struggles.”
After Zhitomirskiy’s death, Ben Huh decided to
break the silence, blogging about contemplating suicide
back in 2001, when his former company was floundering.
“Loneliness, darkness, hopelessness…those words don’t
capture the feeling of the profound self-doubt that sets
in after a failure,” he wrote. Such despair can be so
debilitating that it “makes you question if you should
even exist anymore. I spent a week in my room with the
lights off…thinking of the best way to exit this failure.
Death was a good option—and it got better by the day.”
The post went up shortly before Huh was
scheduled to speak at two conferences. “Almost everyone
I met had read it,” he says—but they were only willing
to admit that in private. “Maybe three of us would
be having a normal conversation and one person would
leave, and the other one would say, ‘By the way, I read
your post. And I know what you’re talking about.’”
Entrepreneurs are left with the feeling that,
for all the abstract idealization of failure, the real
thing makes Silicon Valley deeply uncomfortable. “I
have to act as if I’m going to take over the world,
even if inside I’m struggling,” says an entrepreneur
in his late 30s who founded a startup two years ago
and this winter considered shutting it down.
From left to right, Diaspora co-founders, Ilya Zhitomirsky,
Daniel Grippi, Rafael Sofaer, Maxwell Salzberg
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the beginning of our class, you’d ask people how their
start up was going, and they’d be like, ‘Excellent, great,
super,’” he says. “But a few weeks in, you’d ask the same
question, and they’d say, ‘We’re so screwed.’ It made us
realize we weren’t doing any worse than anyone else.”
Yet sometimes even having that kind of support
isn’t enough. Among Zhitomirskiy’s friends and colleagues,
there are different theories about what led him to take
his own life. One possible trigger, of course, may have
been his despair over the project’s problems and the
way its idealistic goals were being subverted by the
likes of Google. “He thought Google+ was a knockoff,”
says a fellow entrepreneur—one that had replicated
some of Diaspora’s features (or so it appeared), but
hadn’t embraced the underlying idea of giving people
control over their data. “He was feeling upset about
that in October and November,” the friend says.
Others note that Zhitomirskiy suffered from
serious psychological issues that might have proved
crippling no matter what happened at Diaspora. “Ilya had
a bipolar disorder,” says Janice Fraser, the former head
of Adaptive Path, cofounder-CEO of the LUXr incubator
and an adviser to the Diaspora crew since they joined
LUXr’s inaugural class in the summer of 2010. But
sometime before his death, she says, Zhitomirskiy had
decided to stop taking his medication. That’s common,
adds Fraser, who suffers from depression herself and
who’s seen several other members of her family grapple
with mental illness, including a brother who committed
suicide. She says Zhitomirskiy seems to have planned his
suicide, perhaps scouring the Internet for guidance. While
Diaspora’s stresses may have aggravated his condition,
Fraser believes his decision was based more on realizing
what it would mean to have to live with his illness—
how it would affect his capacity to think and enjoy
life. That wasn’t something he wanted, she believes.
It’s even possible to see significance in the
date of his death. Zhitomirskiy was found early on the
“We are very accepting in Silicon Valley of career
failures and decisions that were made incorrectly if the
founder can be, like, ‘I figured everything out. I’ve got
it under control.’ We as a culture love that,” Phillipps
says. “But we don’t know what to do with a founder who’s
depressed or who says, ‘I’m really confused.’ Our response
to that is, ‘Figure your shit out.’ Even before the diaspora
tragedy, momentum was building for a healthier, more open
and compassionate approach. Last April, Ben Horowitz, a
former entrepreneur and a cofounder of the vaunted VC
firm Andreessen Horowitz, wrote a widely read post on the
emotional challenges of being a tech leader, admitting,
“By far the most difficult skill for me to learn as CEO
was to manage my own psychology.” Phillipps’s FailCon
idea dates back to when she and her cofounders couldn’t
figure out what they were doing wrong, and the events
they attended—mostly whiz kids talking about their
successes—offered no insight. Though much of FailCon’s
focus is on impersonal issues like hiring and growth, “by
signing up for a conference that says you have [failed],
or you are going to fail, you walk in with a slightly
more exposed mindset,” Phillipps says. “It’s beginning to
change the tone of the conversation between founders.”
One of the most valuable things about the pro-
liferation of startup incubators around the Valley is
the way they allow, or force, these kinds of conver-
sations to happen—and youthful poses to be dropped.
WePay’s Aberman says an emotional turning point was
getting accepted into Y Combinator, whose cofounder
Paul Graham talks about “the trough of sorrow” as an
almost inevitable phase of a startup’s growth. While Y
Combinator doesn’t have an explicitly emotional component
to its curriculum, the incubator approach—a number of
startups per “class,” with 150 or so other young geeks
to lean on and commiserate with as they try to get
their companies off the ground—inherently addresses
the psychological strains of entrepreneurship, Graham
and his partners believe, and Aberman concurs. “At
from their 20s to their 50s, shuffled into a conference
room at No Starch Press in SoMa. They were responding to
an invitation from Mitch Altman, cofounder of Noisebridge,
the Mission hacker space that provides geeks (including
the Diaspora guys) the infrastructure and support to
explore their passions and bring their ideas to fruition.
Altman, who battled serious depression for the first
half of his life, had been deeply upset by Zhitomirskiy’s
death. He decided to convene the meetup after getting
more than 100 responses to a blog post he’d written about
his own struggles. “So many people expressed how thankful
they were that someone was openly talking about this,”
he says. “We need to create an environment where people
feel it’s totally OK and natural to talk about feeling
depressed, even suicidal. Then people may not feel they
need to hide, and maybe they can reach out for help.”
Four months later, the “Geeks & Depression”
meetup has turned into a regular gathering, and similar
events are starting to bubble up around the world.
At a recent conference in Berlin, organizers asked
Altman to throw together a panel on the topic, and
he’s planning another for the annual HOPE (Hackers on
Planet Earth) conference in New York this summer.
What’s striking to Silicon Valley veterans is
the new willingness among geeks to bare their souls
in public. For all their vulnerability, Fraser sees an
emotional upside in the fact that today’s entrepreneurs
are so young. “The kids who are coming up today are more
courageous,” she says. “This is a generation of people
who are used to letting it all hang out on Facebook.
So if I say, ‘Talk to me about mental illness in your
life,’ probably somebody would tell me their story.
And that’s really different than 10 years ago.”
morning of November 12. The night before had been November
11. Of the year 2011. Ever the math nerd, the theory goes,
Zhitomirskiy might have found some poetic delight in
departing this earth when the clock hit 11:11 11/11/11.
The truth, of course, died with Zhitomirskiy, and
his cofounders, who might come closest to knowing what
happened, did not respond to requests for interviews. It’s
worth noting that Diaspora is not the failure many assume;
donors happily contributed $45,000 on PayPal after the
Kickstarter money ran out, the beta launch is still in the
works, and top-flight VCs have been sniffing around. With
Facebook’s continuing success and huge IPO (“Zuckerberg…
has created a wholly owned Internet,” one writer put it),
the hunger for an alternative will only grow.
What matters now, says Fraser, is that his death
“busted open a door on this conversation.” It’s time for
the tech community to start recognizing the hallmarks
of mental illness and extreme distress, she says. And
it’s time for Silicon Valley to jettison one of its most
cherished ideas, one she calls the Mark Zuckerberg problem:
“The myth of the single perfect hero who gets it right is
bullshit.” Fraser says all founders need to have someone
they can be completely candid with. She has played that
role for some entrepreneurs, including one very successful
founder she’s advising, whose startup has done quite
well by Valley standards. “I came in one day, and they
got teary,” Fraser says. “They said, ‘I don’t know how
I’m going to cope.’ So we just laid it all out. We did an
hour’s worth of work organizing the stuff on their plate.”
FailCon’s Phillipps goes even further. “To
raise VC money, you need an advisory board,” she says.
“It would be so cool if every startup was also required
to have an emotional adviser, someone who could give
psychological support when the founders are in trouble.”
And what about all the other geeks—the ones
who aren’t running startups but who are caught up in the
frenzy and ferocity of the tech economy just the same? One
night last December, 25 such men and women, ranging in age
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photography: Gabriela Hasbun, story: E.B.
Boyd, photo editor: Randi Klett, layout &
design: Julian Weidenthaler
Images originally shot for IEEE Spectrum,
story published in San Francisco Magazine
on February 17, 2012
G A B r i E L AH A s B U N