Why I Left My Big Fancy Tech Job and Wrote a Book

I love Silicon Valley, but it’s deeply flawed

Several years ago, I was sitting in the audience at a big tech conference, learning about a startup that made it easy for people to rent rooms in other people’s houses for short stays. In a world where people can now travel to any part of the world and share someone else’s home, could we hope, the CEO asked, for greater cross-cultural understanding? “Would nations have less war if the residents lived together?”

I closed my eyes, breathed deeply, and felt an immense sense of peace and hope for humanity wash over me.

Then I opened my eyes and thought, “Isn’t this basically a hotel in someone’s house — a cool, convenient, unregulated hotel?”

When it was my turn to take the stage, I too had a grandiose proclamation: Our startup, I declared, was helping people make meaningful connections in the real world.

What I really should have said was: We help people hook up.

On the plane ride home, I began to write what would eventually become The Big Disruption, a satirical novel based on my experience working at both a startup and one of the biggest tech companies in the world. I had no goal at the time other than to provide a bit of cathartic escape from the tech…