Valley Notes: S-Dorks
Welcome to Valley Notes, a series where I reflect on real anecdotes from life inside a caricature. Everything recounted in these stories actually happened, though names may be altered.
Most people living anywhere in the Bay area will be familiar with Mike’s Bikes. It’s a large local chain of bike shops. Most people treat it as a great place to buy a bike for their kids, or a new helmet, or to get their tire changed when it flats. The franchise owners fancy themselves as purveyors of the highest-end cycling paraphernalia; it’s the kind of store where the inventory pages on their website are pre-sorted “Price High to Low.”
I walked in to my local Mike’s Bikes to buy some tools and gear shifting cables, and I was greeted at the door by a magnificent Specialized S-Works Tarmac. It was a lust-worthy machine: draped in a high-gloss midnight blue sparkle paint job, with soft and beautiful cotton-walled tires and not a speck of dust to be found anywhere on it. My inner geek overwhelmed me and I reached out to touch it, to feel its utter lightness and its sleek paint.
“Hey man, if you don’t mind, please don’t touch that one, okay?” A shop attendant called out from behind the counter. My hopes were dashed. It reminded me of being scolded for tapping the B-flat key in a Steinway piano gallery. I purchased my tools and cables and went home. I looked up the price tag on that bike, because I had been forbidden from touching it (if you have to ask you can’t afford it, right?) It clocked in at a towering $9,200. Good on Mike’s for offering financing, I suppose.
My office building was long and flat. Though only two stories tall, it housed hundreds of people, spread out along either side of a huge linear corridor. I parked my car at one end and walked all the way to the opposite end to reach my desk. While almost everybody in the building sat in cubicles, I walked past 4 actual offices: two of them were shared by a handful of directors whose domains ranged from product management to platform security, one for the VP of engineering, and the fourth a proxy office for the SVP of our product area, whose main office was in a different building. While not the highest ranked in his office row, the VP of engineering, Dan, ran our organization.
I walked towards my desk, passing Dan’s office as usual. I looked over towards his door and immediately it jumped out at me. There was the bike. That sultry blue, shining right at me. Dan bought that bike. For $9,200.
I asked around. Did Dan regularly ride a bike? I had never seen him on any of the group rides that company employees regularly went on. I asked around the road cycling circle at work — nothing. As far as everybody knew, Dan did not ride bikes. At most, he would ride a couple miles to work from his posh house in Sunnyvale.
And sure enough, sometimes the bike would sit untouched outside his office for weeks at a time. He wouldn’t even bring that beautiful machine into his house.
If Dan were a Wall Street banker, a Fortune 500 CEO, or a country club patron, it wouldn’t surprise me to see him buying an obvious status symbol. For wealthy people who live in an “old money” focused culture (regardless of how old their money actually is), status symbols are a way of life. Driving a Maserati to Kroger reminds your neighbors that you made it bigger than them. But in the meritocratic vision of Silicon Valley, status symbols feel backwards. Aren’t we supposed to base our judgments of people on what they achieve, not how rich they are?
I’d argue that Silicon Valley meritocracy has become twisted enough that it’s driven us right back to the status-oriented world of the industries we balk at. Dan has a lot of money because he was an early engineer at a company that got sold to a tech giant, so this must mean Dan deserves our admiration, right? The fact that Dan was in on the ground floor must mean Dan is smarter and a better engineer, right? And that S-Works bike he never rides, that’s just him fulfilling a boyish desire for cool shit, right?
The bike, I think, is a particularly fitting status symbol of the Valley. Cycling is, apparently, the new golf. The bike simultaneously signals that Dan is a fit, outdoorsy hobbyist who loves the feel of wind in his hair and fire in his lungs, but also that he has massive disposable income to spend on recreational machinery. The usage of the bicycle as a status symbol gentrifies a sport and a mode of transport intended to be accessible to everyone, to not exclude those without means or status. And before I get a nosebleed from sitting on my high horse, my bike wasn’t cheap either. But it sure as hell wasn’t expensive enough that my bike shop offered financing on it.
I’d heard lots of rumors at work about a former exec at our company, a guy named Matt. Matt was legendary for giving away free stuff. He gave away furniture, clothes, food, and all kinds of miscellany of wildly varying value. One particularly legendary story was that when he bought a new bike, he gave away his old one. The old one he had bought for $3,000. And he just gave that away. I have no idea if Matt actually rode those bikes — nobody I spoke to had known him personally enough to be sure.
But Dan, if you see this article, I’ll take that bike off your hands if you’re not using it.
