Get Hyped • Brady Salz

I'm in a hurry to get things done
Oh, I rush and rush until life's no fun
All I really gotta do is live and die
Even I'm in a hurry and don't know why

I'm in a Hurry (And Don't Why) by Alabama

I've been on a bit of a bender when it comes Silicon Valley media content recently. There's been a recent explosion of content:

The Dropout covering Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes
Super Pumped covering Uber and Travis Kalanick
WeCrashed covering WeWork and Adam Neumann

I think this is the first event -> story -> book -> movie/TV cycle I've been able to fully participate in as an adult¹. Well, slight takeback - I've participated in plenty, but this is definitely the first one I've followed end to end². I read (nearly every) the WSJ/New York story on the first two, and fervently awaited Matt Levine's updates via Money Stuff on the last one. Once they turned into books, I devoured Bad Blood by John Carreyrou and got my copy of Super Pumped signed by Mike Isaac. I heard that these were all going to become TV features - great, I counted down to the release date. I can't claim to have watched every episode every week though, that's a style that's been burnt from my life via Game Of Thrones. But I can claim to have waited until the last episode came out then immediately binged The Dropout over a couple of days.

I'm going to focus on that show today. I was deeply, deeply curious on what angle the show would shine on her. I've heard a ludicrous amount of takes from my friend group, here's a subset:

She's a genius who made promises she couldn't cash, but an impressive example otherwise
She's an example of everything wrong with Silicon Valley startup culture, lighting money on fire³
She's a megalomaniac who drove people to kill themselves for her company
She's a young person who got in over their head and didn't know when to hit stop

The show dances around each of these caricatures and more. I'm not qualified to be a jury member, let alone judgement. I want to talk about how much I deeply resonated with her character in the one of the early episodes. Warning: If you continue to read this post, you may think I'm psychotic!

We Run This

There's two scenes in Episode 2 that just stopped me in my tracks. In the first scene, our (anti)hero has raised enough money for an office. She's living there, likely for a variety of reasons: lack of income, can spend more hours working with a smaller commute, and heck, you can read the vibes that she doesn't care if it's weird. She wouldn't even think to ask if it's weird!

Her morning routine is adorably simple. Sunlight up, headphones in, hit it.

If you've never been in an empty office, it's a surprisingly effective dance floor. Good alleyways for directed motion. Lots of auxiliary items to both create and preserve momentum. No crowds. No concerns over being overheard by your neighbors. Not a care for the ruckus - bring it.

Then the door opens and the sun actually comes up. The dream didn't end when you opened your eyes a few songs prior, it ended when you came back to earth because suddenly you weren't alone. There's no better wake up signal to the brain than pain, and there is no pain greater than having to rip small pieces of plastic out of your ears in lightspeed. Sheepish grin, small talk, onto the rest of the day. I've only crashed at the office 5-6 times, but they got every single heartbeat right in that scene.

In the second scene, we watch Elizabeth travel up and down Sand Hill Road trying to raise venture capital money. She talks to a variety of investors: some sharp, some sexist, but ultimately, none interested. The Missy Elliot pump up is consistently interleaved with her put downs, punctuated only by a few violent exhalations of stress.

I consider myself incredibly fortunate to never have been in an investor pitch on Sand Hill Road. Selling for your life, your company's life, your coworker's lives, it sounds impossible. I have been (un)lucky enough to be in a couple investor visits, but even worse, I've been part of major design reviews with seasoned external parties. It's an frustrating balancing act: you have to display enough confidence that folks will buy into and trust your designs while also knowing that your prototypes aren't even done yet.

I should note, for legal reasons or otherwise, I never had to make jumps as large as Elizabeth had to. We always had something working, it was just very far from what we wanted to be at. Looking back, the difference between “something” and “what we wanted” was miniscule compared to the distance between “nothing” and “something”⁴.

Last weekend I had lunch with a friend who had just gotten introduced to the game. Let's call that friend P. P strongly objected to the wording and content of a presentation, specifically the portion in their area of expertise. The material being presented wasn't true and realized yet, how could they present it to a potential customer? P said they couldn't and removed the content. A few days later, lo and behold, the presentation is going on and that content had magically re-surfaced, courtesy of P‘s manager. P was furious and is debating leaving their job over it.

Making big jumps from reality to Powerpoint is tough. Sitting on the sideline while others makes those jumps for you and about your work is one hundred times harder. I used to hate that so so much, but now I've accepted it as part of the big game everyone plays. All sides are bought in on it. From Startups Sometimes Stretch The Truth by Matt Levine:

Startup investors understand that this is the game they are playing; they want to be sold an enthusiastic vision of the future by someone who believes it so purely and tangibly that he thinks it has already happened. Sometimes it works out great, the founder achieves his vision, the future is as predicted and the investors get rich. Other times—most times—it doesn’t work out, the vision fails, the future is different and the investors lose their money. It’s fine. That is the game they are in, betting on wild visions of the future sold to them by wild visionaries; only some of them have to come true for the investors to get rich.

As the series continues, the gaps between reality and promises widen, and it's easier to paint Elizabeth as the villain. But in those first couple episodes, man, I saw way too much of myself in her to be comfortable labeling her as a villain. She did the same gig I have to do time and time again: show up, get hyped, and keep trying. See you Monday.

Ignoring COVID-19 content, because all pandemic media has been awful, sorry. ↩︎
But Brady, what about the podcasts?! No No and No. ↩︎
Graciously ignoring it wasn't really SV, that's too niche of a point for this post ↩︎
Going from Zero To One, also known as the only thing Peter Thiel wasn't 100% garbage about ↩︎