Saturday in Silicon Valley
I arrived at the startup with a box of donuts. The team had been sprinting and it seemed rude to show up empty handed. There was very little food in the office, so my gift was a welcomed change. Make no mistake, this is a very successful company, just not a wasteful one.
The idea of yesteryear’s over-the-top spending on amenities and goofy adults-as-kids-in-a-playground-but-at-a-company era is long past. There are no three story spiral slides or free unlocked multi-colored bikes or endless buffets of food. No ice sculptures of Tupac or arcade games. No “think pods” or other new age techno sham shamanistic vibes. Just desks. A few couches. There’s a pingpong table, but only one. There’s a small room with an electric guitar. But no one’s playing it. Everyone is at work; engineers have their headphones on. A new-era coffee machine is in the corner. It’s a Saturday and the team is in the middle of a surge.
A surge is a seven-day sprint, where the team eats all three meals together and jams all day towards a specific goal. This isn’t a misery, however, the faces are happy. There is a sense of meaning or purpose in the work.
And this part is hard to get right so I’ll try to carefully explain it. There is a certain happiness in a shared purpose. I once spent some time with Sebastian Junger, author of Tribe. Part of my role for the last few jobs I’ve had is to spend time with celebrities and special guests. It is a special skill to keep calm in the presence of famous people—to see superstars as humans doing their best to move through the world, with their own challenges and unique skills. At Twitter, I’d spend the day accompanying Lady Gaga or Kobe or J.Cole or Snoop Dogg, helping to design the experience for the celebrity, but also to help the team understand the VIPs role on the platform.
A small watercolor I did of Snoop after spending the day with him, writing jokes. Does he know my name? No. I was simply that “guy from Twitter” who was writing jokes in the room. But it was a memorable experience.
At Sequoia the celebrities are much more likely to be prize winning writers or five star generals or extreme athletes or Nobel Laureates or authors of famous AI papers or inventors of the future. In this particular case it was a soldier-turned-writer.
Junger’s key insight was the importance of the extreme sense of purpose one feels while on a mission; where everyone in the group is trying to do the same thing and that thing is both important and dangerous. And there is a happiness (as strange as that sounds) from this sense of purpose. Both as a shared purpose and as personal sense of purpose. For that brief moment, you know what to do with your life. Junger described it in a way recovering addicts describe drugs. Purpose, it seems, it deeply addicting.
Watching this particular team work on a Saturday, you could sense some aspect of this happiness-through-shared-purpose entering the room as a comforting encapsulation that squeezed the team together and helped them persevere through adversity.
The work was non-stop. Debates happened on the main floor. You could choose to join the debate, or keep your headphones on to stay locked in the zone. The conversation was intense—not a fight—but a type of hardening of wisdom through vocal exploration.
I had a role, too, as a kind of visiting wizard, to offer the one magic trick I have up my sleeve—story.
Absorbing the unspoken, strange, and vague human urges, emotions, desires, frustrations, and ambitions hidden behind why people buy what they buy, use what they use, or make the decisions that they do requires a mindset that is different from the one normally used in software development. It’s closer to the animal act of the hunter or the wisdom in the body of the dancer. It’s a type of wide-awake dreaming. It’s weird. Constructing sentences that articulate desire and instigate change is an unnatural act for most engineers. Not all, but many. I was here to help pull the story from them, and present it in a way that would both sell the problem and engender desire to purchase their solution. Honestly, it’s a pretty good magic trick. When done thoughtlessly, it’s the empty marketing garbage that we all hate. It’s the empty promise. The Hard Sell. The lies of politicians and the lazy, trite phrases of the mainstream, the meme, the already seen. Everyone hates marketing. I do too. Story, however is different. It’s almost a religion.
It took all day. And the next. Late Sunday night, 11:34pm, we got a version that melted minds and opened hearts. It was more than just the regular click-n-buy go-to-market language. It was an idea worth reading.
I’d share it with you, but that’s against the rules of my sacred order. Just know that the words held in their structure a near-muscial prosody; that the sentences turned in the mind like a skeleton key; know that the brick-by-brick ideas built a ladder out of oblivion to the sublime.
I’ve tried to describe what it’s like to do this kind of word work. The sentences fall like Tetris blocks and I turn them in my mind until they spin and lock and evaporate to clarity. The ancient Greeks had a word for this, λόγος, which means both “the word” and the underlying order of the universe. Tapping into the logos feels as close as it gets to experiencing the divine.
Key ideas for you to explore:
Team:
Does your team have a sense of meaning or purpose in their work?
Do you feel misery or happiness when working hard?
Do you harden your ideas through debate? or merely fight?
Does everyone on the team feel like they are actively contributing to something both difficult and important?
When was a time you felt good, or even great, after persevering through something difficult?
Story:
How will you transform your audience?
How you are different, not merely better?
What do you see that others often miss?
From Obama’s speech writer, Sarada Peri “What is your urgent burning truth?”
Want to talk through a story? Call or text my 24-Hour Story, Art, and Design Hotline +1 (650) 675-5734 and talk to my AI Delphi. It’s free, strange, fun, and programmed to almost always say something supportive, encouraging, and helpful.
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+1 (650) 675-5734