woah woah... a bartender becomes the head of engineering at a high flying start up? This isn't the .com. Did the bartender also go to MIT?

Drug fueled founder parties? Orgies? I've clearly been doing silicon valley wrong. Or right, depending on your perspective... but not this? I've seen board game fueled parties where maybe one or two people do drugs, but it remains very nerdy? And no sex parties. Mostly sausage parties?

... so yeah. Do people really know Jims? Because I just read posts about them.

I've met the type. But usually, they're on the marketing side, not the ones who develop something. I knew one who blew through 8 figures and ended up an alcoholic, then dead.

The startup market rewards first to market and first to scale. This creates a game of "chicken", where the competitors spend like crazy trying to achieve a near monopoly. That's why some of the fake-it-til-you-make-it crowd gets ahead. But most of them crash. The historical success rate for VC-funded startups is only about 1 in 10.

Re: sausage party - Based on the salary of these guys, if they wanted they could easily afford nightly visits at something like the now closed strip club, the Mitchell Brothers theater in San Francisco. I went for a bachelor party in early 2000s, and every dancer who got close enough to have a conversation with you propositioned you with sex acts for a price in a private room. I worked at a startup in Houston in the early 1990s and the founder went to strip clubs it seemed every time he was in town, he took the whole company one time (it was less than 20 of us) and that strip club seemed to work on a similar if less brazen vibe. The other startups I’ve worked for did not have strip club trips. :)

The whole SV “let’s go to burning man” crowd has always had a very active sex aspect to it. This is one of the things neo puritan pichai era Google struggles to deal with about its past.

Pretty sure my choosing to work for companies ran by stable sane people is responsible for the complete lack of drug fueled orgy invites on my calendar.

Actually the one drugs + stripper party I was invited to was so damn sad and pathetic I left after a few minutes. A bunch of geeks who got rich, using money to do an impersonation of the crazy lifestyle reality TV taught them they were supposed to be having.

I left the party and went back to playing board games in another wing of the hotel.

> And no sex parties. Mostly sausage parties?

Clearly you weren't cool enough to get into the drug-fuelled OpenAI gay sex orgies.

What type of drugs? Asking for a friend.