Menlo Park After Dark

It was one of those Menlo Park dinners where everyone pretends they’re just decompressing from the week but somehow ends up pitching their latest moral framework. Mr. X had gathered the usual suspects—founders, VCs, and a handful of “ethics consultants”

It was a fog-thick night in Woodside, the kind where the Teslas move silently through the mist like silver fish returning to spawn. Mr. X had convened the usual dinner: founders, investors, and one philosopher from Stanford who claimed to

It was a Thursday night at Rosewood, the unofficial parliament of Palo Alto. The mood was unusually nostalgic — not for a product launch or an IPO anniversary, but for a president. Mr. X swirled his drink, eyes reflecting the

It was a Thursday night at a speakeasy in Menlo Park, the kind of place that used to pretend to be exclusive but now mostly served VCs looking for privacy from their own portfolios. Mr. X, as usual, had gathered

It was another Thursday night in Mountain View — the kind of “casual mixer” that felt like a disguised pitch event. Same bar, same kombucha-on-tap, same algorithmically selected crowd of founders and funders pretending they weren’t job-hunting. Mr. X and

It started as a hackathon joke. By the time the IRS granted them 501(c)(3) status, it was a movement. Every Sunday at 10 a.m., in a minimalist warehouse near Sand Hill Road, the congregation of the Alignment Church files in

It was a foggy Thursday night in Palo Alto, the kind that makes University Avenue feel like a simulation with bad rendering. Mr. X and I were at a café that only served “ethically deconstructed” coffee—meaning the barista gave you

It started, as most things in Menlo Park do, over shared mezze and mutual self-regard. A late summer dinner, half toddlers, half founders. The air smelled faintly of eucalyptus and deferred IPOs. Mr. X was holding court near the firepit,

It was another Thursday at Madera—technically “Cougar Night,” but lately the crowd skewed toward Series A founders pretending to be emotionally available. Mr. X and I had arrived early, nursing Negronis while a group at the next table debated whether

It started, as most bad ideas in Silicon Valley do, with a Medium post. A sleep-deprived engineer at a YC startup wrote about his “dopamine detox”—a week of total abstinence from Slack, coffee, social validation, and joy. It went viral