Uncanny Valley
Anna Wiener's beautiful, honest take on Silicon Valley
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“Depending on whom you ask, it was either the apex, the inflection point, or the beginning of the end for Silicon Valley’s startup scene—what cynics called a bubble, optimists called the future, and my future co-workers, high on the fumes of world-historical potential, breathlessly called the ecosystem.”
— Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley
Anna Wiener was an assistant for an NYC literary agency when she got bit by the startup bug.
She interned at Oyster (a four-employee, NYC-based startup building Netflix for books) but wasn’t extended a full-time offer because, as her CEO accidentally posted in a public chat room, she was “too interested in learning, not doing.” Graciously, the Oyster founders helped her land a role in Silicon Valley at Mixpanel (an extremely hot startup building analytics for mobile apps). And the rest, as they say, is memoir.
Uncanny Valley is the true story of Anna’s journey through the strange land of Silicon Valley startups. She arrived in San Francisco at age 25, and, presumably, started writing down everything that she saw. Her memoir is loaded with precise, telling, and at times hilarious details — she notes that her Patagonia-clad coworkers were “dressed, typically, to to traverse a glacier,” and said that a panel presentation hosted by venture capitalists “was like watching two ATMs in conversation.” Anna called this mode of precisely seeing the world her “sociological approach.” At times, that mode left her detached and distant from her co-workers, but it also enabled her to write this book: a uniquely honest, grounded, personal look at Silicon Valley.
Most writing about Silicon Valley these days is either fawning or malicious. Anna is neither, and achieves that balance by telling her story in beautiful, flowing prose.
To Anna, Silicon Valley is impatient:
“It was easier, in any case, to fabricate a romantic narrative than admit that I was ambitious. I wanted my life to pick up momentum, go faster.”
To Anna, Silicon Valley worships engineers:
“Silicon Valley is a culture focused on doing, not reflecting or thinking. And the people who can do, who can actually ship product, are engineers. They are also the hardest to come by, so you tend to get a culture that’s oriented towards them both as a recruiting and retention strategy."
To Anna, Silicon Valley is male-dominated:
“Being the only woman on a nontechnical team, providing customer support to software developers, was like immersion therapy for internalized misogyny. I liked men—I had a brother. I had a boyfriend. But men were everywhere: the customers, my teammates, my boss, his boss. I was always fixing things for them, tiptoeing around their vanities, cheering them up. Affirming, dodging, confiding, collaborating. Advocating for their career advancement; ordering them pizza. My job had placed me, a self-identified feminist, in a position of ceaseless, professionalized deference to the male ego.”
Silicon Valley is influential, but hasn’t yet learned to wield its power intentionally and responsibly:
"Arrogant software developers, giddy investors, and exorbitantly paid employees—all have been chasing dreams of growth, profits, and personal wealth, without pausing to second-guess the feeling of being ‘on the glimmering edge of a brand-new world.’”
One WIRED reviewer criticized Anna’s memoir for failing to resolve “the self-contradictions of her industry, city, or existence” (yeesh!) but such criticism strikes me as unfair. Silicon Valley is a complicated place, so telling a complicated story is, to me, a mark of Anna’s honesty.
Silicon Valley gives young people an abnormal amount of responsibility and sometimes they wield that power poorly. Most startups fail and some of them change the world. To hear that some people see see systemic problems and others see unlimited opportunity in Silicon Valley — or even that one person can see both — isn’t surprising.
My takeaway is that Anna captured her slice of the Silicon Valley story honestly and beautifully. I’d strongly recommend that folks check out her book — or at least read the free article she wrote for the New Yorker. It’s a great, sober look at what it’s really like working for startups that are usually lionized, demonized, or both.
