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Noma lived in the Haight, home of the Grateful Dead, of Janis Joplin and the Summer of Love and Joan Didion. As I climbed Haight Street on my bike, a man with a long gray ponytail and tie-dyed sweatshirt crossed the street without looking. I veered around him. A hookah bar was blasting Jefferson Ai…

At the overpriced Mexican restaurant run by a white guy who’d spent three months in Oaxaca, we took complimentary shots of mezcal while waiting for tamales. It’d been a particularly rough morning in the content review queue, and I was feeling grateful for Noma. Since she’d come to work with us, she…

That one of the ocean,” she said, referring to the photo I’d taken in Bolinas, “is that the default desktop photo from the last OS?”

“No, I took that.” I pointed to the speck of a person visible at the photo’s edge. “That’s my friend.”

“It looks exactly like that one default photo. You know w…

I’d visited the Founder’s old apartment, in the Castro. But his first startup’s acquisition allowed him to upgrade. He moved to a multimillion-dollar penthouse in the Millennium Tower, a luxury condo building of blue-gray glass that has begun to sink into the young bay mud. An engineering problem, …

After a few minutes of browsing, the tell-us-about-yourself questions took over the screen; answering a certain number allowed you to browse again. DateDate defied all rules about how to make an engaging app—“so much friction,” one early reviewer in TechCrunch stated—and yet our userbase continued …