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It would take me a while to realize how rarefied the CEO’s world was. He was surrounded by people who were crushing it, and people who had chosen him. Kingmakers. People who did not like to admit defeat. The CEO’s community was the business community, and it would take care of him. He wasn’t in per…

Like me, the men on the Solutions team wanted nothing more than to stand in the CEO’s light. Even if we rarely saw it, he had a great smile; it was thrilling to make him laugh, to crack the veneer. We’d seen him happy. We knew he had good friends, many of whom had been founders in his cohort at the…

Sometimes it felt like everyone was speaking a different language—or the same language with radically different rules. There was no common lexicon. Instead, people used a sort of nonlanguage, which was neither beautiful nor especially efficient: a mash-up of business-speak with athletic and wartime…

We sat in a row, backs to the window, laptops open. I looked around the room and felt a wave of affection for these men, this small group of misfits who were the only people who understood the backbone to my new life. On the other side of the table, the solutions manager paced back and forth, but h…

It didn’t take long to see that in Silicon Valley, non-engineers were pressed to prove their value. Hiring the first nontechnical employee was always the end of an era. We bloated payroll; we diluted lunchtime conversation; we created process and bureaucracy; we put in requests for yoga classes and…