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I provided the Founder with a truncated version of the integration tasks I’d been assigned at the Corporation, but didn’t say more in front of the researcher. “I’m Ethan,” I said, and shook the researcher’s hand. He introduced himself as Ben and said he should get back to checking in on the ants. W…

The Founder, on the other hand, granted himself accelerated vesting. His shares in DateDate were awarded the day the company was acquired. He believed in the primacy of the inventor. No one else was entitled to anything. Not even me, a friend. Noma informed me that accelerated vesting was common. U…

Noma was right. At the Corporation, I would lose myself in a sea of other people like me. Liberal arts grads searching for meaning through work. Some, exposed to the evils of the dark web, convinced themselves it was their responsibility to keep the internet clean: not just from dick pics, but from…

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…