I think what really shifted my thinking about my success was observing that most of the startups that are getting crazy amounts of venture capital aren't solving interesting problems. There is a lot of money going into squeezing more ad dollars out of users, and getting more attention and eyeballs. Yo is a good example. My app wasn’t much dumber than Yo. And they got millions of dollars of funding.

I also felt like people were becoming founders and investors not because they wanted to solve problems that would help humanity but because they wanted to be in the Silicon Valley scene. They wanted the cultural cachet. They wanted to go to the parties.

That was disillusioning to me, because I had really bought into the ideology that building a business was the best way to make the world a better place. That was something that was drilled into my head at my elite college. I had completely bought into it.

But over the years, as I saw what products were being funded and built, I felt disappointed. It changed how I thought about my own success. I wasn’t actually solving problems—I was just riding a wave of ridiculous overinvestment in social apps.