"After trying so hard for so long to get rich on paper," he said, "I'm going to dedicate myself to something way bigger than myself." After having felt lonely as an entrepreneur, he wanted to feel as though he was part of a movement "That's bitcoin," he said.
People from the East Coast arrived and thought, "This is a community where people's time is their own." They didn't think, "This is a community where you have to juggle five different things because only one of them is likely to work out."
"Maybe Microsoft cares if you have a degree, but the startups don't, and the companies that care about preserving startup culture don't. It's a meritocracy out here. Especially if you drop out of a really good school with a good reputation out here, like CMU. [...]"
As an engineer, Chris could take solace in the cleverness and elegance of the nifty tool they were conniving, even if it wasn't quite the broad platform they'd quit their jobs to build. When he tried, he could burrow himself into the technology and forget about the rest. But when he stopped for a m…
[...] "Maybe we should just close up shop, take a six-month break, start over fresh. But the thing is that I do deeply believe in the idea."
It seemed he did deeply believe in a version of the idea: that initial company, the consumer-facing one, the one that served a broad and stately social p…
