Escape from Hustle Hell: Rebuilding After the Cocaine Startup Cult
By a Recovering Tech Bro Turned Sanctuary Builder
Welcome to the Cult of Hustle
I used to worship at the altar of the toxic startup. You know the place: open floor plan, a smog of stale cold brew and ambition, everyone hustling 24/7 with eyes glazed like donuts. At 6 AM on a Tuesday, I’d find half the team still wired from last night’s coding binge (with a little “white powder motivation” still dusting a few nostrils). We were true believers in The Cult of Hustle. Sleep? For losers. Weekends? For the weak. Vacation days? Don’t make us f**king laugh. We had a mission to change the world, or at least to disrupt something enough to justify our insane valuation.
I remember stumbling into our ultra-hip office (an old warehouse “repurposed” with irony and IKEA furniture) at dawn. The walls were plastered with inspirational vinyl decals: “Move Fast and Break Things,” “Fail Forward,” and my personal favorite, “99% Perspiration + 1% Inspiration = Unicorn”. In the corner, the much-abused espresso machine hissed and groaned like it was begging for mercy. (It probably was—our team treated caffeine like holy communion and the espresso machine like a sacrificial altar. I swear I heard it whisper “please kill me” in steamy agony one all-nighter at 3 AM).
We started each day with a mandatory all-hands meeting (because nothing says “we value your time” like an hour of hand-wavy hype before you can actually do your job). In these meetings, our fearless leader—let’s call him Chad (because of course his name was Chad)—would stride on stage like a messiah in a hoodie. He’d click through a PowerPoint of vanity metrics and glossy pics of our foosball table, preaching about how we were “a family” on a revolutionary quest.
Never mind that half the “family” looked like zombies feasting on Adderall. Chad expected absolute devotion. He’d say with a straight face, “If you’re not giving 110%, you’re giving nothing.” (I once muttered that giving 110% is biologically impossible—my reward was an icy glare and an informal invite to the next “improvement plan” meeting). At these cult gatherings, we were even reminded to report anyone who wasn’t “crushing it” hard enough so they could be, quote, “dealt with” . Yes, snitches got riches in this culture. A colleague disappearing overnight was as routine as the beer keg running dry. One day you’d see an engineer at their desk; next day their Slack went dark and their chair was mysteriously empty. No explanations, just a scrubbed existence—like a failed Soviet general in an old photo, gone. We joked nervously about the “startup Witness Protection Program,” but it wasn’t funny. People were constantly vanished without a trace or a goodbye, while those of us remaining were left smiling nervously under Chad’s watchful eye, wondering if we’d be next . Family vibes, right?
And oh, the titles we gave ourselves in that cult! I called myself the “Chief Hustle Officer” in a fit of self-aware sarcasm (that everyone took seriously). My co-founder styled himself “Vision Architect”, a title as puffed-up as his ego. We had Evangelists of all sorts: a “Customer Joy Evangelist” (who secretly wept in the bathroom between support calls) and a “Coding Ninja Rock Star” (yes, that was on his LinkedIn, kill me now). We truly thought we were so damn clever, subverting Corporate America with quirky titles and a keg in the kitchen. In reality, we’d just reinvented a shittier version of Corporate America—one with less sleep and more cocaine.
Fake Innovation, Real Bull**t
Our product? Glorified nonsense wrapped in buzzwords. We pitched it as “AI-powered synergy platform for disruptive life-as-a-service solutions.” (If that made no sense to you, congratulations: you’re sane. To us in the cult, it sounded like the second coming of Christ…TechChrist™ perhaps.) In truth, what we had was an over-engineered app that basically did nothing new. It was a fake innovation at its finest. But in the world of startup delusion, sizzle matters more than steak. So we served our nothing-burger on a gluten-free, blockchain-infused bun and called it the future.
The fake-it-til-you-make-it game got out of hand quickly. We’d spout grandiose visions about how our app would “revolutionize the way millennials interact with urban ecosystems” — which, I kid you not, means finding food trucks faster. Earth-shattering, I know. But hey, investors ate it up with a silver spoon (likely silver-plated; even their cutlery is BS). We slapped together fancy UX mockups with trendy pastel gradients and called it a prototype. “Design thinking” became our mantra, but only the aesthetic parts. We talked a big game about user-centered design, empathy maps, and inclusive design values. Meanwhile, our actual design process was about as empathetic as a Las Vegas slot machine. Did we solve real user problems? Hell no. We were too busy tweaking the logo shade of blue for the 10th time (because Chad had read somewhere that blue triggers trust).
Let’s talk about innovation theater. We staged hackathons that felt more like fraternity hazing rituals. Picture this: rooms full of sleep-deprived hipsters in ironic t-shirts, subsisting on pizza and optimism, churning out half-baked features nobody asked for. Then parading them in demo day as if we’d cured cancer. We gave out awards like “Most Disruptive Use of an API” to make everyone feel special. It was all a show. We weren’t building a product; we were crafting a myth. A myth that we were geniuses crafting the Next Big Thing™. In reality, we were just throwing digital spaghetti at the wall to see what would stick… and most of it slid sadly to the floor.
Design values? We preached them hard. Our website had a manifesto page with fluffy proclamations like “We believe in design for good. We put people first, always.” But internally, “people first” meant the founders first, investors second, customers maybe fifth, and employees somewhere near last. We bragged about accessibility and inclusion in public, but our team was a clone army of privileged 20-something dudes named Matt, Mike, or Mark. (We did have one woman in engineering for about five minutes, until the bro culture sent her running for the hills. Can’t blame her—I once overheard a product manager refer to a new hire as “fresh meat” and I wanted to crawl under a rock).
Perhaps the pinnacle of our fake innovation was when an investigative journalist dropped a bomb: a piece exposing that our “revolutionary” tech was built on zero actual science. It was all jargon and mirrors . We had claimed to use “machine learning” to do something biologically impossible—I won’t detail it, but imagine claiming to use AI to, say, detect emotions through WiFi (I wish I were kidding). The article basically said our emperor had no clothes, not even a fig leaf. Investors started sweating. Chad went ballistic—well, more ballistic than usual, which is saying something for a guy whose blood was 50% Red Bull.
Our response? Did we pause to, I don’t know, actually fix the product? Nah. Instead, we hastily hired a team of actual scientists to give our BS some veneer of legitimacy . Picture a bunch of bewildered PhDs in lab coats wandering our office, like penguins dropped into the Sahara. These poor scientists would sit in meetings trying to introduce facts (gasp!) and data (the horror!) while our OG tech bros rolled their eyes. We literally paid them to retroactively find a scientific basis for the claims we’d already made. It was like commissioning a study to prove unicorns are real after you’ve sold unicorn rides. Spoiler: it doesn’t make the unicorn any less imaginary.
One of our scientists—bless his heart—quietly told me the whole premise was flawed at best, fraudulent at worst. I was still deep in the Kool-Aid back then, so I told him, “We’re innovating here. Think outside the box!” Outside the box, indeed. We were so far outside the box we were in outer space, untethered from reality, drifting by the light of our own hype.
The VC Funding Circus (Step Right Up!)
If you’ve never experienced the venture capital fundraising circus, let me set the stage: It’s basically like auditioning for the world’s most high-stakes improv comedy, except everyone’s coked out of their minds and pretending it’s a TED Talk. We’d trot into Sand Hill Road boardrooms with our pitch deck of dreams and lies. The VCs sat there, Patagonia vests zipped up tight, eyes gleaming at the prospect of finding the next unicorn (or at least not missing out on one and suffering FOMO at the country club).
Our deck was a masterpiece of malarkey. Slide 1: Vision (some Mark Twain quote about dreaming big). Slide 2: Market (a trillion-dollar TAM we guesstimated by basically counting everyone with a smartphone). Slide 3: Problem (a trivial inconvenience blown up to existential crisis proportions). Slide 4: Solution (us! glorious us! leveraging AI, blockchain, quantum computing, and maybe some fairy dust). Slide 5: Hockey stick graph (projections that made Alice in Wonderland look like hard science).
We seasoned it with buzzwords like a chef with no taste buds. “Platform, ecosystem, scalability, sticky engagement, monetization, flywheel, network effects.” I once literally said, “We’re Uber meets TikTok for the metaverse generation, with a sprinkle of AI-driven blockchain.” (If you threw that sentence at a wall, the wall would puke).
But guess what? The investors nodded like, “hmm, intriguing.” One even murmured, “Huge if true.” Not a joke. That became an inside meme for us later—“huge if true” was code for we’re full of it, but they might buy it. And often, they did buy it! In the funding madness of startup-land, nothing is too absurd. I’ve seen a startup get millions for a smart water bottle. I know of one that literally made a Wi-Fi enabled juicer (you’ve heard of Juicero? Google it for a laugh) and raised over $100M, only for customers to discover you could squeeze the juice packs by hand and get the same result. I’m not making that up – reality outpaced our satire on a daily basis. We once joked about creating an app that just says “Yo” to your friends…then a startup actually did that and got funded too. You can’t write this stuff.
Board meetings with our VCs were their own special kind of theater. Picture a room of rich dudes (and the occasional woman, usually in HR or marketing roles because the patriarchy is alive and kicking) giving us advice like they’re Yoda, but really they’re more like that clueless boss from Office Space. They asked us tough questions, of course: “What’s your customer acquisition strategy? How will you scale? What’s your burn rate?” We would tap dance around the answers: CAC, LTV, ROI – alphabet soup to hide that we had no friggin’ clue.
One time, in a moment of rare honesty, I admitted, “We’re still figuring that out.” The lead investor responded with an indulgent chuckle, “Of course, just make sure you become a category leader.” A category leader… in a category we literally invented! Sure, why not. Then they’d pat themselves on the back for being visionaries and we’d all go drink $18 artisanal cocktails to celebrate the potential of maybe doing something someday. Funding secured, reality be damned.
The craziest part of the funding circus? The higher the valuation climbed, the more delusional everyone became. We started to have “unicorn” dreams – that billion-dollar status symbol – and it was like a collective fever. Chad strutted around more aggressively, quoting Steve Jobs lines (badly) and comparing us to Apple 1984. I swear he actually said, “This is our Steve Jobs garage moment, guys.” (We were in a $15k/month leased coworking space with kombucha on tap, but sure, garage moment, Steve.) The self-congratulation in those days reached peak cringe. We had a company Slack channel called #hustle-hard where folks would brag humblebrag about working 80-hour weeks or landing some meaningless partnership as if they’d brokered world peace. Every trivial “win” got a confetti emoji parade. Our egos were writing checks that reality could not cash.
Bro-Topia: Sex, Drugs, and ‘Synergy’
Let’s address the cocaine-snorting elephant in the room: bro culture. Our startup, like too many, was a full-on Bro-topia. Imagine a frat house but with laptops and a shared delusion of grandeur. Sure, we had the token “We value diversity” slide in our on-boarding (designed by an intern who later quit in disgust), but the daily reality was a sea of hoodies and testosterone. Loud, obnoxious rap music blasting at 1 AM? Check. Nerf gun wars that mysteriously always targeted the one guy who wasn’t into sports? Check. A foosball table that got more attention than our one female engineer (who, by the way, left after some genius joked that she should be “Scrum Master” because “women are good at multitasking”—yes, that happened).
And oh, the parties. Tech party culture is a special beast. We’d host product launch parties like it was Coachella. One time we turned our office into a mini-nightclub: strobe lights, a DJ who was actually our DevOps guy in disguise, and a mountain of cheap beer. As the night wore on, out came the clandestine little baggies. Lines were snorted right off the ping-pong table where hours earlier some poor intern was eating his takeout salad. It was supposed to be “letting off steam”; really it was a bunch of man-children with too much money and not enough sense. I’d see executives popping Adderall like Tic Tacs just to keep the grind going, then washing it down with top-shelf whiskey at these “networking events” where networking meant slurring startup jargon at equally drunk VC associates.
Our work-hard, play-harder ethos was literally killing people’s spirits (and maybe their brain cells). But we enshrined it as culture. If you didn’t party with the team, you “weren’t a team player.” I once skipped a Friday whiskey night to actually go home to my family, and by Monday I was getting side-eye and a cold shoulder; apparently I had committed the sin of having boundaries. The unspoken rule was: dedication = self-destruction. If you weren’t willing to burn out, you didn’t care enough.
Speaking of destructive habits, cocaine might as well have been a line item on our P&L. I joke, but it felt that way. Did I personally indulge? Yes. I’m not proud of it, but in that pressure cooker environment it felt like survival. Code until 4 AM, stumble into a “morning” meeting at 11 (mercifully our days started late), then slump by 3 PM? Someone would whisper, “Need a bump?” And there you were, faced with a stupid choice just to keep up the facade of superhuman productivity. It was presented like some genius life-hack: better living through chemistry! Our office supply cabinet had the usual pens and Post-its—nothing illicit in there, of course—but I always wondered if we should stock it with Narcan given the amount of nose candy floating around.
This toxic soup wasn’t just drugs and bravado. It was the macho bravado that if you weren’t constantly “crushing it,” “killing it,” (insert violent metaphor) you were nothing. We practically fetishized stress. People wore burnout like a badge of honor. “I haven’t slept more than 4 hours a night all week,” one engineer would brag. The product manager would retort, “Oh yeah? I missed my best friend’s wedding for a deploy on Saturday!” High fives all around. Me, foolishly thinking I was encouraging team spirit, would applaud this crap: “That’s the grindset! True hustle!” I cringe so hard now I might turn inside out.
And let me not forget the self-congratulatory founder routines. Chad (our CEO) had an ego that could blot out the sun. Every Monday he’d post a LinkedIn essay about “The 10 Things Every Founder Must Sacrifice To Win” (written, no doubt, from the cushy corner of the private club he frequented to “take meetings”). He loved that we called him a “visionary” and started believing it after our Series B funding. He’d stroll in at noon with a new gadget or after a morning “biohacking” workout (that’s code for a $30k personal trainer and a cryotherapy chamber session) and preach to whoever was in earshot about the latest business book he half-read. If you dared suggest an idea that wasn’t his, he’d nod and then completely ignore it. But if a VC hinted at the same idea, suddenly Chad would proclaim it during the next all-hands like he’d parted the Red Sea of innovation. “We’re pivoting to a community-driven NFT platform because that’s the future of engagement,” he announced one day, out of nowhere, after a weekend golfing with some crypto-bro investor. We had spent two years NOT doing anything with crypto, and boom, Monday we’re an NFT company. By Friday, thankfully, that idea died (after the crypto market tanked that week), but not before we wasted five days and a thousand collective brain cells entertaining it.
Our fake design values vs. real values contrast was never more clear than during product meetings. Outwardly, our design motto was “Don’t make something unless it’s meaningful.” In reality, it was “Don’t do anything that doesn’t make investors drool.” We added a dark pattern to our app that basically tricked users into subscribing after a free trial by hiding the cancel button. It was a shady UX move—something we all knew violated the very “user empathy” we pretended to champion. I remember our UX designer (one of the few genuinely user-conscious people) raising concerns: “This feels deceptive, it might hurt user trust.” Chad’s response: “Growth at all costs. Trust is for banks.” Which doesn’t even make sense, but in a bro-topia, sounding confident is more important than making sense.
Perhaps the cruelest joke was how the outside world viewed us versus the reality. On the surface, we were a “hot, innovative startup” with cool perks and cooler branding. We even landed on one of those glossy magazine lists of “Best Startups to Work For” – ironically while we were at our most dysfunctional . I shit you not: at the exact time our turnover hit 40%, and we were putting out internal fires (sometimes literally, after one hardware prototype exploded in a lab), Forbes or Fast Company or some rag was touting us as the dream company. They had a professional photoshoot of us pretending to brainstorm happily in our lounge (you can practically see the fear in my eyes in that photo, masked by a forced grin and a lot of concealer hiding the dark circles). Those awards exist not to inform job-seekers, but to stroke the egos of founders and investors , and boy did they stroke Chad’s ego to a dangerous size. After those articles, he was unbearable—marching around quoting our own press releases, convinced we were on the brink of IPO or world domination, whichever came first.
The Breaking Point (Burning Out and Wising Up)
My breaking point came one late night (or early morning, depending on your perspective) after yet another all-night crunch preparing for a big product demo. We were chasing a moving target of bugs and half-implemented features, trying to polish a turd into a demo-worthy pseudo-gem. The team was fried. One designer had quietly left hours ago in tears after the CTO barked at her for using the wrong shade of blue (Chad’s favorite blue again… our cult’s sacred color). An intern was literally asleep under his desk, wrapped in a company-branded hoodie like a sad startup burrito.
I was running on a volatile cocktail of caffeine, cocaine, and sheer panic. Around 4:45 AM, I found myself staring at the bathroom mirror in that gritty startup bathroom (you know, the kind where the motivational sticker on the mirror says “You got this!”—yeah, thanks, sticker, I look like Gollum after a triathlon, but sure, I got this). There I was: mid-30s, eyes red, hands trembling. My nose had a little crust of something I’d rather not detail from “keeping myself sharp” during the night. For a moment, I didn’t recognize myself. I flashed back to why I started this whole thing years ago: I loved design, I loved creativity, and I wanted to build something that genuinely helped people. Once upon a time, bright-eyed idealist me had simply wanted to create cool art and tech for kids, empower the next generation, make software that inspired creativity. That dream had long been buried under layers of VC demands and toxic habits.
In that mirror, I saw not a visionary or a world-changer. I saw a burnt-out, coked-up clown performing tricks for an audience of soulless moneymen. My reflection literally sneered at me. I half expected it to say, in George Carlin’s voice, “What the hell are you doing, you fool?”
Then and there, something in me snapped, or maybe awoke. An inner voice (maybe it was haunted intern ghost? or the anthropomorphized espresso machine’s spirit?) whispered: “Get out. Get. Out. Now.” I splashed water on my face, and the cold shock felt like the first honest thing I’d felt in years. I walked back into the war room where a few zombies were still coding and quietly said, “I’m done.”
They barely looked up. One guy, barely conscious, muttered “heh, aren’t we all” thinking I meant done for the night. “No,” I said, louder. “I’m DONE. This… this is over for me.” I looked around at the carnage: empty energy drink cans, bloodshot eyes, a whiteboard filled with frantic scribbles and bullshit metrics. Chad was passed out on a beanbag with his laptop on his chest, a half-written Tweetstorm about our “upcoming breakthrough” still open on the screen. The whole scene was grotesque.
I left. Walked right out at 5 AM, into the predawn chill, and I didn’t look back. Well, I did run back one last time to free the poor little office goldfish we kept (because of course we had an “office pet” we barely remembered to feed). I took Mr. Bubbles with me in his tiny bowl, because dammit, he deserved better too.
The next day (after sleeping till 3 PM and having the first real meal in ages that didn’t involve protein bars or takeout), I drafted my resignation email. It was short, not sweet. Something like: “I can’t be part of this anymore. It’s not you, it’s me. (But actually it’s you.)” Okay, I didn’t write the parenthetical, but I wish I had. Then I shut my laptop and proceeded to have a much-needed breakdown.
I’m talking the full existential, ugly-cry-in-the-shower, panic attack bonanza. Years of suppressed stress and cognitive dissonance came crashing down. I felt like the world’s biggest fraud and failure. How could I have let it get this bad? How did I, who once prided myself on being a decent human, become complicit in this toxic circus? The guilt, the regret—it all hit at once like a sucker punch from Mike Tyson. I was mourning the lost years, the broken idealism, and the people I’d hurt (including myself).
That phase was rough. I isolated myself for a while, half expecting a SWAT team of venture capitalists to bust down my door and drag me back to the office (“You can check out, but you can never leave…” the Hotel California of startups). There were angry calls from Chad, of course. He left voicemail after voicemail alternating between begging (“Bro, we need you, you can’t quit on the vision!”) and gaslighting (“This is really unprofessional, you’re letting the team down big time”). I didn’t answer any of them. A week later I got a terse email from HR about “exit procedures” and “returning company equipment.” They could keep their damn MacBook and that cursed company hoodie—I had already ceremonially burned the hoodie in a cathartic act of defiance (yes, I literally set it on fire in a metal trash can while blasting “Break On Through (To the Other Side)” by The Doors).
I wish I could say I immediately felt free and fabulous. Truth is, I felt like roadkill for a while. Detoxing from startup life is no joke. I had to re-learn basic human activities: sleeping regular hours, eating vegetables, talking to people about something other than KPIs or user acquisition. Friends and family who hadn’t heard from me in ages were cautiously happy to see me re-emerge (though they did eye my twitchy demeanor and newfound swearing habit with concern). I started therapy – thanks to the one wise thing my burnt-out brain did, which was remembering I had health insurance now that I wasn’t bound by “founder poverty wages” anymore. Therapy was a revelation. When I told my therapist about the cult I’d been in, she didn’t even blink. Apparently, she’d seen plenty of patients from the tech world on the verge of collapse. She had a nickname for it: Post-Traumatic Startup Disorder. I laughed for the first time in months when she said that. It felt good to laugh genuinely, without it being a performance or a cover.
Building the Sanctuary: Hippies with Headsets
In my journey to put myself back together, I ended up on a beach in Mexico at a weird little retreat for burnt-out techies. (Yes, it’s a thing. Welcome to the future, where ex-founders gather to do sun salutations and talk about their feelings). It was run by this collective of psychonauts and artists – basically the polar opposite of Chad and his cronies. These were folks who had also seen the ugly side of tech or corporate life, said “screw this,” and bailed. They were a mix of ex-engineers, designers, even a recovering VC or two (imagine the guilt they carry). The “psychonaut” part means there was some gentle psychedelic exploration involved – I won’t lie. I found myself in a safe circle one night, under the stars, having a mild psilocybin trip, guided by a kind-eyed old hippie who used to code for a major social media company. Talk about a plot twist: one minute I was a cynical startup jerk, next minute I’m doing mushroom tea with Mr. Former-Facebook and painting my feelings in a journal.
That retreat was like emotional rehab. I vented, I cried some more (shrooms will do that, man), and crucially, I listened. I listened to others tell stories just like mine—talented people chewed up and spit out by the “move fast and break things” bulldozer. There was a woman who had been at a top design firm, quit when she realized their big clients were just oil companies green-washing their image. A guy who’d worked at a flashy ed-tech startup that promised to “democratize education” but really was mining student data for ad money. Everyone had a horror story, and everyone was hell-bent on building something better from the rubble.
It was there that the seeds for our new venture were planted. Except this time, it wasn’t a “venture” in the VC sense. We explicitly said: no VC money, no hype-BS. We wanted to create what one of our group beautifully called a “creative sanctuary.” A place (or network of places) where young people—especially those who might be marginalized or bullied or just ill-served by the current school-to-cubicle pipeline—could come and create, learn, and heal. We were all creatives at heart, and we had all been, in our youth, the kind of sensitive, imaginative kids who get crushed by environments like the one I had perpetuated. What if we could save those kids a detour through hell? What if we built the kind of studio-space-meets-community-center that we wished we’d had when we were starting out?
I know, it sounds very Kumbaya. Believe me, my inner cynic was doing Colbert-style eye-rolls at first. “Oh great, a bunch of burned-out adults trying to save the children with art and hugs. How precious.” But something in my heart lit up at that idea. A real, genuine warmth I thought I’d lost. It felt… meaningful. And that shit scared me, because cynicism had been my armor for so long. Dropping it made me feel vulnerable as hell.
So what did we actually do? We banded together—a merry band of misfits: ex-coders, ex-designers, an ex-founder (me), that ex-VC who now called himself a “social impact investor” (he basically became our finance guy with a conscience). We rented a disused storefront in a not-so-fancy part of town. It had crappy lighting, a leaky roof, and endless potential. We painted it (with actual colors chosen by actual teenagers we recruited from the neighborhood, not Pantone-of-the-year nonsense). We built out a co-working space meets art studio. We got donated equipment – some computers, art supplies, a 3D printer that someone salvaged from a failed Kickstarter project (so what if it only prints in neon green, it works!).
We called our space The Sanctuary (with a capital S, unironically). Subtle? No. But it felt right. And then we opened the doors to youth – especially the kids who weren’t served by the usual programs. You know, the weirdos, the artsy kids, the ones who might have anxiety or just hate the competitive pressure cooker that school can be. We offered workshops that combined tech and art in actually cool ways: coding classes that felt like improv sessions, painting workshops accompanied by lo-fi music and zero judgment, even a weekly “mental health and makering” circle, where we’d all talk about feelings and make something with our hands, whether it was clay pottery or coding a simple game. (The first time I casually said “feelings” in a group and didn’t cringe… progress!)
Importantly, we didn’t run it like a company, we ran it like a community. Flat hierarchy, shared decision-making. (I had to unlearn being “bossy” – the first time someone called me out on defaulting into giving orders, I had flashbacks of Chad and nearly puked. “Nope, no, sorry! Not doing that,” I apologized quickly. Humility, what a concept.) We set some ground rules from day one: no bullshit. That meant if we put something on a poster or our website, it had to be real. If we say “we prioritize mental health,” we prove it by closing the studio for a mental health day and going on a group hike. If we say “everyone is welcome,” we back it up by actively reaching out to underrepresented kids, raising funds to provide free transit passes to those who can’t afford the trip, and making the space accessible and safe (we literally had a gender-neutral bathroom before it was trendy, because a couple of our teen participants came out as nonbinary and we wanted them to feel at home).
Psychonauts, Artists, and Actual Humans (A New Culture)
Culture was the thing I had screwed up so badly in my startup, so this time I approached building culture like defusing a bomb – carefully, humbly, aware of the damage it could do if handled wrong. We decided our little sanctuary would have a culture of kindness and creativity above all. That sounds corny, I know. But we meant it, and we practiced it. Every meeting (yes, we still needed meetings, the world doesn’t run on rainbows) started with a check-in: “How’s everyone feeling today? What’s on your mind?” The first time I ever opened a meeting with something other than “Here’s our agenda,” I half expected someone to throw a tomato at me. But no, the team actually opened up. We had a rule that you could say “pass” if you didn’t want to share, and that was fine. But more often than not, people did share – whether they were excited, or frazzled, or “I had a panic attack last night, so I’m a bit tender today.” Tender… people used words like tender here. In all my years in tech, nobody ever admitted to being tender. If you said something like that, the bro response would be “Do you need a tissue or something?” with an eyeroll. Here, if someone said “I’m feeling really low,” the response was “Thanks for telling us. What do you need? How can we help?” And they meant it.
We had psychonauts among us – folks who openly talked about their ayahuasca journeys or microdosing experiments not as bragging rights (looking at you, Silicon Valley trend-followers) but as genuine explorations of their minds and souls. One of our crew, Marisol, was an artist who also practiced psychedelic therapy. She led optional sessions for us (no pressure, no weirdness) where those interested could do guided meditations or, if comfortable, partake in a small dose and do expressive art. The goal was healing, not getting high to code more. Totally different vibe. I tried it once – did a tiny dose of mushrooms and painted for 3 hours. I ended up painting a figure breaking out of a cage that was on fire. Subtle, huh? But man, it was cathartic. We hung those paintings on our Sanctuary walls – raw, weird, honest art created by us, the “mentors,” as well as by the youth who came. It wasn’t slick or portfolio-ready, and we didn’t care. It was about expression, not impression.
We also had artists who brought in a sense of play. A musician who taught the kids how to code generative music. A street artist who showed up to do a mural and ended up teaching a class on making zines to speak your truth. These people were aliens to my old startup crew. In bro-land, “artsy” folks were sometimes tolerated if they designed our app interfaces or made our marketing look cool, but they were second-class citizens next to the engineers. At the Sanctuary, we were all mixed together and equal – and importantly, we insisted that tech itself can be creative and human too. Our coder volunteers weren’t there to push competitive coding or making “the next big app”; they were showing kids how to create funky websites to showcase their poetry, or how to use Python to make art. It was tech in service of creativity, not profit. Honestly, it felt like flipping the whole script of my previous life.
And then, the survivors. By that I mean all of us, really. Survivors of toxic workplaces, of burnout, of discrimination or just disillusionment. We sometimes had impromptu group therapy moments. Like once I offhand mentioned how I still get nightmares of those all-hands meetings where I’d be singled out by Chad in front of everyone. One of the teens, who had been quietly listening, asked, “Why did you all put up with that? Why not leave sooner?” It was such a pure, innocent question. I didn’t have a slick answer. “I… thought I had to,” I said. “I thought that’s how success was made. By enduring, by pushing through.” As I said it, I realized how brainwashed it sounded. Another staff member – who had been at the same retreat as me – added, “When you’re in a cult, you don’t know you’re in a cult until you’re out.”
The teen (smart kid) goes, “That’s f**ked up.” We all laughed. It was the perfect summary. F**ked up indeed. And that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing, I explained – so they (the next generation) hopefully won’t fall into the same trap. So they know, from the get-go, that work doesn’t have to be a soul-sucking frenzy. That creativity can thrive in balance, in kindness, in community.
Moments like that gave me chills. It was the opposite of the hollow pep talks I used to give at my startup. This was real talk, unfiltered, and it connected. I saw eyes light up among the youth – and among the adults. We were all healing together in that moment, I swear.
The Ghosts of Startups Past (A Visit from the Old World)
Of course, the old world doesn’t just vanish. Occasionally, ghosts of my startup past would resurface, offering me a morbid sort of closure and, often, comedy. One afternoon, as I was teaching a kid how to solder an LED into his art project, who walks into the Sanctuary unannounced but Trevor—one of my former colleagues, a top coder from the startup who stayed until the bitter end. He looked like hell warmed over. Gaunt, eyes sunken, that twitchy demeanor I knew too well.
Apparently, after I left, things at the startup went from bad to worse. (Color me unsurprised.) They had a mass exodus of talent when the product demo bombed. Investors started jumping ship. Chad, in a last-ditch frenzy, pivoted the company three more times in six months—like a headless chicken in a pivoting competition. They went from “AI platform” to “blockchain for healthcare” to something in the VR/metaverse space because Zuckerberg made an announcement and Chad had FOMO. Each pivot more desperate than the last. The funding eventually dried up, and the company imploded under scandal. (I later found out the whole thing is under investigation for, among other things, fraudulent misrepresentation. Yep, the feds finally started sniffing around all those lies we told . Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of guys.)
Trevor had barely survived the implosion. He came to find me because apparently I was the only one who seemed to have landed on my feet. He had seen a piece about the Sanctuary on social media (we weren’t completely off-grid; we posted pictures of kids’ projects and community events, with their consent, and apparently it was making the rounds in some positive-news circles). He looked around our funky, warm space with an expression I’ll never forget: pure confusion mixed with envy and grief.
He asked quietly, “Are you… happy here?” I almost cried at the earnestness of the question. I put my arm on his shoulder, “Yeah, Trev. I really am. Come have some tea, let’s talk.”
As we sat on a thrift-store couch, sipping chamomile, surrounded by paintings and plants and a couple of teens giggling while editing a video project, Trevor just unloaded. It was like hearing a war vet talk about battle trauma. He confirmed everything I suspected: after I left, Chad got more tyrannical, the cocaine culture got even wilder (someone OD’d at an after-party, thank god survived, but it was hush-hushed). Deadlines got crazier. People were fired left and right to cut costs. The product never achieved anything close to its promises. By the end, there were legal threats from customers, the press was calling out the BS, and investors were furious about their lost millions. Chad apparently went AWOL to “find himself” (rumor has it he’s now touting himself as a coach for other founders—because of course he is).
Trevor was a shell of the bright, curious coder I once hired. I gently invited him to stay a while at the Sanctuary, even get involved if he wanted. He was hesitant—“I’m not an artist or anything, I just know how to code stuff.” I told him that’s fine, we like coding stuff here too, especially if it helps the kids bring their ideas to life. It took a few visits, but we eventually got Trevor to run a little workshop called “Coding for Fun”. No pressure to build anything groundbreaking, just making goofy little games and art with code. The first session, he was shaking, his voice really soft. But the kids… man, the kids were so encouraging. They don’t care that he’s not a showman; they were excited because he knew how to make a Minecraft mod, and they all wanted to learn that. By the end of that class, Trevor was smiling. A real, genuine smile. He later told me it was the first time in years he coded something without feeling dread.
Moments like that drove home how important this all was. We weren’t just helping the next generation; we were redeeming ourselves, too. It’s like we built this ark to carry all of us flood survivors to a better shore. A bit melodramatic, sure, but hell, it felt that way.
Clarity, Hope, and Ruthless Joy
Now I want to be clear: this isn’t some fairytale where I claim I’ve achieved enlightenment and everything is perfect. Running a community space has its own challenges (turns out, funding meaningful work is hard when you’re not BS-ing to VCs; we scrape by with donations and grants, and I’ve become quite thrifty). There are days I’m exhausted, and days some teenager’s behavior has me wanting to pull my hair out (they’re teenagers, after all; occasionally they’ll graffiti a bathroom stall or hack our Wi-Fi to prank each other). We’re human, and life is messy in any environment.
But here’s the difference: This mess is honest and full of heart. Every day I walk into the Sanctuary, I feel a clarity that I never had in the glossy startup offices. There’s no grand illusion to maintain, no spinning plates of bullshit. If something’s not working, we admit it and fix it (and usually laugh about it). If someone’s having a hard time, we see them and support them. We measure success in small, human ways: the shy kid who finally shares a poem at open mic; the disillusioned ex-corporate designer who lights up teaching kids Photoshop tricks; the mural wall now overflowing with diverse self-expression where once I only saw sterile pitch decks.
I often find myself feeling a kind of ruthless joy. By that I mean a joy that takes no shit. A joy that has been through the wringer and come out swinging. It’s the joy of playing a part in something that actually matters, and doing it on our own terms. It’s not naive joy — it’s joy with battle scars, joy that knows exactly how bad things can be and thus cherishes how good we’ve managed to make it now.
Sometimes, late after closing, I’ll sit alone in the space, under the string lights we hung (warm, not the harsh fluorescents of my past life), and I’ll just… exist. No urgent push notification, no panic about user metrics. I’ll maybe sip a non-crazy cup of herbal tea (I traded the 5 espressos a day for one, maybe two, and my heart thanks me). And I’ll reflect. The old me would have scoffed: “You could have been a millionaire by now or a big-shot founder.” But that voice is distant and getting fainter every day, drowned out by the laughter of kids painting murals and the calm I feel in my chest.
I think about the tenderness that now fills my workdays. Yes, I said tenderness. In a work context. And it isn’t weakness; it’s strength. It’s like we discovered a superpower: giving a damn. In the old startup, caring was a quick way to get hurt or disappointed, so we put up walls of irony and cynicism. Here, we care ferociously—about each other, about the mission, about the youths whose lives we touch. That caring, it fuels us way better than cocaine ever did. (Pro tip: empathy has no crash and is totally legal.)
We’ve built something I dare call sacred – not in a religious sense, but in the sense that it’s authentic and life-affirming. And the real kicker? We’re not just healing ourselves, we’re giving the next generation a glimpse of a healthier path. Maybe these teens will become the new designers, coders, artists, whatever – and they’ll carry forward a bit of this sanctuary spirit. Maybe they won’t tolerate toxic BS in their future workplaces. Maybe they’ll start companies (or collectives or nonprofits or art projects) that operate with humanity from the start. That thought gives me hope. Actually, it gives me goosebumps. It’s like planting trees whose shade we might never sit in, but knowing someday someone will, and they’ll breathe easier because of it.
The world we escaped – that destructive system of fake innovation and toxic hustle – it’s still out there. But we’re building little islands of sanity away from it. And we’re not the only ones. I’ve connected with other groups doing similar work: from a cooperative game dev studio that’s all about kindness, to a wellness-centered incubator for underprivileged youth. There’s a quiet revolution of people who give a damn. It’s like discovering an underground resistance movement after thinking you were alone. Each time I hear of another effort, I feel that ruthless joy rise up again: a “hell yes!” that such people exist and are out there fighting the good fight.
In the end, this journey has been the wildest ride of my life. Funnily enough, it’s only now, outside the coke-fueled hype machine, that I truly feel like a visionary, in the sense of having a clear vision: a world where creativity and compassion trump greed and ego. Where a design studio or tech lab is a place of play and purpose, not pain. Where no one has to sell their soul or sanity to create something cool. It took burning out and breaking down to get here, but I’d do it all again if it leads to this kind of clarity.
So here I am, an unapologetically sassy, battle-worn, hopeful-as-hell ex-founder, writing this in a cozy corner of a studio full of mismatched furniture and heartfelt vibes. If you’re reading this and you see yourself in that first half – stuck in hustle hell, surrounded by fake smiles and real exhaustion – let this be your friendly ghost of Christmas Future. You can get out. There’s a life (and a whole community) after the cocaine startup cult. And it’s funny, and messy, and beautiful.
The espresso machine I rescued from the old office sits in our Sanctuary kitchen now. I swear it purrs happily these days, making reasonable decaf lattes for folks at our open mic nights. No more desperate 3 AM shots of espresso, no more burnt motor from overuse. I like to imagine it’s as relieved as I am to be here. Sometimes I’ll give it a little pat and say, “We made it out, buddy.” If that’s not poetic justice, I don’t know what is.
In this little sanctuary, we are finally human again. We’ve traded delusion for compassion, burnout for creativity, toxic Kool-Aid for truth (with a splash of kombucha). And you know what? We’re not just alive; we’re actually living.
Mic drop. (Gently though, we paid good money for these mics for the music program. But you get the point.)