Dark side of the boom

One winter night in 2010, four New York University students went to a lecture about the growing threats to personal privacy in the Facebook-Google era. They emerged from the auditorium determined to save the world. Their weapon would be Diaspora, a new kind of open-source social network that would protect private information by replacing a single corporate behemoth with a so-called federation of pods. Users could join whatever pod they wanted, and if they didn’t like how they were being treated at that one, they could pick up their personal data and move somewhere else. Deep human connection without the Big Brother overtones—that was the utopian promise.
     The students figured they’d need a few months and $10,000 to build a prototype. But Facebook had just made a huge misstep—a series of features that seemed to imperil users’ privacy to a stunning degree. As outrage ricocheted around the web, Diaspora went from being an intriguing but untested concept to the media-proclaimed “Facebook killer,” and the money started rolling in. The NYU students ended up with 20 times more than they had sought in their fundraising appeal on Kickstarter—even Mark Zuckerberg made a contribution. “I think it is a cool idea,” he told Wired. “I see a little of myself in [those guys].”
     In the Hollywood version of the story, the four friends would’ve holed up in their dorm rooms banging out code until they’d created a site that lived up to the hype. They would’ve become famous and, despite their professed indifference to money, fabulously rich—worthy, perhaps, of an Aaron Sorkin sequel. In the unforgiving environment of the newly booming Silicon Valley, though, the reality was far more grueling, disheartening—and, ultimately, tragic. Last November, some 18 months after moving to San Francisco with his three cofounders, 22-year-old math whiz Ilya Zhitomirskiy was found dead in his Mission home, an apparent suicide.
     Of the Diaspora founders, the sweet-faced Zhitomirskiy had seemed to be the most optimistic and idealistic. A unicyclist and ballroom dancer whose family had emigrated from Russia when he was a child, he was fascinated by artificial intelligence and by technology as a powerful agent for good. Cheerful and outgoing, he threw epic parties and had an uncanny ability to connect with complete strangers, whom he would often keep up late into the night, talking about his dreams of making the world a better, freer, place. “There’s something deeper than making money off stuff,” he told an interviewer back in 2010. “Being a part of creating stuff for the universe is awesome.”
     But for Diaspora, as for most startups, the challenges proved daunting. There were long hours at the keyboard, frustrating meetings with potential investors, and sniping from bloggers about the gushy treatment from New York magazine and the New York Times. IEEE Spectrum, a respected technology magazine, got a look at an early version of Diaspora’s software and deemed it “vacant” and “amateur.” That same month, Google unveiled its own curiously Diaspora-like social network. Soon the Kickstarter money ran out amid questions about how it had been spent, and, without explanation, PayPal briefly froze the account the partners were using to raise more funds. Then in October, on the eve of the planned beta launch, one of the startup’s key players abruptly quit.
     All of which would have been hard on entrepreneurs twice the age of the Diaspora founders, never mind kids barely out of their teens with little experience to steel them against the startup life’s inevitable pressures and setbacks. “They had failed. Publicly,” wrote a comment-er on Hacker News, the forum of the tech incubator Y Combinator. “This can be very devastating psychologi-cally to someone who has always succeeded in life.”
     Indeed, a lot of the chatter following Zhitomirskiy’s death focused on the depression that frequently accompanies startup stress, and some speculated that this may have been a factor in his suicide. “I met this kid [Zhitomirskiy] at a half way to halloween party at NYC Resistor,” a Valleywag commenter wrote. “He was sharp and passionate but had a glassy eye look I know my self from my own hypo mania / depression [sic].”
     Suddenly, Diaspora had become a new sort of symbol for the tech community—not just the anti-Facebook but a reminder of the emotional impact of the New Boom on the very young, and potentially very vulnerable, entrepreneurs at the center of it.