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Diaspora was supposed to be the “Facebook killer.” Then

22-year-old cofounder Ilya Zhitomirskiy committed suicide.

E.B. Boyd reports on how his death has touched a nerve in

Silicon Valley – and forced one of its biggest secrets out

in the open.

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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 un-

forgiving environment of the newly booming Silicon

Valley, though, the reality was far more grueling, dis-

heartening—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.

Silicon Valley likes to say that it celebrates

failure—that a willingness in the culture to take huge

risks and learn from mistakes is why great innovations

happen there. You can crash and burn in the Valley, the

lore goes, and still have venture capitalists lining up

to fund your next company; there are plenty of people

who even insist that you haven’t really earned your

entrepreneur stripes until you’ve failed at least once.

But failure is one thing when you have a track

record of success and a wide network of contacts; it’s

quite another when you’re 22, just out of college, far

from your family and friends, and completely green.

Or maybe, egged on by self-proclaimed disrupters like

investor Peter Thiel, you’re one of those high school

geeks who didn’t even bother with college. Maybe you

have a condition—Asperger’s syndrome, say, or bipolar

disorder—that makes you well suited to the intellectual

and creative challenges of the tech life but also makes

it much harder for you to cope when adversity strikes.

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If anything, the myth of the young geek

genius sets people up for failure, says Rich Aberman,

cofounder of the online-payments company WePay. Today,

WePay—which offers individuals and small organizations

simple, user-friendly ways to collect money and sell

goods—looks like a Silicon Valley success story, with

nearly $10 million in funding from the likes of PayPal’s

Max Levchin. But the first year, when Aberman was 23

and the startup was struggling, was harrowing.

The idea for WePay began when Aberman was

trying to arrange a bachelor party in 2008—14 guys

spread across the country, $4,200 in expenses, and no

efficient way for the group to collect and distribute

the money. Seeing an exciting opportunity, he and a

college pal, Bill Clerico, put their respective plans

for law school and Wall Street on hold. Aberman was

inspired by a 2006 BusinessWeek cover story about Digg

founder Kevin Rose (“How This Kid Made $60 Million in

18 Months”). “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, all he did was

come up with a great idea, and he built it, and he made a

ton of money,’” Aberman says. “‘That’s not that hard.’”

Only afterward did it occur to Aberman that he

didn’t know how to code: “You spend three weeks learning

how to program, and you realize it’s going to take you

another 10 years to get good enough to build something

saleable.” He and Clerico had no idea how to catch the

interest of VCs or the media, either, but they had

already gone all in—failure was not an option. “It’s

impossible for you to draw a bridge from where you are

now to where you’ve made promises about where you’re

going to go,” Aberman says. “That feeling leads you to

paralysis.” Suicide, he says, can seem like “an escape.”

The tendency of entrepreneurs to overidentify

with their company compounds the pain of failure, says Cass

Phillipps, a veteran of a doomed startup who now organizes

the FailCon conferences, which analyze how companies go

wrong. Halfway through her own startup’s first year, it

was clear the idea—a plan to aggregate conversations in

online forums—wasn’t working, but one of the partners

resisted the decision to shut down. “He felt like his

personal worth was being judged by our startup’s value.”

The tech-blog culture, with its breathless

coverage of fundings and launches and its tendency to

ignore promising ideas that bomb (except to viciously

tear them apart), can amplify the pressures and feed

the insecurities. Then there’s the terror of having to

concede defeat to the people whose money you’ve been

burning through. While some entrepreneurs say that the

Valley’s top VCs can be a founder’s best source of support,

taking funds from angels or investors who can’t afford

a loss, or who aren’t willing or able to help a startup

through the inevitable rough patches, can be a huge

liability. “The ones who give you money and walk away

aren’t in the trenches with you,” says Ben Huh, founder

of the humor site I Can Haz Cheezburger. “When things

start going south, it can feel like they’re putting more

pressure on you rather than helping you find a way out.”

Yet the industry that makes a fetish of dis-

secting every angle of startup success has been remark-

ably close-mouthed about the emotional vulnerability of

its workforce and the psychic toll of the entrepreneurial

process. The result, noted a Valleywag commenter, is that

people who are hurting believe “it’s just me who is weird

and sick.” “Oftentimes, my clients do not tell anyone

in their lives that they’re seeking psychotherapy,” says

Dr. Sarah Villarreal, a psychologist who counts founders

among her Silicon Valley clientele. “That exacerbates

the feeling that they’re alone in their struggles.”

After Zhitomirskiy’s death, Ben Huh decided to

break the silence, blogging about contemplating suicide

back in 2001, when his former company was floundering.

“Loneliness, darkness, hopelessness…those words don’t

capture the feeling of the profound self-doubt that sets

in after a failure,” he wrote. Such despair can be so

debilitating that it “makes you question if you should

even exist anymore. I spent a week in my room with the

lights off…thinking of the best way to exit this failure.

Death was a good option—and it got better by the day.”

The post went up shortly before Huh was

scheduled to speak at two conferences. “Almost everyone

I met had read it,” he says—but they were only willing

to admit that in private. “Maybe three of us would

be having a normal conversation and one person would

leave, and the other one would say, ‘By the way, I read

your post. And I know what you’re talking about.’”

Entrepreneurs are left with the feeling that,

for all the abstract idealization of failure, the real

thing makes Silicon Valley deeply uncomfortable. “I

have to act as if I’m going to take over the world,

even if inside I’m struggling,” says an entrepreneur

in his late 30s who founded a startup two years ago

and this winter considered shutting it down.

From left to right, Diaspora co-founders, Ilya Zhitomirsky,

Daniel Grippi, Rafael Sofaer, Maxwell Salzberg

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the beginning of our class, you’d ask people how their

start up was going, and they’d be like, ‘Excellent, great,

super,’” he says. “But a few weeks in, you’d ask the same

question, and they’d say, ‘We’re so screwed.’ It made us

realize we weren’t doing any worse than anyone else.”

Yet sometimes even having that kind of support

isn’t enough. Among Zhitomirskiy’s friends and colleagues,

there are different theories about what led him to take

his own life. One possible trigger, of course, may have

been his despair over the project’s problems and the

way its idealistic goals were being subverted by the

likes of Google. “He thought Google+ was a knockoff,”

says a fellow entrepreneur—one that had replicated

some of Diaspora’s features (or so it appeared), but

hadn’t embraced the underlying idea of giving people

control over their data. “He was feeling upset about

that in October and November,” the friend says.

Others note that Zhitomirskiy suffered from

serious psychological issues that might have proved

crippling no matter what happened at Diaspora. “Ilya had

a bipolar disorder,” says Janice Fraser, the former head

of Adaptive Path, cofounder-CEO of the LUXr incubator

and an adviser to the Diaspora crew since they joined

LUXr’s inaugural class in the summer of 2010. But

sometime before his death, she says, Zhitomirskiy had

decided to stop taking his medication. That’s common,

adds Fraser, who suffers from depression herself and

who’s seen several other members of her family grapple

with mental illness, including a brother who committed

suicide. She says Zhitomirskiy seems to have planned his

suicide, perhaps scouring the Internet for guidance. While

Diaspora’s stresses may have aggravated his condition,

Fraser believes his decision was based more on realizing

what it would mean to have to live with his illness—

how it would affect his capacity to think and enjoy

life. That wasn’t something he wanted, she believes.

It’s even possible to see significance in the

date of his death. Zhitomirskiy was found early on the

“We are very accepting in Silicon Valley of career

failures and decisions that were made incorrectly if the

founder can be, like, ‘I figured everything out. I’ve got

it under control.’ We as a culture love that,” Phillipps

says. “But we don’t know what to do with a founder who’s

depressed or who says, ‘I’m really confused.’ Our response

to that is, ‘Figure your shit out.’ Even before the diaspora

tragedy, momentum was building for a healthier, more open

and compassionate approach. Last April, Ben Horowitz, a

former entrepreneur and a cofounder of the vaunted VC

firm Andreessen Horowitz, wrote a widely read post on the

emotional challenges of being a tech leader, admitting,

“By far the most difficult skill for me to learn as CEO

was to manage my own psychology.” Phillipps’s FailCon

idea dates back to when she and her cofounders couldn’t

figure out what they were doing wrong, and the events

they attended—mostly whiz kids talking about their

successes—offered no insight. Though much of FailCon’s

focus is on impersonal issues like hiring and growth, “by

signing up for a conference that says you have [failed],

or you are going to fail, you walk in with a slightly

more exposed mindset,” Phillipps says. “It’s beginning to

change the tone of the conversation between founders.”

One of the most valuable things about the pro-

liferation of startup incubators around the Valley is

the way they allow, or force, these kinds of conver-

sations to happen—and youthful poses to be dropped.

WePay’s Aberman says an emotional turning point was

getting accepted into Y Combinator, whose cofounder

Paul Graham talks about “the trough of sorrow” as an

almost inevitable phase of a startup’s growth. While Y

Combinator doesn’t have an explicitly emotional component

to its curriculum, the incubator approach—a number of

startups per “class,” with 150 or so other young geeks

to lean on and commiserate with as they try to get

their companies off the ground—inherently addresses

the psychological strains of entrepreneurship, Graham

and his partners believe, and Aberman concurs. “At

from their 20s to their 50s, shuffled into a conference

room at No Starch Press in SoMa. They were responding to

an invitation from Mitch Altman, cofounder of Noisebridge,

the Mission hacker space that provides geeks (including

the Diaspora guys) the infrastructure and support to

explore their passions and bring their ideas to fruition.

Altman, who battled serious depression for the first

half of his life, had been deeply upset by Zhitomirskiy’s

death. He decided to convene the meetup after getting

more than 100 responses to a blog post he’d written about

his own struggles. “So many people expressed how thankful

they were that someone was openly talking about this,”

he says. “We need to create an environment where people

feel it’s totally OK and natural to talk about feeling

depressed, even suicidal. Then people may not feel they

need to hide, and maybe they can reach out for help.”

Four months later, the “Geeks & Depression”

meetup has turned into a regular gathering, and similar

events are starting to bubble up around the world.

At a recent conference in Berlin, organizers asked

Altman to throw together a panel on the topic, and

he’s planning another for the annual HOPE (Hackers on

Planet Earth) conference in New York this summer.

What’s striking to Silicon Valley veterans is

the new willingness among geeks to bare their souls

in public. For all their vulnerability, Fraser sees an

emotional upside in the fact that today’s entrepreneurs

are so young. “The kids who are coming up today are more

courageous,” she says. “This is a generation of people

who are used to letting it all hang out on Facebook.

So if I say, ‘Talk to me about mental illness in your

life,’ probably somebody would tell me their story.

And that’s really different than 10 years ago.”

morning of November 12. The night before had been November

11. Of the year 2011. Ever the math nerd, the theory goes,

Zhitomirskiy might have found some poetic delight in

departing this earth when the clock hit 11:11 11/11/11.

The truth, of course, died with Zhitomirskiy, and

his cofounders, who might come closest to knowing what

happened, did not respond to requests for interviews. It’s

worth noting that Diaspora is not the failure many assume;

donors happily contributed $45,000 on PayPal after the

Kickstarter money ran out, the beta launch is still in the

works, and top-flight VCs have been sniffing around. With

Facebook’s continuing success and huge IPO (“Zuckerberg…

has created a wholly owned Internet,” one writer put it),

the hunger for an alternative will only grow.

What matters now, says Fraser, is that his death

“busted open a door on this conversation.” It’s time for

the tech community to start recognizing the hallmarks

of mental illness and extreme distress, she says. And

it’s time for Silicon Valley to jettison one of its most

cherished ideas, one she calls the Mark Zuckerberg problem:

“The myth of the single perfect hero who gets it right is

bullshit.” Fraser says all founders need to have someone

they can be completely candid with. She has played that

role for some entrepreneurs, including one very successful

founder she’s advising, whose startup has done quite

well by Valley standards. “I came in one day, and they

got teary,” Fraser says. “They said, ‘I don’t know how

I’m going to cope.’ So we just laid it all out. We did an

hour’s worth of work organizing the stuff on their plate.”

FailCon’s Phillipps goes even further. “To

raise VC money, you need an advisory board,” she says.

“It would be so cool if every startup was also required

to have an emotional adviser, someone who could give

psychological support when the founders are in trouble.”

And what about all the other geeks—the ones

who aren’t running startups but who are caught up in the

frenzy and ferocity of the tech economy just the same? One

night last December, 25 such men and women, ranging in age

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photography: Gabriela Hasbun, story: E.B.

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Images originally shot for IEEE Spectrum,

story published in San Francisco Magazine

on February 17, 2012

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