{"id":41783,"date":"2026-05-17T17:48:16","date_gmt":"2026-05-17T17:48:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/41783\/"},"modified":"2026-05-17T17:48:16","modified_gmt":"2026-05-17T17:48:16","slug":"no-ones-happy-in-silicon-valley-menlo-ventures-partner-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/41783\/","title":{"rendered":"No One’s Happy in Silicon Valley, Menlo Ventures Partner Says"},"content":{"rendered":"

In San Francisco, the AI boom<\/a> is creating fame, fortune \u2014 and existential dread.<\/p>\n

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As rapid technological development widens the gap between the haves and the have-nots, a sort of machine-age ennui has set across San Francisco, says Deedy Das, a partner at venture capital firm Menlo Ventures.<\/p>\n

Das said in a post on X, which had almost a thousand responses by Sunday afternoon, that over the past five years, the fortunes of a small group of employees at leading AI companies<\/a>, like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nvidia, as well as some smaller startups, have “skyrocketed.”<\/p>\n

Money, however, it seems, really doesn’t always buy happiness.<\/p>\n

Those who’ve made it feel a “profound” lack of purpose, Das wrote, as some of them watch their wealth multiply from less than $150,000 to over $50 million in a matter of years.<\/p>\n

“It flips your life plans upside down.”<\/p>\n

Many, he said, are hitting that threshold young, long before they expected to be financially set. He recalled asking one founder why they didn’t simply sell their company. The founder’s response: If they sold, they would have money \u2014 but lose the attention and relevance that came with always building.<\/p>\n

The under-$500,000 bourgeoisie, meanwhile, feel like they’re on a path with no end, Das wrote. As layoffs ripple through the industry<\/a> \u2014 most recently at Cloudflare and Coinbase, which both cited AI as a reason for the cuts \u2014 once lucrative roles are fading away. “Many software engineers feel like their life’s skill is no longer useful,” he said.<\/p>\n

Middle managers, too, are unhappy, Das wrote, as another wave of the “Great Flattening”<\/a> rears its head. “They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.”<\/p>\n

Instead, people are racked by a new kind of existential dread, Das said. “Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?” he wrote.<\/p>\n

This other half has a name, too: Several users in the replies called it a “permanent underclass.”<\/p>\n

One possible solution: Move to New York. New York City-based tech blogger Packy McCormick, responding to Das on X on Saturday, said that amid 70-degree, sunny weather in New York City, he was heading to a kite festival.<\/p>\n

“I haven’t heard the words ‘agent’ or ‘token’ once all morning,” McCormick wrote. “Greatest city in the world.”<\/p>\n

In the end, everything is relative. Das said that it can be easy to scoff at the “champagne problems of the valley.”<\/p>\n

One user in the replies summed it up: “May you get everything you want quickly and with little effort,” they wrote. “An old curse.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In San Francisco, the AI boom is creating fame, fortune \u2014 and existential dread. Loading audio narration… As…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":41784,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,20995,3224,25,25212,15863,25432,25433,25436,25435,3423,25434,969,25437,1161,25438,573],"class_list":["post-41783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-ai-boom","tag-ai-company","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-deedy-das","tag-end","tag-existential-dread","tag-fortune","tag-life-plan","tag-menlo-ventures-partner","tag-new-york","tag-response","tag-san-francisco","tag-several-user","tag-silicon-valley","tag-small-group","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41783\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}