At the dim light of my Ikea lamp I experience an unusual moment of light-heartedness. I smile at my bruises and pains and tease myself with tag names like “Negative Nancy.” I am sure you have all thought this either by meeting me in person or by reading this blog. You’ve thought I am sad, unhappy, sick, insecure and uneager to get any better. Well, you are partly right and partly wrong.

I am all of the above, just like you and everybody else I have ever met. I just happen to acknowledge it a lot more often in an exercise of self-awareness and ultimately a weird sort of confidence. I would encourage you to try it out. Bringing out the sorest points in you forces you to address them as opposed to indeterminately shoving them under the carpet of day-by-day life.

And here’s the most interest thing I found out about myself by exploring the darker corners of the labyrinth. I found out that happiness, as most of us define and understand it, is not what I am looking for. Happiness doesn’t stimulate me nor does it make me want to wake up in the morning. Happiness feels stagnant and soothing to those who look for no progress (or some type of iterative and controlled progress). When I feel happy, I do not feel like writing, climbing, running, building, revolutionizing, discovering. I simply feel happy. At most I watch a movie.

If you disagree with the details of the above, think about the bigger picture. Think about it, really think about it: who of the greatest game-changers have been “happy people?” Now think about the changes in your life, the types of changes that have made you HAPPIER – did they come from a state of happiness or…quite the opposite?

My theory is that great ambitions come from great insecurities, bruises, scars, sore muscles and so on. My theory is that human beings stop evolving when environments become comfortable and start adapting when environments become challenging and even harsh.

I choose to explore my dark corners because not only do I believe they are a big part of my daily inner impetus for greatness but also because understanding them and learning how to control them is the key to never-ending and sustainable personal progress. I’d venture to apply a similar logic to the world at large and its evolution or lack thereof in different historical times.

So please know that my illnesses and tears and acknowledged insecurities are part of my type of self-advancement. And that there’s nothing wrong with that, quite the opposite. I would say that I do not mean to bring you down with my rants…but that’s probably a lie. Because given all the above, if you’re the type of person who is bothered by my type of writing, it’s probably exactly what you need.

But for now, I’ll save this moment of elusive happiness. It feels similar to consuming a light drug I used to be addicted to. High & dry. 

I’ve always had a fierce enemy in time. I’ve engaged in countless attempts to defy it by convincing myself of its circular aspect. Yes, that’s why I’m late all the time.

I fight with time every day because all the important things in my life – my work, my passion to live, my curiosity, my love for those close to me, my revolution – are timeless. And yet time forces me to bend them all into a 24-hour format, into a schedule, a calendar, a to-do list, weekends, visits back home every three months and so on.

I always claim that I live a life that will amount to no regrets. But that’s a lie. I have one regret and a growing one: the time I took away from those I love. Their time with me. Time has forced me to make choices that my heart cannot bear making and has created insurmountable regrets.

I’ve always expected those I love to be there for me when my choices failed me. In return, I expected them to be proud from afar and let that pride overrule any other feeling. I took their time with me away from them so that I could go on and use my time in the name of a nameless cause that I called my own.

Today I look at San Francisco from my balcony and try to compute the net sum of what I’ve lost and gained. Of what they’ve lost and gained. And in all honesty, I find no solace in my choices. I cannot condone my choices. And had I chosen the “other path,” I couldn’t have condoned my choices either. So I blame time. Time and God or whoever the creator of this entire mechanism is…as so many before me and so many after.

At the end I am left with a sore heart and a set of irrevocable consequences that I have to accept as my own doing. I say accept because I CANNOT understand them not to mention their purpose if such a thing even existed. Time makes no sense. Choice makes no sense. Pain makes no sense.

Silicon Valley is where I chose to grow and there isn’t a day, a week or a month that goes by when I am not reminded of the weight of this decision. A decision that has left me broke, with a bad health, a feeble mind, a low self-confidence and worst of all – the inability to be there for those who have given me an identity. And through it all I hold my chin up and push forward with the conviction of the revolution ahead, a revolution that will wash away everything. Let’s not talk about how naïve I might be.

This is the struggle.  

Once upon a time I was a moderately good dancer in Cluj, Romania. At the age of 16 that was my biggest “achievement” to date. Or maybe taking up smoking at a far too young age. Or having read so much existentialist philosophy that the thought of suicide often felt like a liberation from what I then used to call “the burden of life.” (Thanks Nietzsche and Nirvana)

At 17 I was unsure about how to spell “bicycle.” I had never done my own laundry. I enjoyed being in the beauty salon for far too long and I had a boyfriend whose father was the manager of a big hospital in my hometown and was friends with my father. We used to go shopping for skinny shirts before every high-end party we would attend together (parties that I usually liked to dominate). I had blond highlights and was contemplating going all blond. In fact, contemplating that decision used to take a lot of my time.

At 18, I had already been admitted into Stanford. WTF happened in between?!

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I called this blog post “The Pretenders” because over time I have learned that there is a group of people out there who achieve great things by pretending that they’ve already achieved great things. Other people call them “Visionaries” but it’s not about having an intuition for the future. It’s about projecting a future you have chosen for yourself onto the past.

At 17 I became one of them. Right after I decided to take my hair back to its natural color, I realized that I needed to start acting upon this…inner calling I had felt all of my life. This rebellious streak, this tempest of the mind. I had always been in a deep search to discover the root of my restlessness and more than that, to understand how I could channel this immense source of power into one or several revolutions.  

And because the current state of affairs in my life suddenly had nothing to do with this grand inner realization, I decided to embody whoever I was going to be tomorrow (to be understood as future date when I would be the leader of a revolution). When I wrote my Stanford application, I was already inhabiting this world of tomorrow and as such, explained my past in the light of my revolutionary streak. Another way to look at 16 and 17-year old me was to recognize the patterns of rebellion and original thinking. The patterns of one who not only thought about the greater questions but executed on them by starting responses to problems that I saw around me. And no, I was not a mediocre dancer - I was an artistic creature in search of various means to express myself, dancing and writing being two of them. And no, I was not a blond babe, I was a very popular member of a certain society. And it certainly didn’t hurt that I always got high grades in spite of my skipping class and drinking vodka behind the garages neighboring my high school.

I had convinced myself of what I would be and how everything in my past pattern-matched my destiny. But the world around me said: “Don’t apply to these universities Anda, you’re not going to get in and will just be disappointed. You’re not intelligent enough.” Oh well, how could I convince them of my inner certainty?

The day my life took a turn for my destiny was fairly uneventful until the phone rang. “Hello, this is Erinn. I am an admission officer at Stanford. May I talk to Anda?” My English sucked but when Erinn called, it went from sucking to being inexistent. I was silent. “Anda, I just wanted to tell you that I saw in you the genes of a great entrepreneur.” Thank you Erinn, you changed my life. I’ll forever be in your debt.

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The story of how I reached top 1% at Stanford, how I got my first job and how I became an entrepreneur have a similar pattern. And as you can imagine, today, as an entrepreneur I never live in the present. No matter what happens today, whether we raise millions of $$ or stop seeing any engagement on Knotch, I live in tomorrow. I live in a world where Knotching is what everyone does, all at once, whenever a new and scandalous thing happens in this crazy world. And I believe and live in this future so much that I constantly hear people in the Muni, coffee shops, airports and restaurants saying “Knotch” : “I just knotched about this terrible coffee”, “Did you see what’s trending on Knotch?”, “Check out Obama’s color bar on Knotch.” They don’t know it yet but I do because I traveled from the future! :) (I think my co-founder thinks I am schizophrenic.)

~~~~

So I have given you my secret. And not just mine, but the secret of The Pretenders. I met many like me throughout my life. My favorite, who will go unnamed here but I am hopeful she is reading this, once made this beautiful analogy. She said that she thinks of herself as a mountain climber - she throws her hook a couple of meters above her head and in her mind, she’s already there. And by the time she has reached her hook, she is another couple of meters ahead of herself…and really everyone else.

I think that sums up why The Pretenders are a successful bunch. Very few people can keep up with a climber who is always two steps ahead of him or herself. And if you are one who wakes up in the morning with this restless feeling that the future can’t come soon enough, I’d encourage you to join the club.

(And by the way, the entire reason I am writing this blog is because future Anda told me I will be a big shot soon so all of these confessions will be much more relevant looking back:))). Some people call that “looking ahead.” I call it “looking back.”)

(warning - less about tech, more about me)

So I’ve wished a couple of Happy Ts today and all in all I had one of the happiest days in a long time although completely and intentionally uncorrelated with the celebration itself.

Noteworthy activities include:

1) waking up at 8am just to end up watching TV for 3 hours (a documentary about exporting “Everbody loves Raymond” to Russia as well as Scrooge. The really bad one with Bill Murray),

2) spending 30 minutes with a rubber ball in the gym and remembering my friend Guez, who initiated me in the painful (but) art of the rubber ball,

3) 40 minute run on a treadmill that entailed a repetitive and fairly annoying glimpse of the Embassy Suites, whatever those are. Do you know those treadmills with a TV screen in front? I’m not sure who watches TV while running but it’s definitely not up my alley. David Guetta will always suffice. Distractions from the goal do nothing but tire me.

4) a long and far too hot bath and some weird, attempted yoga breathing exercises (I wonder why I call them ”yoga..exercises” - I guess I need an excuse or a context for whenever I decide to breathe funny, especially in the presence of steam).

5) a glorious self-manicure session during which I reconfirmed to myself that poverty can push one into any type of prowess.

6) wearing a white hat with a red feather.

7) buying the latest Armani red lipstick (yeah, I’m that kind of gal. the kind that does her own manicure but needs the Armani red).

8) sipping on whiskey as I am writing all of this in a bar where internet access theoretically doesn’t exist but the manager thought my hat was cute.

9) getting a Knotch article published in PandoDaily.

10) Eating at a Chinese-Mexican restaurant. ?!?!

11) doing all of the above IN VEGAS. Yes, in Vegas. I’m at the Cosmo now getting funny looks.

And as I sit here at one of the 50 bars in this hotel, I realize that I love this place. For all I hated it the first time I came, now I see it - I see its…charm and elegance and grandiose vision. But before I go on commenting about massive consumption, plasticized desire and other such abstract, fairly boring but mandatory topics when with a laptop in a bar on the Las Vegas strip, let me tell you about the reasons why I’m absolutely loving this break from the Valley of things.

Here, in the Vegas of things, people think about superficial stuff in the simplest way possible. They like to consume everything shiny in large quantities as fast as possible. That’s it - simple. Even boutique shops are huge. I appreciate that. I feel like I am finally in touch with my potential users. I show the Knotch app here to people and they get it in a few seconds. They don’t think that the different colors represent degrees of separation in the Open Graph from the other knotchers (?!?!, thank you Stanford computer scientist & mathematician). And while this is as much of a bubble as the Valley is, every person here has another few million they are representing (as opposed to the Valley. )

The more I stare at the people here, eye-drunk for the glitter and thirsty for the thrill of opaque-glass limos, the more this place looks like a huge, untapped market for consumer tech. Not sure which type of tech would fit in the noisy presentation of this place, but now that the idea has entered my head and blog, I am sure to think of something in the next 3-5 weeks (my creativity turn around time).

I’m off to watch the Eastern European poker players, the old-ladies from the slot machines and the arabs intoxicating the perimeter around them with the $600 Armani Prive.

This past week I met with a journalist. I talked about what I now call “my blog” and I refered to my unapologetic angry rants, to my defiance of stereotypes and my activism against this reality tv show. For those who have met me before - you probably know how I look when I get really passionate about arguing a point. For those who haven’t - I look like an eagle that is about to eat your head off if you don’t align with my views. I often try to temper that, especially when I meet  people with whom I agree to disagree but then I end up looking and acting really awkward because I have a “fuck you” look all over my face and I keep flexing my jaw uncontrollably. 

In any case, I pulled the angry eagle on this guy because we weren’t really seeing eye to eye on things and while the debate was fantastic, he destroyed the conversation with the stupidest question I have heard in a long while. Let me give you some context:

Here I am arguing my heart away and explaining how 90% of what goes on in the Valley is a load of BS and how this and that rule & acronym & buzz word are just results of someone’s desire to make a quick buck from incredulous and desperate entrepreneurs. I talk about “post-launch calendars,” YC hoodies, noodle-eating entrepreneurs and the lean startup. And one by one, I take away this man’s pillars of tech belief and I watch the desperation take over his glass-protected eyes. I am eagerly awaiting his response as I finish my signature rant with a reference to Nietzsche (probably made no sense but…BOOM!).

He quickly responds with an answer that had been clearly cooking in his head for some time and taking away his attention from my own glorious and noteworthy rant. The summary of what he said was the following: “I understand that you think these stereotypes are not right, but what is right then? You can’t just be negative about what exists, you must assert your own beliefs on this.”  His eye twitched. I smiled, contained the eagle and tried not to overly project the look of amusement, sadness and anger in my eyes.

But seriously now - what a damn stupid thing to say! And what a cheap attack and insult to my intelligence. And his own. The way he responded amused and angered me equally but what’s more important is how sad his response made me. I realized that in translation he was saying - “you can’t take away what people believe in without giving them something else to believe in.” And trust me, I know this is true at a general and historical level but oh God how I had hoped it wouldn’t be in this little universe of its own called Silicon Valley.

I had hoped that here, of all places, people actually practiced what they preached. That I would be surrounded by this species of humans who were not in need of a “system” or a set of rules or something to believe in. I thought that here thinking outside of the box was impossible because there was no box to think outside of. But instead of finding the ones who own these boxes, I found the ones who were owned by them.

To those who are confused about why I am writing all of this, what I am trying to achieve with this self-absorbed blog or the type of person I am, please know that it is the least of my intentions to share some type of wisdom. I have none. I fight against stereotypes not because I already have the next generation of them prepared and ready for some mass indoctrination but because I believe that people, and especially entrepreneurs, should think outside of them. And not be afraid to carve their own path through darkness. And not benchmark their decision on anything. And not uphold anyone else’s rules in fighting the fight (and definitely not Steve Jobs’, please stop with that already!).

I don’t believe that all SV knowledge is to be discarded but as I previously mentioned, about 90% has to be thrown straight into the dumpster :). And moreover, I believe that the rest 10% should be taken as optional advice and never become the pillar of anyone’s faith. I, therefore, argue not for a change in the rules and the stereotypes but for their immediate and irrevocable defiance.

So…no - nothing “positive” here. Nothing here to believe in. In fact, this entire blog post could be summarized by saying that all self-help books and all entrepreneurship course catalogs and all pamphlets about the dos and don’ts of marketing, fundraising, PR and so on should be EMPTY. And they shouldn’t be replaced by anything but an entrepreneur’s all-defying desire to create greatness out of nothing.

Until I meet a textbook-born entrepreneur (and here I mean real entrepreneur, not the type who hangs out at tech events whenever he/she is not meeting tech gurus), I will  fight for emptiness and try to convince any and all entrepreneurs to take no one seriously and learn to listen to their gut above all else. 

It seems that Sundays are when I inevitably enter an existentialist crisis and am bound to either walk around for hours or drive down Highway 1. I think every Sunday should have a “Crisis of the Week” piece (although I’d probably discover it’s the same crisis masked under different symptoms and excuses).

But let’s say this week’s was a special one. Maybe because I was food poisoned on Friday or because I spent all weekend alone and in silence. And mostly in bed. Alone. (I miss you mom).

I was walking around Golden Gate Park eating a chocolate croissant and drinking some bad coffee from La Boulange and between the funemployed hippies and the folks playing kickball (who the fuck knew this sport existed before today?), I managed to gather up the strength to draw some big life conclusions. I was watching these people around me on a sunny Sunday - the former frat boy from Indiana who is now a consultant and likes to find new hobbies - like kickball -, the only other lonely wanderer in the park, sitting on a bench and staring at pigeons or the gazillion parents with too many kids who all looked shiny and settled in the Sunday sun. And I realized how much I envied their Sunday. Their Sunday was an ideal Sunday and one that I dream about every week.

In fact, I constantly dream about a life in which my days are happy. And I become extra unhappy when I can’t put a happy day together. But today I realized that living through happy days does not make for a happy life. And you know why? Because you cannot optimize for both today’s and tomorrow’s happiness. (Tomorrow here is to be taken as a general reference to a distant future in which all your dreams come true).

Pursuing tomorrow is what most are afraid of and give up on because it sucks ass. When you pursue tomorrow, your day by day is a string of correlated phases of unhappiness and occasional bursts of happiness that fade away as quickly as they came about. When you pursue tomorrow, the world around you throws you to the piggs with the rest of the unsung heroes and “almost-there but didn’t quite make it” entrepreneurs. When you pursue tomorrow, you can’t enjoy today because today is an unpleasant but necessary step in between you and tomorrow.

…

I can’t really enjoy today or really any day in particular. But I am sure that this journey to tomorrow has a glorious ending. And I know that after this ending, I will enjoy today like no one else on this planet. And even more importantly, I will feel like I earned it. Like I earned my right to a sunny Sunday in the park.

“A lady doesn’t do that” said my father to 15-year old me applying mascara in the small mirror of his big Mercedes on the way to high school. My father never talks about the “feminine” things and usually pretends his testosterone prohibits his understanding of women. So when he spoke, I knew it was serious. My inner Audrey blushed. And then I said: “Dad, you have no idea how ladies become ladies every day!”


I am a lady. The Lady of Knotch. The Lady of Interstate 280. The Lady of Hastily-Applied Make Up. And yet, every now and then I sit back and think about the actual compromise I am making between elegance and the life of a wannabe successful entrepreneur. And about why it even matters to uphold it.

There’s really nothing elegant about my self-made manicure and definitely not about how much I injure my fingers in moment of stress, despair, desolation, confusion, fear etc. Nothing elegant about cutting back on types of food to save money or about applying mascara at 80m/hr on interstate 280 (fine dad, whatever).

Sometimes I find myself funny or even pathetic when I attempt to display elegance in spite of my circumstances that all push me into letting myself go. At the end of the day, I am an entrepreneur, right? I am supposed to eat noodles, wear a hoodie and only take showers when I meet potential investors. Lean startup!! (apologies to all who take the concept seriously)

But I choose to not only opt out of all of the above but also go against anyone’s and everyone’s notion of what I should be as an entrepreneur. And I call it elegance. I often choose to pay for men richer than me in a display of “elegance.” I wear Italian shoes and purses in a display of “elegance” - they look and probably are expensive but I buy them for dirt cheap from people who stole them from Italy. I cover the signs of my nervousness with band aids and (when asked) I claim that I cut my finger in a battle with parsley, asparagus and tomatoes when preparing my famous Italian dish. I don’t have a famous Italian dish…but if you ever hear me say that, pretend it’s true for the sake of “elegance.”

So “elegance” to me means not giving into the pressure of my own circumstances. It’s not pride and it’s not being fake - it’s being strong in the most silent and…well, lady-like way.

So dad - it doesn’t matter how I put myself together every day and appear in front of the world with a big, lipstick-filled smile and several visible or invisible patches. What matters is that as long as I’m wearing earrings, I’m still in the game.

Today this place brought me to my knees again. Another few cancellations and nos and other entrepreneurs posting boastful shit on Fb about crushing it the hustler way. The hustler way all the way, baby.

And every two Fb posts, one about this reality TV show of which I have only been able to watch clips of because I do not own a TV and even if I did, I probably wouldn’t pay for cable. Anyway, I get to an article written by a very funny guy whose name is too complicated to write out (but here’s the link http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57545554-71/silicon-valleys-new-show-a-reality-check/ )
describing his adventure at the launch party of this show a couple of nights ago. He talks about beautiful (blond) women, SV stereotypes, play hard//work hard and a bunch of other expected things.

But then he gets to a quote from Mr. Ben Way who, in the words of the author, has the demeanor of a love child between Bond and a jockey. (He actually does.) So Mr. Way, who is one of the stars of this TV show living in a villa in Twin Peaks, bbq-ing and splashing in pools & jacuzzis I can’t even afford to lay a toe in, talks about how this place (SV) that he is new to, can really drive an entrepreneur mad. And while there is always truth to blank, general statements like that, I wonder what type of madness he is referring to.

It’s definitely not my type of madness. He is surely not talking about the daily desperation of a founder struggling through building a company, a team, a product and maybe more importantly him or herself. And you know why? Because the struggle kicks in when you as a human being have NOTHING other than the company you are working on - no support system, no family to pay for you and more importantly NO TV CHANNEL TO PAY FOR YOU. The company you build is you and if you fuck it up, you fuck yourself up and God knows who can get you out of such a situation and in how long.

Now if I were a tv show star (I’ve always had a deep admiration for women who have a brain that goes with the package @sarah austin… ?!?!), I couldn’t care less about obesity in America or online ads or whatever it is that everyone is doing on that show outside of basking in the San Franciscan sun. All I would care would be MYSELF. Period. And that in itself completely refutes the definition of what it is to be an entrepreneur. People who build companies for their own brands make me sick. Literally nauseous. Especially when I meet them at events or am forced into a conversation with them by a weird series of circumstances. If any of you are reading this - stay away from me. I am antisocial when it comes to you because I don’t know what to talk to you about. I really only want to talk about one of three things: regression analysis, opinion-sharing and Transylvania. I am not cool. But apparently you are. So don’t waste your time.

But you know what really hurts? That I watch these people and a little tiny voice insides says “Anda, maybe if you had shown your boobs a bit more and “networked” with the biggies of the Valley over shots of absinthe, you would be a well-funded, successful entrepreneur by now as opposed to one that is trying to make the honest buck.” And then I stop and metaphorically slap myself into realizing that I am about building a real company and really not taking shortcuts en route to that. That the hard work of the past 5 years at Stanford, in VC and now building Knotch will not go unnoticed in the shadow of the rising reality TV show stars. But I am lucky to have such an acute conscience.

The real problem though is that many are not as lucky. I have already heard a lot of disgruntled entrepreneurs and investors who have made it big and now don’t really like the look & feel that this show is giving to the Valley. But I have also heard from first-time entrepreneurs words of confusion and hidden desire of becoming a similar star. “WHAT? Are you serious?” And then I remember my above-mentioned thoughts and fears and I become my less-harsh self (which I rarely ever become).

So here’s to you Bravo TV Show - for getting to us, the desperate first-time entrepreneurs, the scared and easily manipulated flock who will do anything for a bit of attention, money, distribution, downloads, PR, marketing etc. Almost anything that is. And here’s to you for telling the world about the great parties we all always go to (NOT), about our great personal lives (WHAT?), about our mansions in Twin Peaks and how easy it is to get an investor meeting (I am sure it was because you texted Dave the middle finger, not because Randi Z asked him to meet with you). Here’s to you for appearing in my head today when I was holding on to the edge of my balcony, looking at San Francisco and going from crazy laughter to crazy crying while thinking that I’m surely losing it (for the record, the crazy laughter was because of you and how absurd it felt to me at the time that you even existed and dared to show the world a glimpse of what you think I am going through).

I hope a lot of popcorn gets eaten during this TV show and that a lot of American bottoms get thicker and flatter. I hope you get paid a lot for bastardizing our dramas and glories. But don’t think that I…that we…will just stand and watch. You wanted to give the world a sneak peak into SV? Thanks for the great idea and for wasting so much money on getting us such great PR. We (the real entrepreneurs) will take it from here.