Surviving Silicon Valley

Young and ambitious, they’ve landed in the San Francisco Bay area to become the next Zuckerbergs. How do they live when they’re not plucking away at their laptop? How do they eat, love, plan their days? Photographer Laura Morton spent a year with younger tech entrepreneurs, sharing their lives, their hopes and failures.

- Katie Breen

They hail from every US State and all over the world with an ambition to become rich, mimicking the miners who raced to California during the gold rush of the 1850s. A successful start-up is the new gold, especially if it poised to make one a millionaire. Finding the right idea, unearthing seed funding, bringing the idea to fruition: today’s migrants have to master technology and work long hours on their laptops.

Everything that comes in the way of work is labelled “friction”: shopping for example: “ We have a grocery store two blocks away from our apartment, it is open 24/7,” says Laura Morton, “but a girl who lived in our building never came out of the house, she got all her groceries delivered from Amazon Fresh. She did not want to bother talking to people, she was not into that.”

Feeding oneself entails more “friction” than just shopping: it also means cutting vegetables, cooking, cleaning afterwards... hundreds of startups have emerged in San Francisco delivering ready-to-eat meals, or kits for weekly nourishment. Some people will forget about meals and live on Soylent, a meal replacement product that tastes like cereal milkshake. Is it the end of food? No more sharing a pizza with your girlfriend? “That’s definitely a trend,” says Laura.