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Dear friend,

The law school apprenticeship program in California takes five years before you can take the bar exam — and I was 22 when I started. Back then, five years seemed interminably long, a lifetime away. There was a popular McSweeney’s article back then with the headline, “Welcome To Our Startup Where Everyone is 23 Years Old Because We Believe Old People Are Visually Displeasing and Out of Ideas.” We used to send it around the office. It was a joke, of course, but I also sort of believed it, as if there was a clock ticking until the day I graduated to being Visually Displeasing and Out of Ideas. In physics class, you learn that all potential energy is eventually converted into kinetic energy, but in life, you also learn that not everyone converts their potential energy wisely. Billy Joel has a line in Vienna that goes, “You can get what you want or you can just get old,” and I was always afraid that I would just get old. 

Age and achievement were inextricably linked, and the expectations for the former were too steep for the latter to ever keep up. When I first moved to San Francisco, I once went out to a wine bar with another newly minted Thiel Fellow who told me solemnly that one of these days, the world was going to burn, and out of the ruins, here would be a single spaceship that would take the 精华, the elite of our civilization, away to safety — and he needed to earn his place on that ship before time ran out. I could picture it so vividly: the flames of our civilization, the hurried boarding of the spaceship, leaving the rest of the world to immolate behind them. How I longed to be on that ship too! We all had grandiose dreams back then. Perhaps each new batch of Thiel Fellows does, but only some get to turn those dreams into reality. Others flame out along the way. A billionaire once told me: “Being old isn’t a problem, but you’d best be old and rich.” Easy for him to say, I thought at the time. He had already secured his ticket onto the ship — whereas I was still falling behind.

Here’s the secret: it never occurred to me back then to wonder if the people I loved got to board the spaceship, too. My selfishness rivaled that of a child’s: never intending to harm, but never thinking to help. The fear of aging, too, stemmed from a child’s view of the world, where adults assign each age some pre-set milestone you can either pass or fail. At that age, I saw the company as an accessory to myself, as so many young founders do, like a belonging or a handbag, rather than what it was: flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. I would be beset by envy at the slightest trigger, and no matter how I tried to quell it, any attempts at self-admonishment only fanned the flames. As it turns out, trying to quell envy with self-loathing is like fighting fire with fire. The only way to stop envying someone else’s life is to love your own. 

In this regard, aging did me a great favor. In February, the whole team gathered for a retreat in San Francisco, flying in from all over the country. Wednesday night, I gave a presentation on the history of the company, and on the final night, R organized a game night, where the final challenge involved holding your head still and moving an Oreo across your face. It ended up being too hard for the rest of us, but C was extraordinarily persistent, and when he finally got the Oreo in his mouth, the crowd went wild, clapping him on the back, jumping and whooping. In that moment, I felt such gratitude for everyone at the company who had chosen to join C and I on our journey, and that gratitude morphed into a love that started from the literal flesh of my flesh and radiated out: from my baby to my family to my company to my city, San Francisco, to my country, the US of A. I loved them all so much! For once, I didn’t want those things to be better for me; I wanted to be better for them. If the world were burning, and someone offered me a ticket out, I like to think I would have said, “No thanks,” like the captain on the Titanic who goes down with the ship. 

When you are young, you can’t help but be a taker; if you are lucky enough to grow old, it means you have a chance to give. This has been my favorite thing about growing older: to see my love grow greater than my selfishness. Before the baby was born, I worried a lot about what kind of child he would be, when instead, I should have focused on what type of mother I wanted to be to him. But I’m getting there. When reporters ask me about the future of the company, I often quote Michelangelo’s description of sculpture as an emergent “angel in the marble,” where his job as the sculptor is merely to set it free. Now I think maybe the same applies to myself, that there is a wiser, truer version of myself waiting to emerge with the years. C complains at work that I cannot keep talking about becoming wiser while regularly behaving unwisely, but that just goes to show: I’m not there yet. I’m not in a hurry anymore, even en route to wisdom. Before I was in decline from something, and now I am becoming something else. 

Five years came and went. I took the bar last summer, passing it on the second go (truly, one of the more humbling experiences of my life to date). The interim days have been nothing if not humbling. By my old spaceship standards, I suppose I have just gotten old. And yet! Every weekend when we walk through Golden Gate Park, J repeats the same mantra: that he has the best dog and the best baby and the best wife and the best house in the best city in the best country in the entire world. He’s right, although as W.R. Purche puts it: “Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them is wrong.” It turns out the real “best things” in life are not scarce goods. If you believe they are, it means you have not yet found them at all.

For my birthday, T drove up from Central Valley and L flew in from Denver and along with A, the four of us packed in T’s car to drive to Marin, where we forest-bathed in Muir Woods and pilgrimaged to meet the poet Jane Hirshfield. When we got back, J greeted me at the door. The baby had just woken up from a nap, and his eyes were still sleepy, his cheeks glowing like two red apples. When I picked him up, he put his head on my shoulder and gurgled with joy. Frank O’Hara wrote: “I would not wish to be faster or greener if you were still with me O you / were the best of all my days.” It’s true: these are the best of my days. I know because I do not want for anything else. 

Your friend,
Eva