Slack pings and jargon like ‘scaling up’ and ‘A/B testing’ hummed through my childhood. Growing up, I would head to my dad’s office in downtown Palo Alto, where product managers became my babysitters and software engineers cooed over how much taller I had gotten. These people—who I later learned held some of the tech industry’s most coveted jobs—were never intimidating. We arrived at the office in the same clothes: leggings and a hoodie. We slid down from the fourth to the third floor on the same oversized metal slide. We ate company-catered meals at the same tables. We were, as the Human Resources team liked to put it, a family.
Casual, team-oriented offices define Silicon Valley startup culture. In the 2010 biographical drama The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg arrives at investor dinners in a hoodie, sweatpants, and Adidas flip-flops. His attire has been adopted by the whole of the Bay: Elon Musk attends White House cabinet meetings in graphic tees, and Sam Bankman-Fried’s closet seems to host an infinite supply of rumpled grey FTX T-shirts (or maybe just one). Even Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, rarely presents in anything more formal than a polo shirt.
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The casual fashion of Silicon Valley’s “tech bros” is an intentional choice. A student of psychology and computer science at Harvard, Zuckerberg is well-versed in the literature of social dynamics and the human desire for exclusivity—an awareness that ultimately propelled Facebook to success. His sartorial choices reflect this understanding.
Zuckerberg understands better than anyone that to signal in-group status, one needs iconography. In 2004, the mere possession of a Facebook account was a status symbol. Zuckerberg initially limited Facebook to students with Harvard University emails. When it came time to—in tech jargon—scale-up, invitations were only extended to students at Stanford, Columbia, and Yale. To be a Facebook member was to be part of a cooler, more educated whole. The disheveled college outfits became a way to signal membership in a new elite.
The relaxed dress code of Silicon Valley also reflects a philosophical desire for restricting material and bodily desire—asceticism. Associated with Abrahamic and Dharmic religions, ascetic practices include fasting for Ramadan, sacrificing an enjoyable activity for Lent, or abstaining from meat and aphrodisiacs in Buddhism. By practicing asceticism, one redeems themselves in the eyes of their god. For Muslims, Ramadan draws one closer to Allah; for Catholics, Lent encourages one to remember Christ’s sacrifice; for Buddhists, vegetarian diets abide by the ahimsa tenet of non-violence, garnering karma for rebirth. In each of these religions, asceticism is a distinct choice, practiced to attain spiritual enlightenment or moral discipline.
The tech dress code leverages our positive associations with asceticism. By forgoing pressed suits and ties, tech entrepreneurs aim to garner the goodwill of their most important backers—not only consumers and colleagues but also capitalists. Tech startups are heavily dependent on venture capital investments, and firms like Sequoia, Greylock, and Andreessen Horowitz Capital Management (a16z) receive thousands of pitch decks a year. At a16z, which backed Facebook, Coinbase, and OpenAI, the odds of being funded are a slim 0.7 percent. Entrepreneurs must portray themselves as cutting-edge, hard-working, and financially savvy: the type of person who would flaunt a $20 32 Degrees T-shirt from Costco, REI slacks, and a backpack given out as swag at an industry summit.
A scene like this plays out in The Social Network, when the fictionalized Zuckerberg arrives at Sequoia Capital sporting pajamas and bedhead. Napster co-founder and then-president of Facebook Sean Parker, played by Justin Timberlake, advises Zuckerberg to walk into the meeting 20 minutes late and claim that he overslept. “They’re gonna pitch you,” Parker insists. “Sequoia Capital is gonna pitch you… They’re gonna beg you to take their money.”
It’s easy to dismiss this scene as fictional hyperbole, but Zuckerberg and his co-founder Andrew McCollum really did pitch Sequoia like this. In a Quora thread, McCollum himself reveals the performative nature of their tardiness. “It is true that we were late to the pitch,” McCollum writes, “as we were to every meeting we had with Sequoia, but this, in itself, was not that remarkable—we were late to pretty much everything. This was mostly because we valued working on the products (both Facebook and Wirehog) over just about everything else.” Zuckerberg and McCollum’s tardiness—just like their sloppy dress—was a way to perform their emphasis on creating the product. While Catholics practice asceticism for the judgment of God, tech entrepreneurs practice asceticism for the judgment of venture capitalists.
The aesthetics of asceticism extend beyond just dress. At a Brown University panel on careers in tech and entrepreneurship, one panelist characterized the startup experience as “creaky floors,” “crowded offices,” and “those early scrappy days.” There is an unspoken expectation to work overtime; 71 percent of remote employees in the UK work past paid hours. Those in the office are encouraged to stay past 5:00 PM for company dinners. And, most disturbingly, the “biohacking” phenomenon: intermittent fasting, replacing meals with Soylent, and microdosing on drugs that allegedly improve cognitive function.
As class distinctions based on clothing have diminished, those within the tech industry have begun searching for other identifiers of status. Palo Alto is bloated with parking lots full of the newest Tesla model. While hard work is a key quantifier of a profitable venture, its importance is topped only by success. Projecting success necessitates the signalling of class; it is an endlessly shifting paradigm, preventing the playing field from truly being leveled. Assets like cars and nice houses are acceptable ways to convey wealth as they do not detract from the archetype of the product-obsessed innovator. No critical time is wasted stepping into a Model X instead of a Toyota Corolla.
When, to the untrained eye, the rich look like the poor, it slashes the hope of gaining class consciousness. Without visual class stratification, laborers are fooled into thinking their managers may somehow relate to them or have similar lifestyles. It has become harder than ever to identify those of similar class status. Who is shopping at Costco out of necessity rather than desire? Who really can not afford a tailored suit? Bosses’ orders are reframed as a friend’s advice. Unpaid overtime becomes company bonding.
Such class complacency is dangerous when that hoodie-and-sweats-wearing boss returns home each night to a mortgage-free mansion in Atherton. But at least you all eat dinner together, right?