Happy Fried-Day in Silicon Valley

I received this article in a recent email and found it very interesting. I wanted to post it in it's entirety versus sending readers to the WSJ paywall.

Author: Kirsten Grind

Are you “California Sober”?

Turns out, drug use has moved from an after-hours activity into corporate culture across Silicon Valley.

Psychedelics—ecstasy, magic mushrooms and LSD, among others—have become so prevalent that they’re now turning up in businesses and boardrooms, as my colleague Katherine Bindley and I reported.

Elon Musk takes ketamine, a hallucinogenic drug that acts like a psychedelic, while Sergey Brin sometimes consumes psilocybin. Spencer Shulem, the CEO of the startup BuildBetter.ai, said he uses LSD about every three months to increase focus and creativity. Investors and VC firms, he said, generally have high expectations, so founders need an edge.

“They don’t want a normal person, a normal company,” he said. “They want something extraordinary. You're not born extraordinary.”

There’s a danger of abuse and dependence, though. Former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh began using ketamine to find a business breakthrough and became addicted before his November 2020 death, I reported in March 2021.

“There’s no guarantee you’re going to be the one who gets that positive outcome on your own,” warned Alex Penrod, an addiction specialist in Austin, Texas.

Silicon Valley has long had a tolerance for drug use. But the difference here is how it’s affecting the workplace. “There are millions of people microdosing psychedelics right now,” Karl Goldfield, a former sales and marketing consultant in San Francisco, told me. 

—Kirsten is an enterprise reporter and is based in San Francisco.