Bay Area Drifter's Phonebook

Bay Area Drifter’s Phonebook

Driftwood project #0, massive shoutout to Spruce for a fucking awesome UI

Today, we are launching the bay area drifters’ phonebook. We made this phonebook with one goal: to bring together original and curious people in their early 20s, who are not afraid to drift.

In most countries, drifting is the default. College students spend their summers traveling, reading, working random jobs, experimenting and collecting data.

In the US, or at least at mit, the summer internship grind starts in September. FUCKING SEPTEMBER. When people haven’t even had the chance to decorate their dorm rooms yet. It’s an absolute shit show. the brightest and smartest people i know, racing to be the first to apply to big tech jobs and get the interview, linkedin notifications going crazy and the referrals becoming the new transaction. A culture cultivated to its peak in a FOMO and status-driven environment. It is madness to me.

To know oneself bottom up, usually tacit knowledge of laborious and iterative self-discovery, is the greatest weapon an original thinker has in their arsenal. The difference between people who can actually change/improve the world vs mere industry tools is the petrification of the bare bones of their identity, early on and in a non-arbitrary intentional way.

Individual growth and development of its members is never by default the collective objective of a large group and society as a whole, has no incentives to encourage exploration and drifting. Instead, it optimizes for the prolonged and ensured survival of the whole machine.

For example, the goal of the Jane Street summer internship program, for which you sign contracts 6 months in advance, is not to foster individual talents and abilities. All the awesome perks, status and false sense of ambition is supposed to make you hungry to go back, thus ensuring institutional continuity. If they cared about your development, they would not force you to sign letters commiting to their program 6 months before they begin. This is a cruel FOMO play to lock in the best talent before that talent has time to realize that what they really want to do with their life is not trading derivatives.

From an institutional progression perspective, leveraging FOMO for recruiting aligns with their incentives. But it doesn’t for you. You should choose, consciously, to put yourself in an experience, because you think it will help you grow.

You could tell me “this is a privileged point of view” or “this is too far from the ways of the real world”. I will say, it is not. I was (and still am) a half-broke international student from a third world country with anything but the luxury to fuck around all summer. I know, better than anyone, the ways and restrictions of the real world and I was knee deep in this last November, when I was supposed to get on a call for the final round of a quant interview. I sat behind my laptop and watched the minutes go by, paralyzed, as I failed to physically bring myself to join the call. Then came me flipping out, thinking about the “opportunity” I had just lost.

Drifting is not missing out on opportunities, nor does it come from a place of privilege. It is to recognize the mundane hurricane of fancy FAANG internships and status-based entrepreneurship clubs for what it is, a hamster wheel to trap talent and innovation and that by getting on this wheel, you kneecap your own authenticity. Work on projects you have personal interest in, floating on top of systems and lowering to use them only as you need, apply for funding and grants when you have to, cowork on projects with friends and only take internships and jobs if they align perfectly with your interests and settle for nothing less.

We named our house driftwood, because we were/are all drifters. When all came together with heads full of ideas mid May, we gave up the arbitrary plans we had previously picked for our summer. We didn’t know what we were going to do, but we knew, very well, all the things we didn’t want to do. We decided to drift and learn, because that in itself, is valuable.

So our first project was/is this phonebook. To bring together all the drifters in the bay, so that together we could learn, experiment, and discover. So that we no longer sacrifice originality, for the sake of social pressure. Don’t be scared to drift. Get Good.

“Be happy without lying to yourself”, - Will

“Do the coolest thing you could possibly do at any point in time”, - Spruce

“Explore, experiment, and pay attention to your emotions — how else are you to discover what you truly enjoy?” - Dakota

and finally

“I did not come all the way across the world, just to be normal” - yours sincerely, Tara