The future moguls of corporate America aren’t living like the new money princes in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” Instead, today’s aspiring tycoons are pursuing a different kind of luxury: a monastic purity through abstinence.
For Mahir Laul, founder of HR software startup Velric, the typically youthful whirlwind of sex and romance takes a backseat to Slack notifs and fundraising rounds. “There’s two things that I care about the most: the gym and my work,” Laul told Business Insider in an interview. “I am obsessed with work. My love life is in the gutters.”
With so much pressure on building the next tech unicorn, Laul says most of his fellow entrepreneurs are in the same boat — a lifestyle that doesn’t leave much room for romance, casual or otherwise.
“The opportunity cost is really high,” Annie Liao, founder of AI education company Build Club told BI. “Every night you spent out is time you could have spent building your startup.” She told the publication her San Francisco roommates are in the same boat. To the future new money of America, dating apps are a “big, big distraction,” the founder said.
Those who have paddled into the dating pool say they did so long before the days of building. Now that they’re founders, their long-standing relationships apparently come in handy in the business world.
“Being in a relationship is really helpful for building the company,” said Yang Fan Yun, cofounder of Composite, a company peddling in AI agents for web browsers. Yun told BI he met his current girlfriend early into his education at Stanford. Now that he’s in builder mode, he finds his girlfriend comes in handy by helping with things like product testing.
“You’ve always heard the mentality, ‘behind every successful man, there’s the right woman,’” Laul told BI. “Rather than looking for hookups, I tend to look for someone as a life partner. But it’s been difficult.”
Avaricious chastity isn’t the only thing separating tech founders from their generational peers. The same motivations fuel a thriving sober movement, as well as a clinical relationship to food.
All in all, it’s a strange bargain for the would-be Rockefellers of the 21st century. In a calculated pursuit of wealth and status, they’ve abandoned the very pleasures that once defined life on the top rung. It raises an obvious question for those of us further down: if this is what the good life looks like, then what’s the point?
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