In 2023, Rebecca Smith (not her real name), a 34-year-old single mom and former athlete from Virginia, signed on to carry a child for Cindy Bi. Bi is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist with a fat wallet and a male embryo.
It was a straightforward $45,000 surrogacy arrangement. It was supposed to be a paint-by-numbers surrogacy. Things went wrong, as they often do during pregnancy, and it all spun off into a legal nightmare, according to Wired.
Bi, who had budgeted $200,000 to ensure her baby’s arrival, quickly took on the role of micromanaging investor. Speaking to Wired, Bi described Smith, her surrogate, as if she were a startup she was investing in rather than the biological mother of her child.
There’s no empathy. There’s hardly an acknowledgment that she’s even a human. She is an investment, a womb to be rented for nine months and the body around it discarded when it’s all done.
Inside the Silicon Valley Surrogacy Nightmare That Became a Legal Hellscape
As the pregnancy progressed, so did Bi’s involvement. Smith later discovered that her most intimate medical and personal updates were being shared anonymously on Facebook surrogacy groups.
Based on the events laid out by Wired, Bi was about to be offered the opportunity to learn a profound, if tragic, life lesson: you can’t guarantee a baby will be born. There are too many potential complications.
Pay as much as you want, invest as much time as you wish, follow all the latest, most up-to-date advice you want, use all the resources at your disposal as a wealthy Silicon Valley investor you want, and it could still go wrong.
At 29 weeks, Smith was hospitalized with complications. While she bled and nearly died, Bi was texting nonstop and demanding she sign yet another contract. And then, it happened: a stillbirth. The hospital followed standard protocols and found no wrongdoing. But Bi was unconvinced, calling it “1,000 percent preventable.”
What followed was a scorched-earth campaign of vengeance as Bi seemingly took out her frustrations on Smith. Bi hired a private investigator, doxxed Smith, and publicly accused her of killing the baby through unsafe sex with a secret live-in boyfriend. She froze payments, contacted insurers, and even sent Smith’s child disturbing photos of the stillbirth.
While Bi was tormenting Smith, making her feel like she had murdered a child in cold blood. Smith dealt with hemorrhaging, trauma, and mounting legal fees. Bi was attacking Smith the only way a Silicon Valley venture capitalist knows how, through a misguided sense of Old Testament-style cold-blooded justice via litigation and social media witch trials that don’t seem like they would bring her, or anyone, any shred of peace. “I hope she goes to jail. Ideally, for murder,” Bi told Wired.
To Bi, this was about control—controlling the outcome of the pregnancy and controlling the narrative that spun off of it—and specifically, maintaining her reputation in the cutthroat world of tech investment.
Keeping up with the Joneses probably includes suing your surrogate into financial ruin when they don’t produce the product they were contractually obligated to turn in on a specific date. Because, somehow, that makes you look weak, a surefire sign that the world of Silicon Valley tech investment is deeply inhuman and should be discarded as soon as possible.
That’s not just me rampantly speculating. Again, directly from Wired, in Bi’s own words: “If I cannot protect my son… if I cannot give him honor, sue the hell out of these people, and have some sense of justice… how can the investment founders say, ‘Cindy, you’re the best?’”
The whole story is grim, and that quote might be the grimmest part of it all.
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