[Missed Chapter 1? Read it.]
When I made my fateful decision that night on the shores of Lake Wallowa – to find a way to Europe, somehow – I was feeling extra confident. Maybe even a little cocky.
You see, a few years earlier, I had bought some cryptocurrency from a friend.
Rolling up with the squad
I began playing video games with the same group of guys in 2009. They were devoted gamers. Some of them worked in the game industry, playing nearly every day, for too many hours than was good for them. I dropped in when I could, at least weekly.
We lived thousands of miles apart and hadn’t all met face to face, but we all knew the founder and lynchpin of our group, a loud, rambunctious, neckbeard computer wizard from Alaska. We didn’t all share the same political backgrounds and points of view. One of them had been in the military. One had been in prison. They all loved guns. But we were a tight squad who loved to work together and get silly, slaughtering never-ending armies of alien bugs, stranded on a far-flung planet, ammo running low.
One night our squad leader told us he had just started a new job in the real world. It wasn’t all that surprising. He often jumped around from startup to startup, always jockeying for the most innovative and interesting work. What he could accomplish as one man to help a tech company set up their back-end operations was substantial. His caliber of work paid quite well, but he didn’t always do it for the money. In fact, he told us that, as one of the first employees at the new blockchain startup where he was about to begin working, he had decided to take his entire salary (which was also substantial) in the crypto coin that the company would soon be minting.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen bigger balls. This is how you become squad leader.
Math you’ll never use
I already knew how blockchains worked. As a student at the University of Georgia twenty years earlier, I had taken two theoretical math classes that somehow got me out of taking advanced algebra. One was about game theory and how mathematical puzzles were constructed. It was interesting, but I didn’t love it because it dealt with a lot of combinations, which require a more analytical, logical mind than I possess. The other class was about number theory, in particular one specific class of numbers: prime numbers. This was more my style. Prime numbers are weird, almost magical. They don’t mathematically progress from one to the next in any discernible pattern. This unpredictability makes prime numbers uniquely suited for cryptography.
In that class we were studying the mathematical underpinnings of the RSA cipher, an algorithm for performing encryption and decryption, which was gaining momentum as a new standard for digital security as computers were beginning to become networked together. Back in 1993, this was super geeky stuff. Only people with access to a computer at a university knew how to use a modem to call other computers. As a liberal arts major, I wasn’t sure if I’d use the information I was learning ever again, but I enjoyed it in the same way I enjoyed my Existentialism philosophy class. Mind candy.
That same type of prime number-based cryptography is what blockchain technologies are based on, so I was familiar with the concept of my squad leader’s new cryptocurrency venture. I had also been following the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin creation, but investing little money because it was a huge pain in the ass to actually buy crypto. Fly-by-night cryptocurrency exchanges had cropped up online, trying to become the infrastructure for an entirely new kind of marketplace that didn’t exist yet. They couldn’t even keep their servers up. They needed someone like my squad leader.
Our commander offered to sell us some of these new crypto coins, and we all said yes. We believed in him and wanted to support him. I sent him $500 via PayPal and we went back to murdering those goddamned bugs. I shelved the investment in my mind, right next to the folders of worthless stock options I’d received while working at startups.
That is, until a few months before my sabbatical, when crypto went through the fucking roof.
Moving up and to the right
Game nights got louder and rowdier as we celebrated. My $500 quickly turned into $8K. I rolled that into Bitcoin, the one coin that ruled them all. I was so confident I bought Bitcoin for my dad. I watched the graph of my lucky investment move up and to the right even as I drove up and to the right on the map, destination Lake Wallowa.
If I had sold at the peak, I would have been $125K richer. In the end, I still made out like a bandit, raking in $75K. Who said video games were a waste of time?
So on that night at the lake, while contemplating my decision to leave America forever… well, it was suddenly made much easier, wasn’t it? Seventy-five thousand dollars buys a lot of possibilities. Plenty of space to succeed or fail. One could travel around for quite a while with that kind of money, couldn’t one? Maybe stop and try out a few places along the way.
Then again, when you consider that Henry’s university tuition would soon be costing me $25K per year for at least four years, was I ready to gamble away my serendipitous winnings on the long shot of living in Europe?
Yes. Yes, I was.
The old man and the CV
The decision to leave was made still easier a few months after returning from my sabbatical, when the brand-new CEO at the company where I worked eviscerated the organisation’s entire line of consumer apps, along with all of those employees, along with me. I had never been laid off before. I was always one of the ones they kept. But they weren’t keeping anyone.
But oh, the severance! When they broke the news, all sad-faced and empathetic, they instructed me to do nothing while getting paid for three months, until the end of the year, after which they would pay me even more money to go away forever. I was ecstatic. More room to breathe.
I strutted into the new year applying for job after job in far-flung locations around Europe, with my search eventually narrowing to Berlin. As the tech hub of Europe, it was the most likely place to find a job with my background. Anywhere in Germany sounded good. German, the intellectual language, was the one I had always wanted to study. I started teaching myself the basics.
As the months wore on, the rejections felt increasingly devastating. I had countless interviews (one at 3 am) with startups who were intrigued by my background but unsure of my motives. I was clearly overqualified. This was sometimes a polite way of saying old.
Although I might have aged out of startups, I knew that my youthful attitude and appearance sometimes made people forget how old I was. All I had to do was get my foot in the door. Once I did that, I always excelled almost immediately, taking on more and more responsibility until I was promoted to an even better position. At least, that’s the way it usually worked.
But this wasn’t Silicon Valley. And I didn’t even speak German.
What kept me rolling
Years before, Henry’s mother and I had bought our son a gorgeous single-speed bike from Mission Bicycle on Valencia Street. He picked out the colours and components and styling details himself. I had to admit he had great taste. It was a beauty. But he rarely rode it, less and less over time. I didn’t blame him. San Francisco isn’t exactly a safe place to cycle. In the previous decade, I had been hit twice by cars while riding my own bikes. It made me sad to see his bike sit idle.
One day, about a year before my sabbatical, I asked him if I could take it out for a spin. He said yes. That day changed my life.
From then on, I would wake up early every morning and sneak out while my son was still sleeping to go for a ride. I’d crank my way through the morning chill, warming myself up by attacking steep hills, heading west through thick fog on my way to the Pacific Ocean. After cycling north up the coast, I’d admire the hardcore morning surfers in wetsuits at Ocean Beach before turning east into Golden Gate Park, wandering among its many branching paths, through the entirety of the 3-mile-long park.
Golden Gate Park is a splendid and special place, and I was blessed to live right next to it. Buffalo live there. You can rent a rowboat at Stowe Lake. There are multiple museums, a tulip garden next to a windmill, a Japanese Tea Garden, a polo field. You can throw frisbees with hippies, practice fly fishing, shoot arrows at an archery range, admire a fake waterfall, roller skate on Saturdays, dance the lindy on Sundays – the list goes on. It’s one of the most unique parks on the planet. Watching it change throughout the seasons from the saddle of my bike every day that year was one of the great joys of my life.
I started to imagine what it might be like to ride that same bike throughout Europe.
Sometimes I would turn back home after I rode through the park, but sometimes I just kept going all the way through the city to the bay, stopping at an espresso cart by the Ferry Building and returning through the city on a different route, adding 15km to my usual 20km morning ride. That year, I cycled 4,000 miles (6,500km). I stopped recording distance after that.
I was getting healthier and healthier, stronger and stronger, moving up and down crushingly steep hills without the help of gears. I’ve always been relatively skinny, but I shed more and more weight riding that bike until I weighed less than I had 25 years earlier as a student at university.
That year, I had the bike to thank for building me up physically, but it also provided time for me to think deeply and strategically about how I wanted to plot my future, for hours at a time with no distractions.
Or rather, I had my son to thank. I offered to buy the bike from him for $500 worth of Bitcoin. He negotiated me up to $600. In the end, he made $3K from that sale as Bitcoin continued to go up, giving me double satisfaction: I bought it twice; first for my son and then from my son. We both got a great deal.
My crypto winnings were proving to be a huge help. But I still needed a job.
[Ready for Chapter 3? Read it.]