I thought I was designing for SpaceX, I was actually designing for the Silk Road

I’ve held this personally close for a long time, to the point where some of my closest friends still aren’t sure whether or not I’m lying or telling the truth. I’m not sure if this will set the record straight, but it will either do that or get me into some trouble. Let’s call it getting it off my chest.

After I graduated from UNLV I went to live in England, where I worked for a brief 6 months at a startup and bounced between design and development. My visa expired and I got kicked out. Not before meeting some of the greatest friends I’ll ever have. If the word family wasn’t such a cliche, I’d use the word here.

I was interviewing with anyone who wrote me back after reading my resume and poorly-worded emails. I took the first offer I got. I had one friend in San Francisco, we had met in Techstars a year before. I showed up Sunday around 9pm, slept on the couch and started the next morning. I met some amazing people at this startup and still interact to this day, but the job wasn’t for me. I quit roughly 4 months after I started.

Tip: Do not give two weeks notice when your birthday is in one week. This makes for an awkward cupcake ceremony where you’re not sure whether to smile or to laugh.

Part of the reason I could quit was because I knew I could freelance, I did it before and I could do it again. Right?

I had moved off of the floor by this time into big boy rent, $1,800 with 2 roommates, and knew I couldn’t go a week without making some money, so I started freelancing immediately. The leaseholder at this time was between LA and SF, working at SpaceX, and I had taken over his room while he was mostly in LA. He asked me if I wanted to do some freelance work for him…

I left SpaceX because I want to be back in SF, and I like my freedom running my own thing. We’re going to build this product for SpaceX as a separate team.

A dramatization of what occurred, but the best I can remember.

A thing for SpaceX?! I jumped. Certainly a few designers other than myself have dreamt of sending people to Mars staring at an interface you designed. I named an hourly rate I felt was friend-level, but still high—he didn’t blink.

The project was designed to visualize and analyze large time-series data sets. The data was coming from sensors, I think the number was something like 10,000 sensors on a rocket. The idea was that if you could see the correlation of the sensors, you might be able to make a more informed hypothesis about a problem.

Here’s a demo I built, you can see it in it’s poorly coded form here: http://sciview.herokuapp.com/ the code and design are also open-sourced here:

Everything was going swimingly, but something wasn’t quite right. My leaseholder was now turning into my roommate because he did not need to be in LA, and semi-strange incidents occurred. Other than the obvious of course: buying a Tesla in cash (er, bitcoin), throwing extravagant parties, traveling abroad often. I’m not going to lie, I wanted it. I was seeing this dream lived out in front of me, and it seemed so attainable.

I didn’t have a steady job, and most of my possessions were in storage (including my car) in Colorado. I gave up my room to the leaseholder, and flew back to CO to acquire my car and anything that would fit. The plan would be to slowly make my way back to San Francisco, camping and freelancing until I found a spot (job or apartment) where I would “settle down” for a while.

I had spent a couple days with my immediate family. My dad, brother and I were all leaving the same day, my dad on a business trip, I can’t remember where my brother was. I was starting the journey back to California with a camping stop at the Grand Canyon. My mom would later tell me a story about that day…

There was a black car parked out in front of the house, I didn’t really think much of it but I got a little nervous because you, your brother, and your dad were all out of town. It did not look like someone just sleeping the night, it was a nice, black car with a man in a black suit in the driver’s seat. I called and asked the neighbor to go take a look and see if there was anything weird. As he knocked on the window, the man put up his seat, and drove away without saying a word.

It’s one of those stories that doesn’t do much, unless you look at it through a lense you’ll get later. I have more stories from this time, when using this lense, give me chills.

The email I got from our PM on the project

I started reading the FBI Affidavit, which included detailed descriptions of who was going in and out of the house, any party that was at the house, and insight to what was going on inside. After quickly calling a lawyer (a family friend) he told me I would never hear from the FBI, they already got what they needed.

They already know what kind of cereal you eat, everywhere you’ve seen using the internet, what time you leave and get home from your apartment, what brand of toothpaste you use, everything.

More stories came flooding back. So the Comcast guy that knocked on my door a couple months before, was he actually from Comcast? I don’t know if I ever saw an ID. What else had I missed? How ignorant had I been? A week after this came out I was pitching a new client—I was trying to make up for lost $—he told me he worked for the FBI, but was trying to transition out. I laughed, he didn’t. For a couple weeks my head was spinning, I couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t.

Regardless of your views on the Dark Web or Silk Road, it felt weird to learn that a client and roommate had been lying to this extent. But the writing was already on the wall. I sent the following email (below) shortly before receiving the previous one (above).

So many emails like this

Turns out the lawyer was right. After that FBI press release came out, he was just, gone, and I can admire the breakup. No note, no call, just a bunch of unpaid invoices and 30 FBI agents kicking down the door. There was fallout—to be sure—but no answers on his end.

So what’s the moral of the story?

There’s always more than the eye can see. I left a job with high aspirations of changing the world and improving someone’s life in tangible way—helping rockets get into space. Turns out, I wasn’t doing this at all. I’m not a victim, but I’d say this experience has given me a healthy need to question the needs of the organizations and leadership I serve. Plus, now I always put a little piece of tape over my laptop camera.

All of the code and design for this project can now be seen on Github, and includes an MIT license. Maybe SpaceX will use it after all!