On a warm afternoon in early May, I sat at a cafe in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn with a self-proclaimed hacker. The cafe was “Cotton Bean,” one of the many spouting up in the Nostrand Ave. corridor catering to a new influx of young professionals in the area. The hacker was Evan Stites-Clayton, former founder of Teespring, an e-commerce platform that was once considered a golden child of the Silicon Valley tech scene, commanding valuations approaching one billion dollars. Now, he was at the outset of a new venture, one that found a nest in Backend Capital’s Hacker Fellowship, a 10-week program that took place in a 23-bedroom brownstone a few blocks from where we now sat.
“For you, it’s 1:15 EST. For me, it’s 4.65 hacker time,” Evan remarked, “As soon as I leave this meeting, my autopilot will tell me exactly what I need to do next.”
There was a clear feeling that even though Evan and I were sitting across from each other at the same cafe, in the same year 2020, his experience was driven by a technology that planted him firmly in the future. It was this technology which he had built initial prototypes of during the fellowship.
“The investors at first didn’t understand the concept — we had to let them take it home so they could experience it for themselves.
“We think of this as an Operating System for humans. By default we run "software" that results in greed, disharmony, and unhappiness. Ultimately it heats up the planet and destroys Earth's ecosystem.
“Our technology is an OS for humans that allows us to run different software, and thereby get different results.
“We expect most early users to think of it as a self-help or productivity tool, but really it’s much more than that.”
I was a little taken aback by what Evan was telling me, and even more surprised that he already had investors lined up to give his team over a million dollars in funding. Almost on cue, he gave me a knowing look. He pushed a stack of devices across the small table to me — a bluetooth headset, a fit-bit, and a cheap android phone.
“The hardware solution is a bit of a hack at this point, but trust me, when you try it at home, you’ll get it.”
[ This piece was written as a part of an exercise at the Hacker Fellowship in which we were asked to envision an optimistic future vision of a reporter meeting with us a few months after the program. It was written on Friday March 6, before we realized fully what was about to happen. ]