Mostly Human

Silicon Valley's Secret

Dinner at Meredith Ackley’s house is like stepping into a dream. The walls are painted pink and purple. There’s a heated patio and arching branches over the backyard. The sun beams through the windows, music plays and three beautiful girls dance with their mother in the kitchen.

The missing piece of the fairytale is Ackley’s husband, Eric Salvatierra. It’s been four years since he called to say his last “I love you.”

In 2012, Salvatierra stepped in front of a Caltrain, abruptly ending his life. He was 39 years old.

Salvatierra was an executive who helped build eBay from the ground up. He was the former CFO of Skype, a VP at PayPal, and always one of the smartest in the room, according to his colleagues.

“They would say he could write an Excel spreadsheet like a symphony,” Ackley said. “He was one of those people who could go all the way up and go all the way down into the details.”

Salvatierra would stay up all night coding and occasionally writing his wife love poems. The moments of brilliance when he did his best work -- and channeled extraordinary passion -- turned out to be manic episodes. They were symptoms of Salvatierra’s ultimate struggle: a crippling battle with bipolar disorder and depression.

According to the CDC, one in four people suffer from mental health issues. Scratch the surface in Silicon Valley, and the seemingly open-minded mecca is not necessarily welcoming to them.

In 2016, a study by psychiatrist Dr. Michael Freeman identified the relationship between entrepreneurship and depression. It found that many of the personality traits found in entrepreneurs -- creativity, extroversion, open mindedness and a propensity for risk -- are also traits associated with ADHD, bipolar spectrum conditions, depression and substance abuse.

Ackley’s husband had some of these traits. When Salvatierra was “on,” he was unstoppable, she said.

“I think Eric's managers saw that his brain operated differently than other people and they could use that to their advantage to help the company,” Ackley recalled. “And I just kind of accepted that as part of his work culture, not part of him.”

It wasn’t until her husband was hospitalized and diagnosed as bipolar in 2011 that the reality sunk in. He was battling mental illness.

His bipolar disorder gave him extreme highs manifested in wild bouts of creativity, and incredibly low lows -- he would be paralyzed by feeling like he’d made a mistake and couldn’t forgive himself.

“He would ruminate on these for months,” Ackley said.

While Salvatierra was hospitalized, the couple went to a psychiatrist who advised them to keep it secret.

“I thought I was going to throw up. I thought Eric was going to just disintegrate,” Ackley remembers. “It was instant shame on both of us ... She was like, ‘You don’t want to show weakness; you don’t want to show that your brain is anything but 100%.’”

In Silicon Valley, where your biggest asset is your brain, the stigma is magnified, according to Penelope Draganic, whose husband Zarko also struggled from depression and ended his life. Like Salvatierra, Zarko was lauded for his all-night coding sessions, which were a byproduct of his battle with depression. He was a Silicon Valley success story: Along with other tech titans, he worked at mobile device company General Magic in the early '90s and later founded a startup he sold for millions.

“He slept in a bed in his office, would roll off the bed and write code throughout the night," Draganic says. "They loved his perseverance and his resilience. He was able to perform superhuman tasks because he was biochemically off-kilter, and he wasn't even aware of it because he managed it so well.”

People viewed Zarko’s confidence and work ethic as a sign of his brilliance, Draganic recalled. But she said the pressure made it difficult to talk openly about his mental health issues.

“It's particularly relevant in the Valley because hypo-manic productivity is a sign of strength and opportunity, and even in your weakest moments you're not supposed to present anything other than your game face,” Draganic said. “It's not the culture that creates the illness, but it's a culture that actually makes this illness even harder to grapple with.”

The fine line between creative genius and mental health can be hard to decipher. Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who worked closely with Salvatierra, was blindsided when he died. Whitman personally recruited Salvatierra, who opted not to attend Stanford Business School so he could take a chance on eBay.

“Silicon Valley is a cradle of creative geniuses. And so Eric was not, in some ways, out of the ordinary,” Whitman said. “People had zones of genius, and I just thought, 'OK, this is a really smart, really gifted young guy.'”

Whitman, whose sister struggles with bipolar disorder, says the myth of mental illness is that people are unable to do their jobs.

“Eric was highly functioning. My sister is highly functioning,” she said. “People think, ‘Well, maybe you can’t do the job.’ Actually, it’s often quite the opposite.”

Whitman says tech companies have a responsibility to ensure health plans cover mental health and employees have an open forum to talk about these issues. Now the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Whitman has opened an onsite medical facility for employees.

She’s one of few high-profile CEOs to speak openly about mental health, but a movement is beginning to happen in the Bay Area.