GOD COMPLEX

SILICON VALLEY WAS ONCE DRIVEN BY A GODLESS CHASE FOR GROWTH. NOW THE NEW RELIGION IS RELIGION

ZOË BERNARD

IT’S MID-OCTOBER IN San Francisco, and a crowd of 200 or so congregants—some seated in pews, others standing below cathedral windows at the back—bow their heads in prayer. Over cranberryapple cosmos and plates of Burmese food served by black-shirted waiters, a DJ plays a thumping soundtrack of remixed worship music. This is not a church service or even a Bible study. It is, instead, an entirely new kind of event in Silicon Valley. We are here to listen in on a conversation between Dr. Francis S. Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health and leader of the Human Genome Project, and Garry Tan, the president and CEO of Silicon Valley’s influential start-up incubator Y Combinator, which has hatched thousands of tech companies with a combined valuation of…

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Vanity Fair UK (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 2025

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