Daniel Breyer swears he isn’t mad at his dad.
“He’s done nothing but give me an incredible life, and he’s a really good dad,” Breyer says of his father, Jim, the billionaire founder and CEO of investment and venture philanthropy firm Breyer Capital. “I care a lot about him.”
This is slightly difficult to believe, given that the younger Breyer’s debut novel, “Smokebirds,” to be released Tuesday by Rare Bird Lit, is a searing indictment of a fabulously wealthy, high-society San Francisco family — exactly the kind of tribe he grew up in.
“I would hope that my dad doesn’t take any shit from this book,” Daniel says in an interview at a bustling La Boulangerie in Noe Valley. “He’s a much better person than all of my characters, I promise.”
Breyer’s father is arguably one of the most successful venture capitalists in the country, with early investments in Facebook and Etsy and a current net worth of about $1.8 billion. As a result, the younger Breyer grew up in a six-bedroom, five-bath, $15 million estate on five acres in scenic Woodside, attended a private high school in Menlo Park, along with “a lot of other kids of VCs and entrepreneurs and stuff,” and studied history at Brown University. After college, he started an early-stage crypto firm with his younger brother, cofounded a startup, and ultimately went to work at his dad’s company, where he is now a partner.
Which is to say, he knows he’s a cliche. “This book’s a lot about nepotism, and that’s the world that I live in,” he says.
His novel is not so much an attempt to break away from that world — he loves investing and working with entrepreneurs, he says — as it is an opportunity to skewer it. “Smokebirds” centers around a wealthy Pacific Heights family, the Petersons, whose fortune derives from patriarch Duke Peterson’s multibillion-dollar lumber company — an enterprise reviled for profiting off the massive forest fires that have overtaken California. Duke’s children, Eliza and Richard, either work for their father or make their wealth using his money; his grandchildren, Cole and Emmett, struggle with whether they should follow in their parents’ footsteps. Everyone is unhappy, and no one is likeable.
Breyer says he was inspired to write the book on what he calls “Orange Sky Day” — the 24 hours in September 2020 when wildfire turned the sky above San Francisco bright orange, hammering home the effects of climate change and decades of poor land use. In Breyer’s affluent circle, he says, the conversation was not around why this apocalyptic omen was happening but how to escape it.
“It was very much, ‘Let’s get out of here, let’s retreat,” he says. “It was like, ‘Of course this is gonna happen.’ Climate change for rich people is to figure out how we cannot have this affect us. And I thought, let’s write a book about it.”
That book — for which Breyer says he found an agent and publisher without using family connections — paints a bleak, unsparing picture of the rarified world in which it is set. The characters abuse prescription pills, plot illicit affairs, cheat each other out of money, and, in one pivotal scene, attempt to cover up a massive forest fire started by their company. (One character, in a particularly Silicon Valley twist, starts therapy after “reading about its business merits in a Sheryl Sandberg book.”)
They read like characters out of “White Lotus” or “Succession” — immature, self-absorbed, and generally incapable of introspection. “They’re all awful characters,” Breyer says. “Maybe they’re all the worst parts of myself, or the worst thoughts that have ever entered my head, coupled with the worst behaviors I’ve seen from other people in my circles.”
And Breyer has seen a lot of bad behavior. His private high school, he recalls, had a yearly fashion show to raise money for financial aid students, where upperclassmen strutted down a runway in designer clothing. “What type of place every year raises money for financial aid by having their 17- to 18-year-olds parade down an aisle in clothes that cost $2,000?” he asks. College and the venture world were not much better: “I know a lot of very wealthy people. I don’t know how many of them I would say are very self-realized, great, genuine,” he says. “Some of them are great, for sure, but a lot of them aren’t. A lot of them are desperate for the next thing.”
Still, he says, he does not want the book to come off like he’s staking a moral high ground or waging class war. As someone whose salary is paid by his billionaire father, he knows the hypocrisy inherent in writing a book like this.
“You can be a ‘good nepo baby’ and own it, and it’s almost a social currency — people like you more,” he says. “I can do that in this interview, I can do that in general, and I think a lot of the book is about that tension.”
The Standard reached out to Jim Breyer via email for his thoughts on his son’s debut novel, but instead received a response from Daniel, who relayed that his father would not be commenting. The elder Breyer “wasn’t planning to do interviews or provide comment to the press outlets I’m speaking to about the book,” his son said. “He’s proud of me and a fan of the novel, but also knows this is my project.”
For someone who’s done so much reflecting on how wealth has affected his past, Breyer doesn’t have much to say about how it’s affecting the future. Asked about his life as an investor, and whether he thinks about the potential harms of companies he invests in — such as AI startups that require vast quantities of energy to run their chatbots, or automation companies that could replace human jobs — his answers are slightly less considered.
| Source: Ulysses Ortega for The Standard
“I just do the best I can to be like, I really like this opportunity. I think this could be really cool, and a positive thing, and really fun to work on,’’ he says. “But yes, if I backed a company that turned out to, like, cause horrible harm for people and tons of negative effects, I’d feel fucking terrible.”
That, in essence, is what Breyer’s novel offers: an acknowledgment of the sins of his class, but not much in the way of solutions. Perhaps it is revealing that Breyer sees himself most in the character of Cole, the idealistic college student who swings between wanting to support liberal causes and wanting to protect his wealthy family, and who — spoiler alert — never actually has to face the consequences of his actions.
“I do think the worst part of me, if I totally just went off the deep end, I’d become more like Cole,” Breyer says. “He’s very liberal, says the right things, talks the right points, but what does he want more than anything else? He just wants to be liked.”
That being said, he adds: “He does things I would never do. Or I hope I would never do.” He laughs. “Time will tell.”