I left 2 corporate careers to find purpose in Silicon Valley. Instead, I found it solving the wrong things

Alex Stephany is CEO and co-founder of Beam, the global leader in AI for human services. The only frontline tech built by frontline workers, Beam’s HIPAA-compliant AI tools help over 100,000 social and healthcare workers across five countries reclaim time for human-centered care.

Purpose at work—everyone wants it. But people go to differing lengths to find it. I walked away from a career in law, followed by a stretch in management consultancy, before landing in technology to try and locate more meaning.

As a lawyer, I was a fish out of water. The pace, the risk-aversion, the gatekeeping — I felt constantly ill at ease among people who clearly felt right at home. My stint as a consultant ended in me being let go, and left me with the same existential question: could this really be it?

So I trusted my instinct and wound my way into startups. In a short period of time, I was running a successful venture-backed parking startup. It gave me the speed, ownership and creativity I’d been looking for, but a question about meaning still lingered.

As company CEO, I traveled to San Francisco often: meeting people, raising money, attending events. But on one occasion, I accidentally wandered into the Tenderloin, the city’s notorious downtown neighborhood.

It was Christmas Day, bitingly cold, and I chanced upon an open-air church service. On paper, that might sound quaint. In reality, it was the most desolate scene I’ve encountered. People not wearing shoes, human unmentionables littering the pavement.

This scene would have been shocking in any city on earth. But I wasn’t in just any city — I was in San Francisco, where one in every 14,000 residents is a billionaire. I tried to square this in my head. When I couldn’t, I realized it........

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