Tech exec who told family “We’re in the Matrix” still missing

SAN JOSE >> Relatives continued their frantic search Saturday for a missing young tech executive who they said apparently suffered a manic episode early in the week, telling them in a string of bizarre phone calls that “it’s all a game, it’s a thought experiment, we’re in the Matrix.”

Erin Valenti, a 33-year-old entrepreneur whose husband said she had no history of mental illness, was on a business trip to Silicon Valley from Utah when she went missing Monday night.

Her parents said they last heard from her close to midnight, when she was driving a rental car through residential neighborhoods of the Almaden Valley in South San Jose, off-course from her plans to drive from Palo Alto to catch a 6:40 p.m. flight home from the San Jose airport.

The young woman, who has thick blond hair down to her waist and was driving a gray Nissan Murano, hasn’t used her phone or credit cards since.

Her mother, Whitey Valenti, flew to San Jose from New York with her husband and two sons to join her daughter’s husband in the search.

Whitey Valenti said Saturday that her daughter is an intense, brilliant young woman who graduated with high honors from Georgetown University before entering the private equity world.

“We talked to her for hours on and off” on Monday night, Valenti said.

“Her thoughts were disconnected. She talked a mile a minute. She’d say I’m coming home for Thanksgiving, then in the next she was saying she’s in the Matrix,” a reference to a science fiction movie about a virtual reality world.

The family planned to hire someone on Saturday with a drone to search the rugged areas of Quicksilver Park in the Almaden Valley.

On Friday, they reviewed security camera footage at gas stations and plastered missing-person flyers throughout Almaden, including the areas around Redmond and Camden avenues and Washoe Drive.

Verizon Wireless picked up pings in that area on Monday.

Attempts to locate the woman through “find my phone” apps and other digital search tools have been unsuccessful.

During the phone calls with family members on Monday night, Erin Valenti said she was low on gas.

With a request from the family, a San Jose police officer contacted Valenti by phone Monday night.

“The officer said she wasn’t making any sense. They drove around looking for her on Monday night and never found her,” said Valenti’s husband, Harrison Weinstein.

Police consider her case a “voluntary” missing person and “are not doing any active search,” Weinstein said Saturday.

“We are extremely upset about that,” he said.

When reached by email Saturday, San Jose police Sgt. Enrique Garcia didn’t explain the department’s approach to the case, saying only that “we are not sharing additional information about the investigation at this time.”

Weinstein, a psychologist, said Erin Valenti checked out from The Nest Hotel in Palo Alto on Monday afternoon.

“There’s never any history of anything like this, no mental health diagnosis, no hospitalization, no substance use, no arrests — as clear of a record as you can get. This is incredibly unlike her,” he said. “She is an extremely high achievement, successful person.”

Valenti missed a ceremony Tuesday in Utah, where she was looking forward to receiving a “women in tech” award.

She founded her own company, Tinker Ventures, and is an avid rock climber, mountaineer and skier, her family said.

“I always say she’s intense,” her mother said, “because she always has to be the best. I’d say, ‘calm down, you don’t have to be the best at everything.’”

Valenti and Weinstein met in Palo Alto in 2003, when he was a graduate student at Palo Alto University and she was working for Summit Partners private equity firm. They’ve been married since 2011.

During her trip to California the week of Oct. 1, the couple spoke each night, Weinstein said, and everything was fine.

She stayed at the Ritz-carlton, Laguna Niguel, for an executive leadership workshop called “Create the Powerful” and on Thursday flew to San Jose and rented the Nissan.

She drove to a tech conference in Monterey late in the week before returning last weekend to the Bay Area to reconnect with old friends and colleagues.

Nothing seemed amiss until she called her parents about 3:30 p.m. on Monday after she met with a former colleague on Sand Hill Road and said she couldn’t find her rental car.

Once she found the car, she stayed on the phone with her parents and her conversation became bizarre.

“It’s a nightmare,” her mother said.

“I don’t know if the car ran off the road. Why can’t they find a car? How can you hide a car?”