My husband, Parag, and I are walking the long hallway of our four-bedroom house in Los Altos Hills, California. We come to the room we’ve been using as a gym, I do a quick inventory: treadmill, stationary bike, stair stepper, set of weights. A framed mirror we never got around to mounting leans against the wall. In the small room we introduce to guests as “the ironing room” there’s an ironing board, a guest bed, a chest of drawers, a floor lamp, and a collection of shag poufs. Parag and I agree: Donate it all. There’s the dining room we converted when we moved in, installing a high-definition projector and wall-sized screen, a state-of-the-art sound system, and the most comfortable L-shaped couch the world has ever known. My husband looks at me and we both wonder the same thing. How did we acquire so much stuff?

Two years earlier we had been living in a modest, craftsman-style bungalow in Atlanta. Parag was a professor at Georgia Tech in an obscure field combining artificial intelligence and music, and I was a struggling entrepreneur without a salary. Our house was in a part of the city known as Old Fourth Ward, where break-ins and vandalized cars were not uncommon—but we felt safe because we had nothing much to steal: a vintage couch we’d found on Craigslist, an IKEA footstool, an old TV.

Then, one sweltering July morning, I woke up ragged with nerves. My latest startup, which I’d founded with my husband, had launched a new iPhone app a few days earlier—a quirky little thing called Songify, which turns spoken word into song. I checked my phone to see how highly we were ranked in the App Store and had the shock of my life: Songify was number one, the most downloaded free iPhone app in the world. My inbox was flooded with messages—from TV stations and newspapers requesting interviews, from investment firms eager to learn more about our growth plans.

Suddenly, everything changed. Within six months we’d moved to the Bay Area, merged with a larger company in Silicon Valley, and taken lucrative jobs as executives there. We had money for the first time in our lives and quickly leased a house in a scenic neighborhood—a decision that opened the floodgates. We spotted handsome furniture through our neighbors' windows and we saw the expensive cars in their driveways. The houses on either side of ours had infinity pools overlooking private mini-vineyards. One neighbor, who had sold his company for hundreds of millions during the first dot-com boom, was installing a zip line to encourage his children to spend more time outdoors.