Dear Tech Guys: HBO's Silicon Valley Is NOT An Instruction Manual

from the it's-a-lesson-in-what-not-to-do dept

I've been living in Silicon Valley for just about twenty years at this point, and lived through the original dot com bubble (got the t-shirt, etc.). And there are a few small signs that remind me quite a bit of the "bad stuff" that started to show up in the 1999/2000 time frame, just before everything collapsed. One of the biggest issues: the carpetbaggers. Basically, as things get frothier and frothier, a "different" kind of entrepreneur starts to show up. In the original dot com bubble, these were frequently described as "MBA's" -- but as someone with an MBA degree, I find that to be a bit misleading too. There were plenty of good, smart, tech-savvy MBAs who added value to the innovation community. The real problem was the people who came to (a) get rich and (b) party (not always in that order). Getting rich and having a good time aren't necessarily bad things, but if they're what you're focused on, then bad things tend to result.

Lots of people like to mock the whole mantra of "we're changing the world" in Silicon Valley, and sometimes it deserves to be mocked. But... in many cases, there is actual truth to it. And, in many cases, there are entrepreneurs and innovators who really are trying to change the world and make it a better place. The problem is that you have the other element -- the carpetbaggers -- who show up with no actual interest in innovation or in making the world a better place, but who readily adopt the terminology and slogans of those who do. And, these days, we're seeing more and more of those types of people in the Valley. It's been happening for years, but it's been getting worse and worse lately. It's why people talk about "Techbros" with dumb, but flashy, company ideas, while ignoring entrepreneurs working away at truly world-changing products and services.

I've been thinking more and more about this lately, especially as a whole bunch of stories have come out in the tech world (as in so many other industries) about sexual harassment and sexual assault. And, as in so many industries, this has been an issue for a long time around here -- and often not taken seriously. Earlier this year -- before many of the bigger stories came out -- I wrote about why Silicon Valley needs to get its act together and grow the fuck up. But with many of the revelations coming out, showing how widespread the culture of harassment (and assault) has been, it's a much bigger problem.

That's why this story from Bloomberg is so flabbergasting. Even after all of this, to hear that some tech companies are hiring good looking models to attend their holiday parties is just so... dumb.

Local modeling agencies, which work with Facebook- and Google-size companies as well as much smaller businesses and the occasional wealthy individual, say a record number of tech companies are quietly paying $50 to $200 an hour for each model hired solely to chat up attendees. For a typical party, scheduled for the weekend of Dec. 8, Cre8 Agency LLC is sending 25 women and 5 men, all good-looking, to hang out with “pretty much all men” who work for a large gaming company in San Francisco, says Cre8 President Farnaz Kermaani. The company, which she wouldn’t name, has handpicked the models based on photos, made them sign nondisclosure agreements, and given them names of employees to pretend they’re friends with, in case anyone asks why he’s never seen them around the foosball table.

To be honest, the story is so dumb, and no companies are actually named, that I'm wondering how much of this story is actually planted by the modeling companies hoping to make it reality. But... these days, we're hearing about so much bad behavior that it may very well be happening.

And I saw more than a few people commenting on Twitter that this seemed like something straight out of HBO's Silicon Valley. Which leads me into another thought that I've been toying with recently. Last time I was in Washington DC, some friends based there were asking me what I thought of the show, and I said that for all of its famed "accuracy," I thought it was ruining the actual Silicon Valley. My friends suggested this was ridiculous, since the show clearly made most of the protagonists out to be fairly buffoon-like, and worthy of mockery. But... without other guidance, it really feels like many people are arriving in Silicon Valley with the HBO show as their mental model of how things are supposed to be. And, even if the show is "truthy" in how it portrays certain people/activities, it does so for the sake of entertainment. Thus, it only presents the really exaggerated versions, and creates entertaining caricatures of certain types of people, while leaving out the many, many, other people who actually get real shit done here, without being buffoons or assholes.

People out here, for the most part, still love the show, because they recognize elements of reality within those characters and events -- but it misses out on the nitty-gritty of how stuff gets done and the fact that some people are legitimately doing good stuff without being horrible people. But if everyone now coming into Silicon Valley is coming in with HBO's Silicon Valley as their model -- too many are looking at the show as an instruction manual, rather than a giant warning sign of what not to do. In some ways, it reminds me of the classic 90's indie film Swingers with Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn. When it came out, I remember lots of guys trying to "take lessons" from the movie in how to pick up women, even though the entire point of the movie was to make fun of those people with their tricks and rules and games.

Assuming that story of hiring models for parties really is true, it feels like yet another brick in this problematic wall of "techbro" culture taking over from what has always been the true core of Silicon Valley, involving non-assholes who really are changing the world. It would be great if we could get more of that, and less of the HBO version, no matter how entertaining it might be.

Filed Under: bad behavior, change the world, sexual assault, sexual harassment, silicon valley

Dilbert's Scott Adams Has The Best Explanation Of Innovation In Silicon Valley Today That You'll Read

from the it's-all-psychology dept

Having spent nearly two decades in Silicon Valley, it's always interesting to see how different people try to understand or explain the innovative process that happens here. Remember last week's discussion on "disruptive innovation?" That's just a small part of the larger debate, often perpetrated by folks who have little sense of what's often going on in the startup and innovation world. So I find it interesting that after reading a bunch of opinions on that debate, a totally unrelated discussion hit home as being a hell of a lot more insightful and relevant to understanding a lot (though not all) of the innovation happening in Silicon Valley today, and it comes from Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame.

Adams, of course, is more than "just" a comic strip author, even if that's what he's most known for. He's started a few other businesses over time and is apparently hard at work on an internet startup. He also tends to post thought-provoking posts to his blog pretty frequently, even if he admits that much of the time he's just trolling to get responses out of people. Sometimes I strongly agree with him, and at other times, I vehemently disagree. But one of his recent posts on the nature of innovation in Silicon Valley is really worth reading.

It starts out by clearly setting itself up to mock the overused and overhyped concept among startups of the pivot -- a startup totally changing product direction after realizing its existing offering was unlikely to go anywhere. This concept has often been mocked (perhaps rightfully so) as highlighting entrepreneurs who either lack the courage of their conviction, or who are unwilling to put in the long slog of building a real business. But while Adams could take the easy mocking route, he actually provides a lot more insight into what's really happening, first highlighting how much of success in Silicon Valley is really due to luck.

The valley attracts some of the smartest humans on Earth, and each of those humans, being otherwise normal, probably assumed they could use their talent, brains, and hard work to achieve specific business goals, such as building product X and selling the company to Google for a billion dollars.

And then they find out that success in the start-up realm is mostly luck. They discover this by trying great ideas coupled with great execution and failing. And they further discover it by observing unexpected successes at other start-ups. Success simply can't be predicted to any level of statistical comfort.

Smart observers in the valley look for the "tell" that an early stage start-up will be a winner, but none can be found. Oh, sure, the team needs to be smart, talented, and willing to work long hours. But nearly every start-up has that going for it. Most have great ideas as well. None of it predicts success.

This is an exaggeration, of course. A skilled and ready team executing well is better situated to capitalize on good luck -- and there is a big variance in skills and execution among teams. But it is depressing how little people recognize or admit the role of luck in a successful startup. In my experience, first-time entrepreneurs who succeed take way too much credit for their own work. Those who struggled to build their business or who have a failure or two under their belts are much more willing to admit the role of luck (good or bad) in their eventual results.

But rather than taking this to the next expected place of laughing off the whole situation as an effort in being lucky, Adams points out that with the basic infrastructure of building a startup so commoditized, it changes the nature of innovation on the internet, such that it's no longer about a technological advantage or innovation, but about psychology:

In an environment in which start-up resources are not limited, and no one can predict the next winner, and it is easy to measure customer behavior in great detail, the Internet is no longer a technology.

The Internet is a psychology experiment.

Building a product for the Internet is now the easy part. Getting people to understand the product and use it is the hard part. And the only way to make the hard part work is by testing one psychological hypothesis after another.

Every entrepreneur is now a psychologist by trade. The ONLY thing that matters to success in our anything-is-buildable Internet world is psychology. How does the customer perceive this product? What causes someone to share? What makes virality happen? What makes something sticky?

And that's why you see so many companies "pivot." Because as a psychology experiment, it becomes clear that the early results aren't good, so it's time to try something else. Whether or not this seems exciting or depressing to you may depend on your perspective, but Adams isn't taking an opinion on the subject so much as describing what he's observing, and it seems fairly accurate in my experience.

There's one other bit of Adam's post that is worth highlighting, because it's something that people outside of the startup world almost never understand: the fact that while highly competitive, the level of "helping each other out" that goes on in Silicon Valley is quite incredible:

Another fascinating phenomenon in the valley is that every entrepreneur and investor seems genuinely interested in helping strangers succeed. I would go so far as to call it the defining feature of the start-up culture. Some of it has to do with the nature of entrepreneurs as serial problem-solvers. If you tell me what problem your start-up is experiencing, my reflex is to offer a suggestion or to connect you to someone who can help. And creating social capital makes a lot of sense when teams are fluid and who-you-know always matters. But beyond the practical and selfish benefits of being helpful, the dominant worldview in Silicon Valley is that if you aren't trying to make the world better, you're in the wrong line of work. The net effect is that the start-up culture is shockingly generous. If you need something for your start-up, folks will happily help you find it. I would have predicted the opposite.

Adams is not the only one who would have predicted the opposite. Time and time again, I hear outside observers believe that the startup world is very insular and only focused on their own goals. People frequently like to mock the "change the world" attitude of many entrepreneurs, finding it difficult to believe it's sincere or genuine, rather than pure marketing hype. And, sure, there are some carpetbaggers who don't believe it at all, but the degrees to which many in the Valley are legitimately trying to do amazing things and change the world is part of what's so inspiring in an age where cynicism and protectionism is so prevalent elsewhere.

We've talked in the past about all the research that shows how widespread information sharing and job hopping made Silicon Valley into the innovative center of the world, and this is just an extension of that. Rather than creating silos inside big firms, Silicon Valley has long been about sharing ideas among a wide group of people, which actually helps accelerate the pace of those "psychological experiments" to figure out what works, and what will actually build a better, more innovative product.

It's a really useful way of understanding Silicon Valley for those who haven't lived it.

Filed Under: change the world, experimentation, innovation, pivot, psychology, scott adams