LSD, cargo shorts and the fall of a tech CEO
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
"Back in San Francisco, Zhu was preparing for an important meeting with a prominent investor group. Believing that limited quantities of LSD would improve his pitch, Zhu, who had never before used the drug, decided to try the microdosing plan. He took what he thought was a small amount of LSD shortly before the meeting."
That's just plain stupid.
also it sounds like a litany of other things but I read this yesterday and don't recall off hand now
I prefer to smoke weed and hang at the beach, so I don't chase investor money, or make myself responsible for the wellbeing of full-time employees.
Is it limiting, absolutely.
Would I rather work myself to death now so I can... one day (maybe, dad died at 50 so...) one day maybe do the same thing... Lol
An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
The Mexican replied, “only a little while. The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?”
The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.” The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”
The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”
To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.”
“But what then?” Asked the Mexican.
The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”
“Millions – then what?”
The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”
At his current margins, the fisherman's business is basically entirely fixed-cost. He needs to pay for a house and food for his family and new guitar strings when one breaks and that's it, in terms of expenses bait or whatever is probably next to negligible (I know nothing about fishing)
So he's vulnerable to someone spending twice as much time fishing as he does, lowering the commodity price of fish to 1/2 his current rate, so they'd be able to sell at 3/4ths his rate to undercut him while making a solid profit. Maybe the demand is there that it wouldn't affect our main character, but it's kind of an unstable equilibrium. If all his competitors decided that they actually wanted some of that profit and did full work days rather than only fishing for "a little while", the competition and increased supply would mean cheaper fish for everyone else in town but they'd end up stuck all working longer hours for not actually that much more money (since they'd have to compete with each other they probably couldn't all sustain 33% margins)
What the harvard MBA should have told the fisherman is that his lifestyle was at risk and he needs to form a cartel with all the other fishermen to not work more than a few hours a day (normally he would also have to worry about imports from elsewhere, but maybe transportation costs and a lax regulatory environment in the fisherman's town allow him to undercut external competitors without having to work too hard)
(One interpretation is that their culture is already forming that "cartel" as none of them want to or see a reason to work more. But they're still vulnerable to people from outside the villiage who don't share that view coming in and eating their lunch.)
From the article, looks like that wasn't the actual reason. The actual reason is that Zhu preferred his own personal brand PR (with heavy social justice activism overtones, accusing anybody who challenges him of racism because he happens to be of Asian descent) to the good of the company, and was unwilling to reconcile the two.
Hard to say he lost overall if he is walking away with 8-9 figure equity.
Companies can't just kick someone off the cap table once they have vested equity.
There’s no shortage of stories out there of founders being burned by VCs once the company has real money behind it.
Down rounds and massive dilution absolutely happen, but this hits the entire cap table.
- We love our CEO! We'll do anything to keep this boss happy
- We're stuck with a loser, and we need to make a change
- We're in the middle. This CEO has real strengths, which we appreciate, and real weaknesses, which concern us. We're regularly taking stock of the situation, and we'd probably like an orderly transition down the road. But we're probably okay for now.
The third situation is quite common. And in those cases, you don't really need a "pretext" or a "power struggle." You just need the board to say: "We've tolerated a lot, but maybe we've tolerated too much. This new incident is not what we'd be seeing if we had the right CEO."
The article has a specific quote which would indicate there's some disconnect between the average board and this ceo.
>> He believed that he and the company were too focused on sales and money at the expense of altruistic goals
This is an obvious point of conflict with a board, which would not align itself with a CEO who said that even privately.
I think he could have done with advice from a mentor who wasn't at all involved with the vc side - even on how formal meetings like board should be run.
He is right about different cultures around how meetings are run though.
Zuckerberg:
“So one of the things that I’ve been lucky about in building this company is ... I kind of have voting control of the company, and that’s something I focused on early on. And it was important because, without that, there were several points where I would’ve been fired. For sure, for sure,”
Source: The Verge
That often isn’t the case. I personally know of situations where CEOs were pushed out and recapped to effectively little.
Naturally, he presents the issue as being all about him getting ousted for being Asian.
That is exactly the problem. They cargo cult Steve Jobs' personality, fashion or some other aspect, but they don't deliver Steve Jobs kind of results. It ends up being cringey at best and disastrous for their company at worst.
I have seen this before with CxOs and owners who decided their company would be "just like Apple" and they would be "just like Steve Jobs". They read how Steve Jobs was an asshole, so they just started acting like assholes towards everyone waiting for the fame and fortune to follow.
1) Steve Jobs had a vision for the appearance, function, and marketability of his products, and enforced his tyrannical will on his team until that vision was met, or at least it was impossible to enforce any more. The fact that his vision changed along the way or that he was inconsistent at times isn't as important as the fact that he was a central authority that was allowed to keep the resultant products consistent and stable. People who try to behave like Steve Jobs rarely have the level of vision that he did, and mimic his behavior rather than his principles.
2) Everything the teams under Steve Jobs produced has been cargo-cult mimicked ad nauseam by people today, to the point where every modern software looks like someone tried to redesign Apple software from memory. Unfortunately, it all sucks (compare Jira to Windows 95 Email in terms of form and its relation to function).
In this case, the vision is unifying and improves your ability to execute.
If the vision is not coherent or consistent then you lose the ability to execute without micro-management. Staff will be unhappy because they feel subject to the whims of an unpredictable dictator.
You can have both experiences in the same company if there are some people who "get it" and other people who don't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Nguyen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Labs
https://collapsed.co/startups/color-labs
https://www.fastcompany.com/1784823/bill-nguyen-the-boy-in-t...
https://www.fastcompany.com/1742613/how-colors-bill-nguyen-w...
If dosed correctly (it takes time to find it and depends on the person) micro-dosing (usually around 5 - 20 ug per dose) an obvious effect in not as apparent as you might expect.
For me, 5 to 10 is enough. I don‘t actually want to feel the body high when microdosing. Precisely because it should feel like a normal day. Except your perception, creativity and emotional balance is heightened.
Is there any science to back this up? The increase in confidence from alcohol makes me dance better... from my perspective, at least. I've read the "productivity boost" from ADHD drugs is similar. It feels like you're doing more/better but you're really doing the same.
Seems like he picked a bad time to try it out.
I would love to work for someone like this, but since I just retired, not really a thing any more.
I wouldn’t assume this, or that they’re worth the same.
https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hyp...
>The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard, by Bill Atkinson.
>In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, California.
>I gazed up at a hundred billion galaxies each with a hundred billion stars, and each star a giant thermonuclear fusion reaction as powerful as our Sun. And for the first time in my life I knew deep down inside that we are not alone.
>I knew that life on planet Earth is not the only pocket of consciousness in the universe, and likely not the most advanced. But we still have a role to play in the unfolding drama of creation.
>It seemed to me the universe is in a process of coming alive. Consciousness is blossoming and propagating to colonize the universe, and life on Earth is one of many bright spots in the cosmic birth of consciousness.
>But the stars are separated by enormous distances of darkness and vacuum, which may hinder communication between them. I lowered my gaze and saw the street lamps below glowing brightly, each casting a pool of light but surrounded by darkness before the next lamp. As above, so below.
>The street lamps reminded me of bodies of knowledge, gems of discovery and understanding, but separated from each other by distance and different languages. Poets, artists, musicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, mathmeticians, and economists all have separate pools of knowledge, but are hindered from sharing and finding the deeper connections.
>My vision distorted by thick eyeglasses, I witnessed the curvature of the Earth’s horizon, and I felt the pull of gravity toward its center, such that every one of us is standing at the very apex. Each of us stands at the top of planet Earth, and each of us is a leader or captain of the “Blue Marble” team.
>How could I help? By focusing on the weak link. If I were captain of a soccer team, I would look for the weak link and work on it. If the goalie was letting too many through, I would spend extra practice time with him, and the whole team would prosper.
>It occurred to me the weak link for the Blue Marble team is wisdom. Humanity has achieved sufficient technological power to change the course of life and the entire global ecosystem, but we seem to lack the perspective to choose wisely between alternative futures. But I was young, without much life experience or wisdom myself.
>Knowledge, it seemed to me, consists of the “How” connections between pieces of information, the cause and effect relationships. How does this action bring about that result. Science is a systematic attempt to discover the “How” connections.
>Wisdom, it seemed to me, was a step further removed, the bigger perspective of the “Why” connections between pieces of knowledge. Why, for reasons ethical and aesthetic, should we choose one future over another?
>I thought if we could encourage sharing of ideas between different areas of knowledge, perhaps more of the bigger picture would emerge, and eventually more wisdom might develop. Sort of a trickle-up theory of information leading to knowledge leading to wisdom.
>This was the underlying inspiration for HyperCard, a multimedia authoring environment that empowered non-programmers to share ideas using new interactive media called HyperCard stacks.
>Each card in a HyperCard stack included graphics, text, interactive buttons, and links that took you to another card or stack. Built-in painting tools, drag-and-drop authoring with a library of pre-fab buttons and fields, and simple event based scripting made HyperCard flexible and easy to use.
>It took a lot of hard work and a dedicated team to complete this mission. Apple shipped HyperCard in August 1987, and included it free with every Mac so any user could create and share HyperCard stacks. Many creative people expressed their ideas and passions, and several million interactive HyperCard stacks were created.
>HyperCard was a precurser to the first web browser, except chained to a hard drive before the worldwide web. Six years later Mosaic was introduced, influenced by some of the ideas in HyperCard, and indirectly by an inspiring LSD experience.
Taking a "small amount" LSD for the first time in your life, right before an important meeting, in the vain hope that it will improve your pitch, when you don't even have any idea how it will feel, or what it will do to you, or how long it will last, or even how to medically define and accurately measure a "small amount" of LSD, is astoundingly idiotic and irresponsible.
Is that how he runs his whole company? Why bother with development and staging servers? Just log in as root and hack away on the production server!
I understand that he made a dosing mistake, but to pile on this whole thread, what he did was a forehead-smackingly bad decision.
As a South Asian, I think there's more meaningful discussion to be had on the "bamboo ceiling" and, in particular, how Chinese collectivist views interact in increasingly global economies. This core tension between the two views isn't going to go away. Perhaps the Eternal September is upon us?
The major one: in the West, the expectation is that everyone will express their opinion and be respected for it, even if their opinion is a minority. If you disagree with the boss, you're expected to say so, even to the point of having an actual argument. In the collectivist view, disagreeing (even privately) with those in authority is a huge no-no. Having an argument with your boss is roughly on a behavioural par with taking a dump on their desk.
It's easy to see how a collectivist boss would be criticised by Western colleagues for not allowing free debate or gathering enough opinions on a subject.
The thing that really causes issues, is "airing dirty laundry". Ie, don't ever disagree around people outside of the company, don't complain to people above your manager or outside your org and don't gripe on company slack channels if it undermines your superiors.
Someone actually did it for you already!
Needlessly aggressive response.
ex•pound intransitive verb To make a detailed statement. intransitive verb To explain in detail; elucidate.
Here, the narrative is that the CEO is ousted because of anti-Asian bias/racism from his investors. Similarly, with Basecamp, employees quit due to a change in workplace policy that they viewed as intolerant.
You can take those suppositions at face value. Or you can look at our supercharged political culture and view these prevailing narratives as convenient scapegoats.
I don't think that 1/3 of Basecamp's employees decided to quit based on one meeting or an isolated policy decision. I presume many were thinking about leaving (due to workplace culture or otherwise), and a 6 month severance package made the decision easy for them.
I have no idea what is going on internally at Iterable or the company's financial situation. But stellar performance gives you a lot of breathing room. Adam Neumann's drug use was tolerated and even encouraged when WeWork was doubling in value every year...right up until WeWork tried to go public and imploded.
Being unconventional is embraced in the business world as long as you're delivering returns to your investors. Once you're not, it is used against you. We've seen this fall from grace play out over and over again (Travis Kalanick, Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, etc).
At the core though, they have a highly talented group of people that probably won't have trouble finding a job in 6 months. If I was in that situation, and I agreed with the changes they made (I read Jason Fried's post, and mostly agree), I would still take the buyout!
6 months salary for me, or most engineers (or anyone, really) is A LOT of money. I like my job, and I've had lifestyle jobs that I absolutely LOVED. I can't say that I have ever loved a job so much that I would turn down that much money to leave.
If I was staying I would be pretty annoyed, the people that leave get a bag of cash, and the people that stay get to pick up the slack while their former colleagues get on twitter to dump on the company?
> For instance, when you fund a company in its early stages,
> you might want a founder who will microdose LSD at work,
> because that’s just the sort of imaginative, aggressive,
> independent thinking that might change the world or whatever.
> (“Narrative violation: This CEO drops acid,” etc.)
> But when you are looking to take that company public,
> you want a CEO who would never microdose LSD at work,
> because that’s the sort of thing that stodgy
> institutional investors and regulators will find unsettling.
> If the founder-CEO has been microdosing acid all along,
> and you have been encouraging him to do so,
> there will be an awkward transition when you tell him to stop.
(The whole section is good, but this is a good summary paragraph)
The two investors with whom Zhu seems to take issue were born and raised in South Asia and Turkey, respectively.
Zhu was replaced by his co-founder (who supported Zhu's firing) who is of East Asian descent.
Zhu believed "the company were too focused on sales and money at the expense of altruistic goals". Excuse me? You're running a company with other peoples' money at stake with the express understanding that you will seek to maximize their returns.
Zhu was the one who publicized the LSD incident (which was NOT a microdose, as he admits) via his contact with a reporter. The board actually tried to intervene. Imagine finding this out as an investor. Now all your company's current and potential customers, partners, and investors know that you've got an Adam Neuman type at the helm. That's got major potential to harm investors.
Ultimately, this reads as an egoist who can't sufficiently control his impulses. It's a wonder he wasn't fired sooner.
Separately, much of the reporting on this has been emblematic of the sorry state of journalism. This article, for example, bends over backwards to draw tenuous connections between racial bias/identity politics and Zhu's firing. Truly shameful.
You can't simply abstract all of Asia, from Turkey to China, as a singular monolith. Now's a good chance to point out that the MIT 'Bamboo Ceiling' paper from 2020 makes this distinction in the title:
"Why East Asians but not South Asians are underrepresented in leadership positions in the United States"
"You’re just pattern matching,” Zhu recalls telling them. “Your last 20 CEOs who went public, they were probably all Caucasian guys.”
Note again that the same board replaced Zhu with his east-Asian partner, who also supported Zhu's ouster, and that each of the investors in question had funded other major start-ups with east-Asian CEOs.
A guy has a cool idea, then he needs money to make it big. Some people give the money in the hope that they will maximize their return. The fact they give money doesn't give them total power.
I've been in that situation of having a cool idea with investor interested. Believe me, those with the money quickly think your idea is theirs and all of a sudden you're reduced to that : an initial idea, a starting point. As soon as money is put in, you basically don't exist anymore. I don't consider that a fair deal; it's a deal with vultures.
So, yep, Zhu got my sympathy.
But Iterable's mission (quoting from its career page) is: "We empower growth marketers." Its products help your organization get more juice out of emails, texts, etc.
That's a busine$$ -- and it's very much an area where money can be made. I'm struggling to see how this could be an altruism play, too.
If you "need money to make it big" you can bootstrap, take donations, or look for investors.
It's easier to raise investment than donations, because an investor expects a return in an economic/probabalistic sense(not hopes for a return)
You can't have your cake and eat it too though; once you accept investment you can't cry foul when they don't sit back and act like a donor.
I wonder why in this case it's different, yet another tech CEO/Founder can go to Burning Man, trip on LSD and peyote, brag to everyone they were out of their mind at Burning Man, and face no consequences.
I feel the LSD wasn't the main problem. Zhu just didn't manage the company in a manor they felt comfortable with and used any pretext to cast him out.
To which CEO are you referring? Also, the comparative context is very different. One (Zhu) is in a fundraising meeting with a potential investor (i.e. in professional capacity) whereas the other (your hypothetical) is at a festival (i.e. a personal capacity).
> I feel the LSD wasn't the main problem. Zhu just didn't manage the company in a manor they felt comfortable with and used any pretext to cast him out.
I agree. The article seems to suggest that the LSD incident was merely emblematic of a trend of behavior with which the board was unsatisfied. In fact, reading between the lines, it actually seems like the board was more troubled that Zhu chose to publicize the LSD incidence via a reporter.
I have struggled with this question a lot and taking a bigger picture view helped me understand the systemic problem.
The exact same reasoning was used by some social media users to argue that there was no racial motivation in the case of George Floyd's murder by Minneapolis police in May 2020. One of the officer was East Asian and another was not white but the man who had the knee on the neck of George Floyd was white and was the superior officer.
I can't conclude that all the power over Mr.Zhu in this case was in the hands of the two VCs you mentioned.
I am saying racial bias should be viewed with the lens of the larger system or world in which we all operate.
But we already know it does. He brought the company from 0 to $2b valuation, steadily growing for 8 years.
I do agree though that it would be great for startup to not depend on VCs that much.
My 2¢: stop forcing companies to provide health insurance.
A proposal to do exactly that. Critically, it phased out incentives available to corporations that provide employee healthcare in favor of tax deductions for individuals that purchase their own healthcare. During the transition period, employers would subsidize private plans purchased by their employees.
Another thought is throughput. If welfare wasn't so closely tied to employment, working relationships could then be more ephemeral until one found a best fit. This may also look like more cautious hiring, which directly leads to missed opportunities for all parties.
Edit:
Capital buys employees, but it also buys time. For every extra dollar an employee costs the amount of time it takes to make the decision to hire that employee also increases. An efficient job market would compensate based on contribution, which is a lot more possible if a significant amount wasn't mandated to be spent, and then guilted into continue spending because, you know, you don't want to take away someone's welfare.
The idea of capitalism is that capital accumulates in the hands of those who figure out how best to deploy and protect it. Investors, not Zhu, are the ones with the track record and experience.
Trusting them to be stewards of capital is a better bet than trusting an eccentric, unproven founder who decides to experiment with LSD for the very first time before a big pitch.
If Zhu had managed a successful exit, he would have established that track record, accumulated some capital of his own and bought himself the leeway to be as eccentric as he wishes in the future. See: Elon Musk.
At the extreme, if starting a company only requires pocket change, then nobody (society, investors, or anyone else) has much to lose in letting an unproven founder do their thing.
In what ways could capital be made less necessary?
By reducing the cost of anything and everything that startups spend money on.
(And for the largest item in many budgets, namely employee costs... in the presence of an adequate social safety net, cash-strapped startups could pay employees in equity rather than cash, and they could stick around for as long as they thought it might be worth something in the end).
Somewhat separately, what struck me from the article is that Zhu's controversial moves generally didn't involve bad business decisions, but rather failing to impress investors at a moment when the company needed the money. It would be better if that need for money were reduced, and we could all see how this type of experimental style turns out.
Did he really not have _any_ sense of a proper dose? Seems unlikely.
I will say that hiring people who are risk averse is great for middle managers who will say NO to most opportunities because they're more afraid of failure than they are interested in opportunity.
Hire risk takers and you get risk takers.
1. Unlike income, there is little relationship between capital and most measures of intelligence.
2. Most private capital in America is inherited.
I'm sure there is anti-asian sentiment (or at least discomfort) out there, but replacing a CEO once a company gets big enough to need it is absolutely routine.
Founders get pushed out by VCs all the time.
You can see it even today. People who know who they are...are in the thousands whereas people like Bezos and Musk seek to be known by the whole world.
If we know something about the promotional industry is that you only become famous if you want to.
But microdosing -- and getting the dose wrong! -- puts him in a whole different category. That's just a fundamental inability to act sensibly in risky situations. The board doesn't need to wait for the second example.
This is the kind of incident that plays well in the press, because it generates headlines - like becoming the first word of a headline.
Do we really think that the board was so gosh-darn offended that their founder did the wrong LSD dose, once? Or, that there were long-standing disagreements over strategy, direction, and tone?
The latter is harder to justify in the normie press, so they're trying to crucify him over some minor incident.
Zhu looked at the screen and saw numbers and images swelling and shrinking, making them impossible to discern.
His body felt as if it were melting away, he says
Did he kill someone? No. Did he lose a major customer account? No. Did he fire a top employee in a drunken rage? No.
He's under a lot of pressure and fucked up in an embarrassing way once. That doesn't mean he has a substance problem. It means he had a bad day.
If it happens a second time? Yeah, ok, now it's starting to be a track record. Third? Nuke him.
It's ok for people to fuck up sometimes
And mixing up the dosage is insanely easy with LSD, especially if you are using tabs since the LSD isn't evenly distributed throughout the paper. Also, you never really know how much LSD is on your sheet or in your vial, you just have to trust your source.
My point was that seeing visuals on a screen doesn't necessarily mean it's a large dose, especially for a first time user. Definitely not a microdose, but getting the dosage right is an art.
With how long trips and the comeup take, I just have trouble understanding what kind of confidence it must take to walk in the meeting anyways and try to wing it. I would have found any excuse to sober up and get things in order before drunkely stumbling through a big pitch.
You'd probably be in trouble.
And if on top if that you would be freely talking to the press about various issues even after the board has asked you to stop it.
You'd be fired. Which is exactly what happened here.
If your company is big enough to think going public, "Let's try LSD just before a big meeting" is not exactly the kind of idea you want your CEO to have.
I've done similarly and taken similar risks - and I'm lucky enough that the combination of my prior experiences with the stuff and luck in the moment helped see me through my troubles.
But if it hadn't, it would've been painfully obvious I'd shot myself in the foot and would need to confront the choices that led me to being able to make such a stupid one.
"He wore cargo shorts and a T-shirt to a meeting with Geodesic, a VC firm founded by John Roos, a former U.S. ambassador to Japan. An Iterable board member later informed him Geodesic wouldn’t invest, implying it was partly because of his casual attire."
Seems petty. Surely VC firms have had to look past appearances before. Of course, it did say "partly"...other things could have transpired in the meeting.
Pretty sage advice. I'm keeping this one.
However, dressing appropriately for a meeting is an easy way to demonstrate that the person is taking the situation seriously and being respectful of the other parties. If someone can’t make the effort to dress appropriately for pivotal VC meetings that decide the future of their company, it’s likely they won’t bother taking other meetings seriously either: Meetings with customers, partners, recruits, and so on.
As a VC, you don’t want to fund someone who will go around being disrespectful, intentionally or otherwise, thought your network. We like to glorify the exceptions like Steve Jobs, but the reality is that dressing appropriately to show respect for your business partners is a fact of life.
In 2021, it’s cheap to dress in a presentable manner. You don’t need a suit and tie (west coast, anyway) but you do need to make a basic effort.
I don't think dress has anything to do with this firing.
When Bill Gates and Paul Allen were preparing for their life changing meeting with IBM, they knew that IBM has very strict dress code, so they dressed in conservative IBM style suits. At the same time IBM executives wanted to make these young unknown west coast guys comfortable and decided to wear relaxed and informal attire breaking their own dress code.
When the two groups met, they busted into laughing. It was funny but also made it clear that both were serious and wanted the deal succeed.
If you have to pull millions of dollars out of your own pocket to invest into a company led by someone that doesn't care enough to dress at least business casual... I can understand thinking twice about that.
Maybe the pitch wasn't even that convincing, the cargo pants were just the cherry on top.
A really talented CEO might be good enough to overcome "quirkiness" on the "dress-the-part" side, but you have to have sufficient other advantages.
A really talented CEO isn't overcoming this. They're not overcoming anything; they're using it.
Given the stats on VC investments in firms led by women, I'm not sure this is a true statement.
He did the famous Sequoia pitch in pajamas:
https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerbergs-brutal-pran...
Stuart Ellman the VC talking about Mark Zuckerbergs arrogance and why they skipped investing in Facebook:
https://www.businessinsider.com/15-people-missing-out-on-mil...
The employee who rejected J. K. Rowling's Sorcerer's stone manuscript for being too long didn't try to say it was her fault for making it too long and that is why the company missed out on the first billion dollar author.
And another source in the article claims that had nothing to do with it; so who knows.
people who run the core routers of the largest ISPs on the planet regularly show up to meetings in cargo shorts and t-shirts, believe it or not. They're responsible for things much more critical than some overly-valued advertising/consumer promotions marketing firm.
"He wore cargo shorts and a T-shirt to a meeting with Geodesic, a VC firm founded by John Roos, a former U.S. ambassador to Japan. An Iterable board member later informed him Geodesic wouldn’t invest, implying it was partly because of his casual attire. A person familiar with the firm’s thinking says Zhu’s attire didn’t factor into the firm’s decision"
So was it the shorts or was it not the shorts? If the reporter has a solid source saying it wasn't the shorts, then why bring it up at all, unless the gossip aspect of it fits your narrative...
Can we just stop for a sec and collectively roll our eyes at VCs (and our own) trope of a “tech leader”? We want some kind of decisive, basically tech bro, alpha to come in and boss people around without any context. We want the startup CEO to be a wunderkind, and magically know the right call to make at any given point. There’s little room for consensus based leadership, which has its own place. How often have you had the “hard charging leader” come in and make a mess because their confidence outstrips their know how?
I’m not saying one leadership style is better than the other, I just hope we recognize good consensus based leadership should be valued as well, and it’s rather undervalued in tech culture in favor of people that sometime make a lot of noise, but end up being completely full of it.
I could be wrong but on the surface it looks like he’s looking for an excuse to blame something else.
That stereotype was for Japanese who stereotypically seek consensus (but it’s more an expectation that you will agree with the boss rather than achieving managerial nirvana). In any case I have not seen that as a stereotype for Chinese or Taiwanese or any of the Chinese diaspora enclaves in Southeast Asia so it almost seems like someone wanting to take advantage of other people’s uncertainty of a stereotype where it’s kinda plausible.
Who exactly wants this? Neither Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai nor Zuckerberg fit this description. The vast majority of tech leaders seem like consensus builders, as opposed to this "alpha leader" trope.
The fact that even the most assertive tech leaders are more "chair throwing tantrum incident" at most may be part of their aggro. "Normal people" get irrationally pissed off at things not meeting their prejudices and preconceptions. In this case the lack of "alpha bro" at the top. They cannot imagine a lack of this as seen in the shibboleth of the clueless "techbro" perojative.
You don't see vandalism for decades saying "Wall street go home!" in the Bronx in the face of gentrification even though the rough consensus is that Wall Street is a bunch of priveledged douchebags.
Allen writes in Idea Man that Gates “thrived on conflict” and “would demean people and force them to defend their positions.”
https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_850292
Gates was famously the office bully. He dressed down employees in public, hurled sarcasm at rivals, and would reportedly troll around Microsoft's parking lots on weekends to see which employees were working overtime.
https://www.gq.com/story/young-bill-gates-was-an-angry-offic...
Except for Google.
It seems likely that some leadership styles are better than others and plausible that techbrocracy is better than a more circumspect style for companies like this.
Variety of styles at various similar firms might have benefits, but I don't think it's fair to assume that variety is worth while without an actual argument or evidence.
I haven't seen solid evidence that that is the case.
Here's an alternate hypothesis: high-capital investors & wall street types aren't actually that good at determining quality management at all, they grew up in affluent social circles where "professional bro"-esque (be it finance or tech) people were common and respected, and they project those views onto the companies they invest in. Getting investment capital from these people is as much about cultural homogeneity with the "old money" types as it is about having a brilliant idea or a good execution plan.
It's worth remembering that most of this capital is being invested by people who just inherited the wealth from their parents, they're not necessarily genius market participants.
e: And I'm downvoted, why?
Seeing how much more wealth there is now than there was 40-60 years ago it just doesn't seem plausible that most of the investors just inherited it. Extraordinary claims - extraordinary evidence please.
Sure, the estimates range from 50% to 65% of all private wealth in the US being inherited by the 5% most affluent households [0]. This logically implies most of the wealth held by affluent households is inherited.
Certainly, those at the very, very top (ie. the literal top 10, like Gates, Bezos, Musk) of households are likely to have built their own capital, but I'd also point out that there are plenty on the top list that have inherited it, if you look at the top 15 wealthiest Americans, 5 of those arguably did not earn their wealth (the Waltons, MacKenzie Scott, and Charles Koch). [1]
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/02/06/people-l...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth...
As to sources: what politically motivated newspaper claims in an opinion piece isn't meaningful. I look at the list of richest Americans and I see the vast majority (90%+) or even all of them were involved in building the fortune.
When googling around for numbers it seems most sources claim that vast majority of world population millionaires are self made and even bigger percentage of billionaires are.
Personally all the people I know who did well for themselves didn't inherit anything. I am sure my perspective is shaped by being born in a very poor communist country but it seems the actual numbers worldwide don't contradict my intuition that fortunes bigger and smaller are mainly built and rarely inherited.
Look, I'll grant you that Scott is "arguable" as I said, Koch is also very arguable.
I don't think you can seriously claim the Walton heirs earned their wealth, but I don't think it is particularly relevant to the debate.
> what politically motivated newspaper claims in an opinion piece isn't meaningful
I only cited the WaPo because it collated the econometrics papers that showed the claim. Look, you choose whether you want to believe, whether it is peer-reviewed economics research and meta-analysis or "googling around for numbers." We all know how reliable Google is :)
> it seems most sources claim that vast majority of world population millionaires are self made
I also googled this "claim", and huh, guess what showed up? A bunch of "politically motivated newspaper claims" but this time they were relying on this obviously biased source (https://www.wealthx.com/report/world-ultra-wealth-report-201...), not peer-reviewed economics research.
Ultimately, you choose what to believe but almost all the evidence points to the majority or close to the majority of private wealth being inherited by the wealthy.
> Personally all the people I know who did well for themselves didn't inherit anything
1. This is 100% contextual to America 2. Many people are very shy about admitting an inheritance.
I also don't really trust you to be a good judge of if someone is "self-made" if you honestly think the Walton's didn't inherit their wealth - pretty much every one of them is described as an heir/heiress and they were not actively that involved in the business.
You choose what to believe, but ultimately "facts don't care about your feelings." You seem to be reasoning backwards from your political beliefs to the conclusions you want to hear.
(Note, I called this plausible, not correct or even likely.)
Given that the company was founded and formed under Zhu's leadership, it was probably exactly suited to his leadership style[0].
The new factor appears to be the VC's. It's not so common now, but VC's used to have a reputation for replacing founders with "experienced" CEOs - y'know: their mates from the golf club who could be counted on to play ball nicely. This was especially common if the founder was unconventional in any way.
[0] TFA doesn't mention any internal management problems, so I'm assuming all was well and there wasn't any dissatisfaction with the leadership style. That assumption could be wrong.
And it's a pretty obvious conclusion from:
1. the fact that GPs have to put up $10s of millions into the fund to get the job
2. most (>50%) wealth held by affluent people (like the people who become GPs) is inherited from their parents.
These are people who grew up in affluent social circles and want people like them managing the companies they invest in.
Otherwise it’s just a bull in a china shop stepping on and sh*ting on a lot of pre-existing work and stakeholders who did the work. Easy way to lose an org trust and never get it back unless a ton of headcount churn occurs such that no one really recalls how much of a moron the lead was.
Just like no one cares (in the tech world at least) if you drink like a fish or get stoned every night if you show up the next day and get your job done.
If he was refusing to make this change then it probably was just a bog-standard power struggle.
Anyone have juicy insider info?
“But your replacement is Asian..”
“Oh he’s temporary, they’ll fire him too”
Edit: Since someone seemed to be irritated with my comment enough to downvote, people just with East Asian names have been known to suddenly face less discrimination once they started using non-East Asian names, or be characterized as non-East Asian after changing their names to something non-Asian.
Some notable biracial (White/East Asian) Hollywood actresses with ambiguous racial characteristics have had to change their East Asian sounding name to a white name to get roles, or non-typecast roles. For example Sandrine Ho (of House of Cards) changed her name to Sandrine Holt and suddenly got more callbacks.
- taking LSD
- arguing with board members
- wearing cargo shorts
Rather, his mistake was not retaining control of the company he founded, either by bootstrapping it entirely or not taking venture capital. Contrast this to the recent Basecamp debacle, both cofounders owned 100% of the company and could do as they pleased, no one could fire them.
I disagree with this notion, even as you might agree. If I'm making a company, it exists for my sole pleasure. If it didn't, then I wouldn't have bothered creating the company in the first place.
> The board is the CEO's boss, and just like with any boss, behavior has consequences.
I would make a company to get away from having a boss at all, not so that a board could now be my new boss.
Trying to pull the race card after you get fired for tripping on acid at an investor's meeting is the most Silicon Valley "young disruptor" high-on-the-smell-of-your-own farts CEO thing I've ever heard of.
Fails to recognize the repeated failure in such behavior. Gets fired.
Plays race card.
<sarcasm>
No, it couldn't be about anything else but his race...
No need to take personal accountability for one's actions (despite warnings)--
it's everyone else's fault for being racist!
</sarcasm>
This is why I refuse to live in West Coast cities. Too much SJW kool aid.
edit
ouch, those downvotes hurt so badly!
why can't I just be a brainless sycophant like the big corporations & global governance organizations want me to be?!
:( dastardly critical analysis! You've stung me again!
Why can't I just take the force fed propaganda that I encounter at every turn across entertainment & "news" media!
Oh brain, why do you fail me?!
Good luck with your job search btw ;)
What's your take on the article & story btw?