Ctrl+F "chickenhawking".
Called it called it motherfucking called it. From the 2013 post:
An archetypical case of chickenhawking occurs in The Office, wherein the clueless middle manager Michael Scott develops a (one-sided) mancrush on sociopathic temp worker, Ryan Howard. Ryan is visibly creeped out by Michael’s intense interest in his personal life, but uses Michael’s support and devotion to launch his career, catapulting far beyond him. Michael is, of course, oblivious to Ryan’s character flaws, but it’s actually those defects that enable him to have the juicy personal life. The chickenhawk’s protege needs to be psychopathic to do many of the despicable things for which the chickenhawk himself lacked the courage when he was young.
One thing that business chickenhawking is not, I’ll note, is gay. It seems to be an entirely heterosexual phenomenon that originated in the red-meat-for-breakfast, three-martini-lunch, dinner-at-a-strip-club MBA-culture crowd (that now dominates the Valley, through VC). The hawks tend to be middle-aged and married with children, or at least outwardly heterosexual. The chickens tend to be young “Game”-spitting psychopaths who, while insubstantial without money, would (once produced) be able to tear through party girls like a late-April tornado.
The motivation of the “hawk” is clear: it’s a midlife crisis phenomenon. Most of the marquee venture capitalists came up not through technology, but rather, through the MBA culture. They were aiming to be working on billion-dollar deals and crashing third-world currencies. Instead, they’re hawking techie cantrips out in California. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not what they wanted. In addition, they sacrificed their 20s to get there. Instead of partying and drugging and whoring, they were working 90-hour weeks, and too overweight to run “Game” thanks to all the takeout they ate. In middle age, they panic about having done their 20s all wrong, and look to cling to a young psychopath through whom they can live vicariously. The trade is this: the hawk ensures the chicken’s career and lines him up with an enormous income that he doesn’t have to work hard to get. In exchange, the chicken tosses back stories about weekend debauchery.
There are plenty of VC-funded founders who are obvious beneficiaries of chickenhawking, but I won’t give names.
Is there gay chickenhawking, or female chickenhawking? I have no idea. All of the examples that I have seen involve heterosexual men. However, I tend to doubt that it exists among gays or women. Chickenhawking is, to a large degree, based on the objectification of women– the idea that reckless, high-frequency sexuality (in addition to heavy drug use) in a man’s 20s is a “rite of passage” and that “tricking” women by pumping money (and “Game” advice) into some otherwise uninteresting loser, in order to prove that “women” are “whores”, is a worthy use of investors’ money. Chickenhawking is what you get when the corporate patriarchy of the 1950s meets the crass, status-obsessed, casual sex meat market of the 2010s.
Chickenhawking is a somewhat fascinating topic, although an ugly one. There’s a lot more I could say about it and its sociological ramifications, but it’s fundamentally depressing and I don’t see it worth it to double this article’s already large word count. I bring it up because it’s the Achilles’ heel of VC-istan. It’s massively embarrassing to the established players, and it’s one of the most powerful cultural variables in determining whether a young VC-istani’s career will succeed or fail.
I don’t think there’s a huge epidemic of chickenhawking in Silicon Valley. It’s there, but I don’t think most people (or even most VCs) participate. The problem is that it’s potent enough to be a driving cultural force, if not the biggest one, in determining who’s “cool” and who’s avoided. I discussed above that, even though most venture capitalists aren’t racist, they’re going to be more reluctant to throw their time into producing a non-white founder. When you have a culture of co-funding and note-sharing, where individual risk-taking is rare, the biases of the few will influence the many. For racism, there’s a countervailing force, which is that it’s extremely socially unacceptable, among educated people anywhere, to be racist. For chickenhawking and ageism in the VC-funded ecosystem, there’s no such counterweight; it’s taken as axiomatic (even if visibly untrue) that older people (with bias starting around 35) are incapable. The truth is that, even if the investors aren’t chickenhawks themselves, they’re going to be most inclined to throw their time into producing founders who are “chickenhawk compliant”: not just white, young, and male (a common combination) but arrogant and psychopathic enough to create drama that the backers (if they wish) can enjoy.
Age discrimination creates an extremely unhealthy culture, but it’s to the advantage of venture capitalists, because it puts unreasonable (and, I would argue, extreme) time pressure on the careers of founders and engineers. If such people were allowed to have typical 40-year careers, they probably wouldn’t treat specific startups as their sole shots at success, and they’d be less inclined to work 90-hour weeks for a comparably small slice of the pie.
While the age-discrimination culture begins with a small number of creepy middle-aged, rich men trying to redo their 20s through young sociopaths, it’s perpetuated because the time pressure it creates is beneficial to investors and startup executives– and harmful to everyone else.
This study is the Theory of Chickenhawking's equivalent of the May 1919 eclipse.