by
Ellen Pao
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Kleiner’s managing partners flouted hiring rules, too, asking inappropriate questions in interviews throughout my time at Kleiner, like, “Are you married? Do you have kids? How old are you? Are you thinking about having kids? What does your husband do? What did your ex-husband do?”
It was noted at some point that asking all these questions created a giant legal risk, and the response was, effectively, Well, who’s going to sue us?
“So we really want people who are twenty-six,” another managing partner stated, paying no attention to the seriousness of the discussion. “How can we hire more twenty-six-year-olds?”
The partners were always obsessed with twenty-six-year-olds. I think maybe it was because Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google were around twenty-six when they met John.
The trainer looked startled. “You can’t,” he responded. “In hiring you have to look for the best people. To discriminate on the basis of sex, race, or age just isn’t legal.”
“Okay,” the partner tried again. “But what about a twenty-six-year-old mindset? How do we guarantee they have that?”
“Uh, you can’t,” the trainer repeated.
I wanted to point out to them: You’re asking this lawyer to help you discriminate. Of course he’s not going to give you advice on how to do it!
“But what if we asked them about things only twenty-six-year-olds would know…” the partner continued. Questions about the twenty-six-year-old gold-standard candidate continued.
“No, no, you can’t,” the trainer said uncomfortably. “We’ve got to move on.”
hahahaha this kills me every time
For years, I’d tried to believe in the story of Kleiner as a place where we were really trying to help entrepreneurs to build awesome companies and products. I’d believed that we were this team of people working together and that we were trying to be missionaries, not mercenaries. But eventually I’d come to see all that talk as a big lie. My parents raised me to believe that the world was a meritocracy, that if you worked hard enough you could get ahead. But that wasn’t true at Kleiner. It just wasn’t fair.
im sorry but this made me laugh out loud
In the wake of the verdict, I just wanted to hide, but in the months after the trial, I knew it would be good for reddit if I did a little bit of press. In April, Katie Couric sat down in our offices to interview me, even though I’d turned her down at first. Initially I didn’t want to do any video, but Katie was visiting her daughter at Stanford and asked to meet with me, and we got along well. She seemed so nice and genuinely empathetic, and she even shared some of her personal experiences with bias in journalism across her entire career. She was warm and professional, so I agreed to my first on-camera interview. I was very tightly wound and found it hard to relax, but she was fair and professional. I respected her and thought the interview went well.
why does she include all this unnecessary detail??? where was her editor
And so we left town on our first trip for fun in ages. For the first time in years, there were no calls scheduled, no emails to return, and no emergencies to handle. We went to Maui to see Lori, my old friend from Google. Our daughter loved Hawaii so much—from her first taste of shave ice to sunset hikes on the beach—and Buddy and I loved being on the beach, watching her frolic in the surf. The stress of the trial, the miscarriage, and all the other crises of the past few years had taken a toll on our marriage. I didn’t know what would happen with us. But I did know that, whatever happened, sitting together on the sand watching our little girl laughing in the sun would give us a wonderful memory.
i just???? what???
[...] one might separate those Trump voters who could and should be responsive to such an appeal from the card-carrying racists and alt-right ethnonationalists who are not. To say that the former outnumber the latter by a wide margin is not to deny that reactionary populist movements draw heavily on loaded rhetoric and have emboldened formerly fringe groups of real white supremacists. But it does refute the hasty conclusion that the overwhelming majority of reactionary populist voters are forever closed to appeals on behalf of an expanded working class of the sort evoked by Bernie Sanders. That view is not only empirically wrong but counterproductive, and likely to be self-fulfilling.
Let me be clear. I am not suggesting that a progressive-populist bloc should mute pressing concerns about racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and transphobia. On the contrary, fighting these harms must be central to a progressive-populist bloc. But it is counterproductive to address them through moralizing condescension, in the mode of progressive neoliberalism. That approach assumes a shallow and inadequate view of these injustices, grossly exaggerating the extent to which the trouble is inside people's heads and missing the depth of the structural-institutional forces that undergird them.
[...] the depth at which racism is anchored in contemporary capitalist society - and the incapacity of progressive-neoliberal moralizing to address it. They also reveal that the structural bases of racism have as much to do with class and political economy as with status and (mis)recognition. Equally important, they make it clear that the forces destroying the life chances of people of color are part and parcel of the same dynamic complex as those destroying the life changes of whites - even if some of the specifics differ. The effect, is finally, to disclose the inextricable intertwinement of race and class in contemporary financialized capitalism.
The objective side of the crisis is no mere multiplicity of separate dysfunctions. Far from forming a dispersed plurality, its various strands are interconnected and share a common source. The underlying object of our general crisis, the thing that harbors its multiple instabilities, is the present form of capitalism - globalizing, neoliberal, financialized. Like every form of capitalism, this one is no mere economic system but something larger: an institutionalized social order. As such it encompasses a set of noneconomic background conditions that are indispensable to a capitalist economy: for example, unwaged activities of social reproduction, which assures the supply of wage labor for economic production; an organized apparatus of public power (law, police, regulatory agencies, and steering capacities) that supplies the order, predictability, and infrastructure necessary for sustained accumulation; and finally, a relatively sustainable organization of our metabolic interaction with the rest of nature, one that ensures essential supplies of energy and raw materials for commodity production, not to mention a habitable planet that can support life.
Financialized capitalism represents one historically specific way of organizing the relation of a capitalist economy to these indispensable background conditions. It is a deeply predatory and unstable form of organization that liberates capital accumulation from the very constraints (political, ecological, social, moral) needed to sustain it over time. Freed from such constraints, capitalism's economy consumes its own background conditions of possibility. It is like a tiger that eats its own tail. While social life as such is increasingly economized, the unfettered pursuit of profit destabilizes the very forms of social reproduction, ecological sustainability, and public power on which it depends. Seen this way, financialized capitalism is an inherently crisis-prone social formation. The crisis complex we encounter today is the increasingly acute expression of its built-in tendency to destabilize itself.
i love the "institutionalized social order" formulation
Whatever our uncertainly regarding the endpoint, one thing is clear: if we fail to pursue this option now, we will prolong the present interregnum. That means condemning working people of every persuasion and every color to mounting stress and declining health, to ballooning debt and overwork, to class apartheid and social insecurity. It means immersing them, too, in an ever vaster expanse of morbid symptoms - in hatreds born of resentment and expressed in scapegoating, in outbreaks of violence followed by bouts of repression, in a vicious dog-eat-dog world where solidarities contract to the vanishing point. To avoid that fate, we must break definitively both with neoliberal economics and with the various politics of recognition that have largely supported it - casting off not just exclusionary ethnonationalism but also liberal-meritocratic individualism. Only by joining a robustly egalitarian politics of distribution to a substantively inclusive, class-sensitive politics of recognition can we build a counterhegemonic bloc capable of leading us beyond the current crisis to a better world.
The left in general has a lot of work to do at a programmatic level. I think we know what the values are. We know what is wrong, what is bad, what has to be gotten rid of. We know the economy needs to be de-financialized and de-carbonized, that there needs to be planning and a big rise in the share of income that goes to the working classes and so on.
What we don't know yet is whether some new, yet-to-be invented form of capitalism could satisfy those imperatives - or whether the only possible solution is a postcapitalist society, whether we want to call it socialist or something else. Maybe more important than knowing that for sure right now is knowing what the new rules of the road should be for a political economy that is both pro-working class and globalized. [...]
we need a socialist compass!!