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[...] In 2012, new start-ups were flush with money and the tech sphere was overwhelmed by ardent media coverage; the verb disrupt was elbowing its way into vernacular prominence and had not yet become a cliché. Facebook’s IPO was not only record-setting but a flag in the ground, and the West Coast seemed a hopeful counternarrative in an otherwise flailing economy. Stories about Silicon Valley were imbued with a certain awe that, today, is starting to fade.
Since the genre’s takeoff in the late 1990s, during the first dot-com boom, writing about the tech industry has traditionally fallen into a few limited camps: buzzy and breathless blog posts pegged to product announcements, suspiciously redolent of press releases; technophobic and scolding accounts heralding the downfall of society via smartphone; dry business reporting; and lifestyle coverage zeroing in on the trappings, trends, and celebrities of the tech scene. In different ways, each neglects to examine the industry’s cultural clout and political economy. This tendency is shifting, as the line between “tech company” and “regular company” continues to blur (even Walmart has an innovation lab in the Bay Area). Founders and their publicists would have you believe that this is a world of pioneers and utopians, cowboy coders and hero programmers. But as tech becomes more pervasive, coverage that unquestioningly echoes the mythologizing impulse is falling out of fashion.
[...] Portraying Silicon Valley’s powerful as “uber-nerds” who struck it rich is as reductive and unhelpful as referring to technology that integrates personal payment information and location tracking as “little buttons.” The effect is not only to protect them behind the shield of presumed harmlessness, but also to exempt them from the scrutiny that their economic and political power should invite.
useful for my tech hubris piece
If technology belongs to the people only insofar as the people are consumers, we beneficiaries had better believe that luminaries and pioneers did something so outrageously, so individually innovative that the concentration of capital at the top is deserved. When founders pitch their companies, or inscribe their origin stories into the annals of TechCrunch, they neglect to mention some of the most important variables of success: luck, timing, connections, and those who set the foundation for them. The industry isn’t terribly in touch with its own history. It clings tight to a faith in meritocracy: This is a spaceship, and we built it by ourselves.
[...] The tech industry owes a huge debt to the financial sector. Wolfe is eager to depict Silicon Valley as the new New York, but much of the money that funds venture-capital firms comes from investors who made their fortunes on Wall Street. (The tech industry also owes a great debt to “Main Street”: Private-equity funds regularly include allocations from public pension plans and universities.) [...]
My friends in publishing were skeptical when I told them where I was going to work. They had a lot of questions I felt uneasy answering. Wouldn’t a subscription model undercut author royalties? Wasn’t it basically a cynical, capitalist appropriation of the public library system? Wasn’t an app like this parasitic at best? Was it all that different from the online superstore, and wouldn’t the app’s success come at the expense of the literary culture and community? I didn’t have a good response to most of these concerns. Mostly, I tried not to think about them. Smug and self-congratulatory, I translated most of my friends’ questions to mean, simply, What about us?
lol yep
The CEO did not acknowledge that the reason millennials might be interested in experiences—like the experience of renting things they could never own—was related to student loan debt, or the recession, or the plummeting market value of cultural products in an age of digital distribution. There were no crises in this vision of the future. There were only opportunities.
“She’s too interested in learning, not doing,” the CEO typed once into the company chat room. This was an accident—he meant it only for the other two cofounders. We huddled in the conference room and he apologized sincerely, while I looped the words over and over in my head. I had always been interested in learning, and I had always been rewarded for it; learning was what I did best. I wasn’t used to having the sort of professional license and latitude that the founders were given. I lacked their confidence, their entitlement. I did not know about startup maxims to experiment and “own” things. I had never heard the common tech incantation Ask forgiveness, not permission.
oof
In an effort to hype myself up, I developed the theory, however flimsy, that analytics was a natural extension of my liberal arts education. The e-book startup had used the analytics software to track our alpha users through the app, and I had enjoyed looking at some of the data: what our investors were reading, and abandoning; whether or not people read public-domain books with cover art designed by the CPO, which we had added to bolster the library. In a certain light, I tried to convince myself, business analytics could be seen as a form of applied sociology.
this is basically me with macro
Several months prior, a tech blog had published an article announcing the analytics startup’s first major fund-raising round of ten million dollars. When asked how he would spend the new funding, the CEO made his priorities clear: he would pay the first hundred employees far above market, he said, and spoil current employees to retain them. This was the language of customer acquisition, but I didn’t know. I didn’t think at all about the stratification, either; how the hundred-and-first employee might feel. I’d never worked anywhere with a hundred people—I’d never worked anywhere with twenty. I’d certainly never worked anywhere that wanted to spoil its employees and had the means to do it. Generous, I thought. I found the tenacity winning.
The solutions manager did not mention equity, and I didn’t ask. I did not know that early access to equity was a reason people joined private companies at the startup stage—that it was the only way anyone other than VCs and founders got rich. I did not even know that equity was an option. The company’s in-house recruiter would eventually intervene, to recommend that I negotiate to include even a small stake. His rationale was simple: all the other guys had some. No one told me how much it was worth, or how big the pool was, and I did not know to ask.
High on the feeling of being professionally desirable, I told the solutions manager I would sleep on it.