by
Karen Ho
archive/abolish-silicon-valley
Karen Ho,
Logic Magazine,
Yanis Varoufakis,
Mary L. Gray,
Siddharth Suri,
Kai Brach,
Mel Krantzler,
Patricia Biondi Krantzler,
Cary McClelland
[...] My informants proclaimed that the smartest people in the world came to work there; Wall Street, in their view, had created probably the most elite work-society ever to be assembled on the globe. Almost all the front-office workers that I encountered emphasized how smart their coworkers were, how "deep the talent" was at their particular bank, how if one just hired "the smartest people," then everything else fell into place. [...] what was most culturally unique about Wall Street was the experience of being surrounded by, as Bern put it, the "smartest and most ambitious people." Logan added that the three qualities of success on Wall Street are to be "smart, hardworking, and aggressive. Everything else is considered tangential." [...] they will be working with "the brightest people in the world. These are the greatest minds of the century."
lmao
[...] "They understand that interns coming in knowing basically nothing - but if you're smart and personable, it's worth it to them to hire you." [...] most do not even know what "financial services" is. "Most are going into finance because they haven't figured out what else they could do," yet "finance employers are seeking them out, telling them they're qualified for finance" no matter what their training, major, or department - as long as they are from Princeton. [...]
mix of bribery (salaries) and flattery (we only hire the best, we therefore recognise you as among the best) and preying on people who dont know what they're doing and therefore susceptible to corporate cajolery
[...] during the initial meeting between a Wall Street investment bank and a potential client, the managing director (MD) on the deal usually begins the meeting by introducing "the deal team" (the vice presidents, associates, and analysts on the pitch) with the explicit purpose of awing the client with their smartness, and thus, expertise. The presentation (contained in the "pitch book") not only includes the proposal for the deal, the market overview and competitor profiles, and the financial rationale for, and impact of, the deal, but also the relevant biographies and posed pictures of the team members, which painstakingly details their prestigious pedigrees and affiliations as well as profiles their deal experience and industry knowledge in the corporate cllient's area of business. [...] Positioning themselves as smarter, savvier, and more cutting-edge than corporate America by capitalizing on the aura of elite institutions, investment banks construct a mutually reinforcing connection between the market and the Ivy League: because we have "the best of the brightest" working for us, then what we say about the market must be believed and the deals we envision should be executed. [...]
hahhahahhahahaa
this isnt' exactly relevant to the point i want to make in my book (which is that SV is essentially the same, esp when it comes to raising money) but important thing to remember: just cus someone is smart doesn't mean they're acting in your interests. they serve their own masters, hidden in that black box algo
[...] When it came time for my cotrainees to be placed in less prestigious and (much) less well-paid divisions of the bank, the full weight of unequal branding and classification bore down on them. It was also during this time that my GMFTP friends began to go home early, recognizing the fact that no matter how long past 6 p.m. they stayed at work or how much initiative they showed, they were excluded from the front-office positions: for them, hard work was already severed from advancement and reward. [...]
like the contractor system
Almost everyone else in the bank is considered "back-office" support staff (which includes operations, account services, trade reconciliation, technical support, word processing) and treated as a "cost center", which is understood as a division that depletes money because of the refusal of investment banks to recognize or compute their contributions as part of revenue generation. [...] They are often from middle- and working-class backgrounds, with an overrepresentation of people of color and women, and tend to receive their jobs through employment agencies, vocational and technical training networks, job postings, and word of mouth. Oftentimes, back-office workers are found not in the bank's "headquarters" building at all, but rather in less expensive locations in Brooklyn, other parts of Manhattan, or across the river in Jersey City. [...]
again, contractors
Wall Street argues that its greed for money is a "counteracting" interest against other more evil passions such as racism and sexism. Because investment banks are so greedy, so singularly focused on money, they become money meritocracies: whoever makes them money will be rewarded regardless of background or identity. Of course, instead of understanding desire for money as itself a constructed "passion," most Wall Streeters see it as a naturalized state. Similarly, the Wall Street mantra that "money does not discriminate" resonates powerfully with the assumption of neoliberal economic theory that racism and other prejudices form "an impediment to efficient market transactions and [are] therefore likely to be overriden in the long run by the exigency to generate profit" [...]
Using money meritocracy as a dominant discourse of exceptionalism, investment banks differentiate themselves from corporate America, which they imagine to be caught up in the traditional "ol' boys' network." Unlike the bureaucratic, out-of-touch managers of most corporations, Wall Street bankers are a modern, renegade breed whose singular focus on money makes possible color-blind innocence and objectivity. [...] investment bankers did not have to be aristocrats, but could be "geeky quant-jocks" or amazing "chess players off the street". [...]
it's funny cus SV views WS as exactly this ol' boys' network
[...] the poor stewardship and excesses of managers and how it was Wall Street investment bankers who realigned managers to their true purpose of increasing shareholder value. If a CEO did not do what was good for the stock price, then he or she was being self-serving and the only way to guard against management self-interest was to tie compensation (via stock options) to the stock market. In this worldview, corporations exist for the sole benefit of shareholders, and any attempt to separate shareholder interests from those of the corporation was selfish and nonsensical. Although in the modern history of capitalism in the United States, the desire for profit accumulation is not new, what is clearly unique about Wall Street's shareholder value perspective is that employment is thought to be outside the concern of public corporations. Job loss was certainly a sad event, but beyond the responsibility of corporate America. [...]
[...] George Roberts, the "R" of KKR, claimed that since the Oregon public employee pension fund invested in the KKR fund which bought Safeway, "the masses" benefited. He justified the LBO by stating that Safeway employees were finally being held accountable to global competition. [...] The company whose "first store had been opened by a clergyman who wanted to help his parishioners save money" was redefined. Now, "the new corporate statement, displayed on a plaque in the lobby at corporate headquarters, read in part: 'Targeted Returns on Current Investment'" [...]
jesus. relevant for VC model
Given this historical opportunity created by the state's war economy, corporate leaders and Wall Street developed the tenets of shareholder democracy to promote their own long-sought cultural and economic legitimacy, articulate a conservative, anti-regulatory, anticollective political agenda, and obscure unequal class antagonisms through an employee buy-in of the corporate class agenda. [...] Wall Street investment trusts and brokerages argued against the necessity of labor organizations and government-administered social welfare, for the individual can "compensate for his lack of independent proprietorship in the traditional sense by assuming the mantle of corporate shareholder"; in an era of large corporations, it was through "investment, rather than production or consumption," that individual economic betterment could be pursued [...]
[...]
Wall Street and corporate executives advocated for widespread shareholding, not as a vehicle to give shareholders control (as public shareholding was understood and actualized as a dilution of control), but a cultural rehabilitation. Their motives were to promote conservative social and political goals designed explicitly to counter state regulation of markets, foreclose contestation over the control of corporate governance by invoking the semblance of agency via investing, and resist worker unrest. [...]
maybe the diff here is that one is exclusion by default and the other is inclusion by default. and when the stakes include people's lives, then inclusion by default is better, independent of how "good" or "efficient" either option is
but yeah very relevant to SV today. also, similar to gamification? a competition where antagonism is directed against others (or you vs the market as an individual) which precludes the possibility of overarching revolt
Stark landscapes spread on both sides of the road, like the bottom of the sea. It was March but there was still snow. Spared of leaved trees, the sky felt immense, even significant. Everything white, brown, or gray, stone colors.
breathtaking