First off, I wanna thank the reader who emailed me after taking a journey through RFK Jr.’s fractured psyche to describe the 10 excruciating minutes he spent watching the dynastic scion awkwardly stand around while a podium was removed from a university lecture hall stage before the he’d deign to give a speech on the environment. We will never know why RFK Jr. felt he couldn’t talk to a university crowd while that podium remained on the stage, but we’ll forever revel in its mystery.
Anyhoo, you’re probably (not even remotely) wondering what intrusive thoughts have been living in my head for so long that they now have squatters’ rights. So glad you asked.
Like VHI Behind the Music — in Book Form
Whether it’s a “visionary” tech scammer getting caught (Elizabeth Holmes), an overconfident grifter who trying to sell himself as, among other things, a tech visionary (Adam Neumann), or an unscrupulous tyrant getting ousted from a tech empire rife with illegal and unethical practices (Travis Kalanick), I love a good rise-and-fall story—especially when the business itself (Theranos) is an overhyped, flimsy house of cards and the narrative hits most of the beats of a VH1 Behind the Music episode but with a generous dose of fraud added to the mix. Unlike a VH1 Behind the Music episode, Vince Neil won’t pop up on your screen,* bragging about how he partied in jail after killing Razzle from Hanoi Rocks in a drunk driving wreck.
Mind you, I’m not any kind of expert on tech or startups or the like; I’m just some shithead who tore through a few core books and their associated documentaries and TV adaptations. Although the documentaries and adaptations varied in quality, the books—Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lives in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou, and The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell —are all fascinating and impossible to put down.
After reading deep and incisive reporting on figures like Neumann, Holmes, and Kalanick, I (walked away with a few general impressions on startup culture, Silicon Valley, and “the Cult of the Founder.”
It’s common for a tech startup to solicit investments long before they figure out how to make the minimum viable product (MVP) work. Venture Capital firms know this; that’s why they diversify their investments across multiple startups with the hopes that one of these will become a unicorn. This is more or less fine if you’re developing some innocuous photo app or whatever, but the situation becomes more ethically dubious when you’re soliciting funding for medical tech (Theranos) where the stakes are life and death.
The leaders of the old school banking class are particularly vulnerable to being taken in by a startup scammer thanks to their profound insecurity. The Cult of We took great pains to point out just how thirsty one particular bold-faced name/CNBC regular was in his quest to attach himself the next great tech visionary. Despite the power and influence they wield, commercial and investment bankers still want to be seen as cool and on the cutting edge. Because these guys will never stop chasing relevance, they tend to be taken in by a certain kind of confident charlatan who they believe will provide the tech clout they crave. This is especially true if the charlatan is photogenic/reasonably attractive enough for the banker to picture them on a Forbes cover or gesticulating on a TED Talk stage. This is part of the reason why Neumann tried so hard to sell WeWork as a “tech company” even though it just leased office space and part of the reason it was so easy for Holmes to fleece former Nixon/Reagan administration members whose marquee “achievements” occurred decades ago. Positioning yourself on the forefront of a purported revolutionary biomedical tech breakthrough is one way to finally earn your grandkids’ respect—or at least make them stop regarding you as a dusty relic of a bygone era. **
VCs, investors, useful people with deep pockets seem to have a very specific idea of what their ideal founder looks and acts like: an eccentric, scruffy genius enthralled with “innovation” but can ostensibly still be reined in by a board of directors and shareholders. In the popular mythology, visionary founders do things like wear the same casual outfit every day because deciding between t-shirts in the morning apparently takes up precious cranial real estate better suited for innovating at any cost. Founders gotta give those big, genius thoughts room to breathe; that’s how highly evolved brains work. Duh.
The problem*** with the eccentric founder trope is that a very specific interpretation of genius is easy to perform. Elizabeth Holmes probably understood this performative genius act better than anyone with her bold, gender-flipped Steve Jobs cosplay. Plenty of people who should know better probably looked at Sam Bankman-Fried’s disheveled wunderkind schtick and thought to themselves, “Damn, this MIT grad doesn’t have time to tie his shoelaces or change out of those rumpled basketball shorts. He must be busy thinking huge, innovative, genius thoughts.” Seems like grifters with audacious confidence who can perform a few established tropes stand a good chance of getting FOMO-plagued investors to spray a firehose full of cash in their general direction.
During every documentary, there’s always chilling footage of an ostensibly serious reporter at an ostensibly reputable publication asking founders cozy, The-Chris-Farley-Show-style softball questions at a live event. They always look so damning in hindsight.
Anyway, that’s what I was reading at the start of the pandemic. Lately, I’ve been devouring books on mid-to-late-20th century history. I’m almost finished this voluminous tome on the ‘88 election, and then I plan to spend some time with Professor Garbage’s exalted trash queen Kitty Kelley via the unauthorized bios where she absolutely savages Nancy Reagan and the Bush family. I’m sure you’ll hear about it at some point. Maybe I’ll use some of the holiday break to finish the pilot script I’ve been agonized over for [redacted length of time]. Wouldn’t that be something.
xoxo,
Maggie
Footnotes:
* Just trying to remain grateful for small blessings.
** Unless you’re George Schultz, in which case you bury your grandkid in legal bills to try to keep them from blowing the whistle on the egregious fraud upon which you’ve staked your legacy. If you’re George Schultz, you’re also dead, so congrats on somehow reading this from beyond the grave.
*** Well, one that’s the problems with the cult of the founder. I’d argue that the main issue entails how so-called visionaries mythologized as “eccentric” actually just behave like abusive, megalomaniacal autocrats, but this gets excused because their underlings are being tortured in the name of progress.