Let’s two step our way away from the limits of new age consciousness to the pathologies Silicon Valley needs to overcome as it marches to the pinnacle of the new world information economy.
Today’s pathology: Narcissism.
Building a company to serve yourself instead of building a company to serve others.
Today’s evidence: How Entrepreneurs talk about Acqui-hires:
Joe Lonsdale on FB a few weeks back:
“OK, I realize this is maybe unkosher in the SV culture, but come on guys – is it necessary to post that you are proud of a company being sold when what happened is “the business didn’t work out and we lost investors’ money and the common stock went to 0, but we had a good team so somebody bought it” – and then everybody hits ‘Like’ and writes “Congratulations! Way to go!”. Not congratulations – sorry for your loss … as Peter likes to quote, show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser. Learn from your mistakes and do better next time! That’s great! But pls don’t take to social media to celebrate your association with the failure as if it’s a win.”
My corresponding thoughts:
Totally agree. It is only the entrepreneur who cares most about the positive impact they make on the world who would cop to an acqui-hire being a loss rather than a win.
The rest narcissistically use an acqui-hire to uphold and inflate their public self-image, rather than being brave and honest and sharing their true lessons learned from the failed startup.
Sadly, this appears to me to be today’s default script in Silicon Valley. And I believe it actually impedes Silicon Valley’s overall impact on the world by slowing the rate of learning. This is akin to how science suffers from the fact that many scientific experiments that don’t produce remarkable hypothesized results don’t get published…and we lose the chance to learn about the negative space of success.
Creating technology startups in the way we do know is arguably only 40 years old, and the ground underneath our feet is changing very fast, so the half-life of knowledge is very short indeed. Nobody really knows what they’re doing. We’re all flying by the seat of our pants.
So entrepreneurs, whether you succeed or whether you fail I’m asking you to share your journey and your lessons learned with the intention to be as close to truth as possible.
We need to learn together. To grow together. To fail together. To succeed together.
Entrepreneurs, let’s create a world we can be proud of…together.
