Golden Oldies: If The Shoe Fits: Hypocrisy And Greed In Startup Land
by Miki Saxon
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
How time and tech fly. I wrote this in 2017 and there’s been a lot of change since then. In short, while hypocrisy has skyrocketed, with the advent of Uber, Lyft, We, and others profitability has fallen way behind. Greed, however, is alive and kicking butt — think We’s Adam Neumann.
Read other Golden Oldies here.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.
Tuesday I cited a post by Scott Belsky on Medium talking about how employees are often conned (my word) by founders, especially unicorns, when it comes to the wealth that is supposed to flow from their ISO.
As pithy as the post was, some of the comments were even pithier. I especially like this one from colorfulfool (21st comment)
If profitability were proportional to hypocrisy, there would be no failed startups in the Valley.
Not just true, but succinctly and elegantly stated.
Founders love to talk about the importance of transparency, trust and authenticity.
However, their stock plans and pitfalls thereof exhibit such a high degree of opaqueness and caveat emptor that they kick a hole the size of Texas in the fabric of the founders’ authenticity.
Another prevalent piece of hypocrisy is “change the world.”
Do you really believe that another dating app or being able to evaluate a new restaurant or another way to buy your groceries will change the world?
While they may impact one’s personal world, they certainly don’t have the impact of something like Mine Kafon.
What is proportional to the Valley’s hypocrisy is its sheer greed.
Actually, when I stop to think about it, the greed probably exceeds even the hypocrisy.
Image credit: HikingArtist
