Looking at founders, such as Larry Page, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zukerberg, you get the feeling they believe they are all powerful — more so than even governments.
The Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, according to Mr. Smith, “learned that life actually does require compromise and governments actually are stronger than companies,” if only after a bruising confrontation.
Mr. Gates, who wrote the foreword in Mr. Smith’s book, recalled that for years he was proud of how little time he spent talking to people in government. “As I learned the hard way in the antitrust suit,” he wrote, “that was not a wise position to take.”
Lesson learned well enough that you don’t see Microsoft on the common list of big tech, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple.
That lesson hasn’t hurt Microsoft, which is valued at more than a trillion dollars by investors based on profitability, not funding.
Satya Nadella, who became CEO in 2014, is credited most often for the change in Microsoft fortunes, i.e., its culture. attitude and product mix.
You don’t hear as much about Microsoft president Brad Smith, but he’s the guy who made friends with government and helps with policy.
“When your technology changes the world,” he writes, “you bear a responsibility to help address the world that you have helped create.”
Responsibility.
The thing that so many founders don’t see as being within their purview.
Unlike Microsoft, their future will be decided more in Europe than in the US.
But the revised interpretation of an old US law could change things drastically.
And that change is being driven in by a surprising source.
Writing in the New York Times last month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai argued that it is “vital for companies to give people clear, individual choices around how their data is used.” Like all Times opinion pieces, his editorial included multiple Google tracking scripts served without the reader’s knowledge or consent. Had he wanted to, Mr. Pichai could have learned down to the second when a particular reader had read his assurance that Google “stayed focused on the products and features that make privacy a reality.”
Writing in a similar vein in the Washington Post this March, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for Congress to pass privacy laws modeled on the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). That editorial was served to readers with a similar bouquet of non-consensual tracking scripts that violated both the letter and spirit of the law Mr. Zuckerberg wants Congress to enact.
An Ovia spokeswoman said the company does not sell aggregate data for advertising purposes. But women who use Ovia must consent to its 6,000-word “terms of use,” which grant the company a “royalty-free, perpetual, and irrevocable license, throughout the universe” to “utilize and exploit” their de-identified personal information for scientific research and “external and internal marketing purposes.” Ovia may also “sell, lease or lend aggregated Personal Information to third parties,” the document adds.
Good grief. As any search will tell you “de-identified” is a joke, since it’s no big deal to put a name to so-called anonymous data.
By now you should know that tech talks privacy, but walks data collection.
That means it’s up to you to do what you can, starting with always adjusting all default privacy settings.
The media loves attaching the “self-made” label, shining a spotlight and making it seem that anyone willing to work hard enough can become a billionaire, or at least a multi-millionaire.
It’s not just all the people along the way, but also where you come from and how privileged your background.
The latest self-made billionaire is 21-year-old Kylie Jenner who claims the self-made title, because she didn’t inherit her company, i.e., bootstrapped it using her own money.
No help, did it herself.
Of course, that self-made label ignores a few significant factors.
Still, it’s obviously absurd to attach the phrase “self-made” to Jenner, who is part of the wildly successful Jenner-Kardashian clan. While she is clearly savvy about marketing and promotion, Jenner grew up in one of the wealthiest ZIP codes in the world with access to every advantage money could buy ― including years of self-promotion on a successful reality television show. The value of her makeup company lies in the celebrity she accrued via her family.
So is “self-made” more nature or nurture? According to new research from Sandra Black, an economics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, the answer is nurture.
The environment you grow up in ― the quality of education your parents can afford to give you, the investments they make in you, the relative affluence of your neighborhood ― is almost twice as important as biology.
It’s not a case of denying the success of Kylie Jenner, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, or Nick Woodman.
It’s a case of recognizing how the advantages they enjoyed reduced risk, lowered barriers, smoothed the road, and made the journey easier.
If you still doubt that parents aren’t a big deal and nurture doesn’t carry all that much weight, take a look at a currently breaking scandal over the lengths to which parents will go to get their kids into a top university.
If someone claimed they were your friend, but constantly lied to you, used you, stole from you, and vouched for con artists would you still trust them?
Would you invite them into
your home and introduce them to your friends?
You probably already have.
The ‘someone’ is Facebook in
all its forms, subsidiaries and partners.
Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages. (…) The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.
It should not come as a surprise that Facebook — a giant, for-profit company whose early employees reportedly ended staff meetings by chanting “domination!” — would act in its own interests.
Current and former fact-checkers for Facebook have slammed the company in interviews with The Guardian, saying it cared more about “crisis PR” than actually combatting the spread of fake news.
Do you think Sheryl
Sandberg’s a role model? If so, think
again.
A report from The New York Times shows that, while Sandberg was building her global brand, she was using aggressive and underhanded tactics at Facebook. As the company faced increasing criticism and pressure (…) she embraced a strategy to suppress information about Facebook’s problems, discredit its critics, and deflect blame onto its competitors.
What about companies owned by
Facebook?
WhatsApp is a major child pornography platform.WhatsApp has become a platform for users to “openly” share pictures and videos of child pornography, the Financial Times reports. (…) WhatsApp only has 300 employees to monitor its 1.5 billion users globally.
“Instagram was a significant front in the IRA’s [Russian Internet Research Agency] influence operation, something that Facebook executives appear to have avoided mentioning in Congressional testimony …”
It has far more harassment
and bullying, than Facebook — in spite of its so-called “kindness”
initiative” Read the stories, they are a real eye-opener.
Zukerberg not only lies, he
is expert at turning
a blind eye on the headline-generating happenings and focusing on all the marvelous
accomplishments in 2017.
The number tech CEOs who have been caught manipulating, lying, cheating, and other bad actions, all while claiming to be good guys, has skyrocketed.
Perhaps the result should be an additional title: CHO
While there are many (at all levels) who deserve the title, none has a higher profile than Mark Zukerberg.
His talk about caring for user privacy, security, etc., is common and constant, although results are negligible.
Hopefully, this time his blatant hypocrisy will come back and savagely bite him and Facebook.
Zukerberg stayed silent after the news broke that Cambridge Analytica covertly gathered data on 50 million Facebook users that was used by the Trump campaign for targeted advertising.
Then, on March 21, in a CNN interview he said, “I’m not sure we shouldn’t be regulated…”
He was referring to pending congressional legislation,
Honest Ads Act, a bill proposed in October 2017 that would require social media companies with more than 50 million monthly users to disclose information about any political advertiser that spends more than $500 pushing ads on their sites.
However, that statement, along with his similar comments in Wired, are pure poop, as the money spent lobbying against it proves.
Lobbyists for the company have been trying to dissuade senators from moving the Honest Ads Act forward, some Congressional aides say.
Facebook’s argument to Congress behind the scenes has been that they are “voluntarily complying” with most of what the Honest Ads Act asks, so why pass a law, said one Congressional staffer working on the bill. Facebook also doesn’t want to be responsible for maintaining the publicly accessible repository of political advertising, including funding information, that the act demands, the staffer said.
Facebook spent nearly $3.1 million lobbying Congress and other US federal government agencies in the last quarter of 2017, on issues including the Honest Ads Act according to its latest federal disclosure form. It also signed on Blue Mountain Strategies, a lobbying firm founded by Warner’s former chief of staff, an Oct. 30, 2017 filing shows.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here.
Ask most tech founders about role models and who they want to emulate and you’ll usually hear the same names — Gates/Jobs/Page/Zukerberg/Bezos.
Rarely do you hear Benioff.
Granted, Benioff’s Salesforce’s revenues aren’t as high and the valuation is “only” $66 billion, but Salesforce sells no consumer products — ads are products — therefore has a much smaller market.
Revenues aside, Benioff is a much better leader and role model.
Not just a philanthropist, but an activist philanthropist who is not afraid to use his clout and get in the face of his peers.
Given the same clout, would you do the same thing?
A guy who believes a company’s concerns should go beyond its investors to include all its stakeholders, direct and indirect.
How far beyond yourself do your concerns go?
Tech’s been on the hot seat lately for a host of reasons, with gender issues front and center, especially equal pay.
Most, including the “role models” listed above, have been vocal in their promises to address the pay disparity.
In 2015, his company did a salary study, and it turned out they needed to make some changes. So they spent $3M to level the playing field. A year later, they put salaries under the microscope again and found they had to spend another $3M to close additional pay gaps.
Now Benioff has pledged to evaluate salaries on a regular basis. For this and more, he was named a “Global Champion of Women in Business.”
And before you whine about not having enough cash to do that stop and think.
If you pay your people equally when you hire and promote there wouldn’t be a pay gap for you to erase.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Ask most tech founders about role models and who they want to emulate and you’ll usually hear the same names — Gates/Jobs/Page/Zukerberg/Bezos.
