A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

I said Tuesday that I wasn’t holding my breath in hopes of change when it comes to harassment in the workplace.

I blamed two main reasons, one societal and the other legal, but KG sent me an article yesterday that diminish the likelihood even more.

The articles cite an annual survey done by First Round on various topics, such as hiring, compensation, funding, etc. Last year they added diversity and inclusion and this year they added questions about harassment.

The companies are venture-backed and from all over — the Bay Area, New York, Los Angeles and other parts of the US.

Every year, we survey as many venture-backed startup founders as possible to figure out what it’s like to run a technology company right now. This year, we got more responses than ever before — 869 — giving us an even more precise pulse on what entrepreneurs think, feel, fear, and value.

These founders are the bosses of tomorrow’s tech sector, which doesn’t bode well.

As you can see they aren’t kids who are likely to change their attitudes when they “mature.”

55% have been in business for three to five years. Nearly 60% have an all male board and slightly more than half say their team is “mostly male.”

Actions speak louder than words and most don’t have any formal policies regarding diversity and inclusion or harassment.

Maybe I’m missing something, but there’s nothing about the majority of these new “leaders” that changes my mind regarding the likelihood of real change.

Image credit: HikingArtist and First Round

It’s amazing to me, but looking back over more than a decade of writing I find posts with information that is as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.

Three and a half years and nothing’s change. Not that I expected it to, but one always hopes. That said, my opinion hasn’t change. The only thing any of the men recently outed as harassers and worse are sorry for is being caught — not for their actions — which will make it harder to do it in the future, although I’m sure they will — people have very short memories

Join me tomorrow for a look at one of the major reasons nothing has changed and is unlikely to in the future.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

The more they stay the some.

Einstein said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”

George Bernard Shaw said, “The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

Both of these go a long way to explaining the unchanging culture that fosters gender harassment in the workplace, most prominently in STEM fields.

…666 responses, three quarters of them from women, from 32 disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, biology and geology. Almost two-thirds of the respondents said they had been sexually harassed in the field. More than 20 percent reported being sexually assaulted. Students or postdoctoral scholars, and women were most likely to report being victimized by superiors.

Does a woman or minority in a leadership role actually have more ability to help level the playing field? Not hardly…

…when minorities and women behave in a way that calls attention to their race or gender characteristics — i.e. by advancing others like them — it separates them from other white male leaders, causing them to be devalued by their peers.

Schmoozing and small talk are considered lubricant in business negotiations, but they don’t work for women.

Men who engaged in small talk were likely to get positive ratings on questions about trust, overall impressions and solid foundations for a future relationship, (…)  When it came down to final offers, they were willing to give the men who chit-chatted nearly 8% more than they offered women who engaged in small talk.

Ben Horowitz, of Andreessen Horowitz, has a new book about startups and the Valley called The Hard Thing About Hard Things. There are exactly four women mentioned in the book and one is his wife.

In the first 90 percent of the book, I counted three females: a human resource staffer, a woman whose husband ran NetLabs, and Horowitz’s wife Felicia, a woman with “award-winning green eyes” whose focus seems to be family and her husband’s success. He doesn’t present a real-life female peer until four pages from the end, when he hires Margit Wennmachers, a marketing guru-turned-venture capitalist whom he dubs “the Babe Ruth of PR” and “Sultan of Swat.”

There are many anecdotal stories from women founders on the varied ways they are hit upon by potential investors, but this one in Forbes is first person sourced.

I met the author several months ago and was floored by the stories she had to tell about her dealings with mostly male investors. Like many men (as she writes), I knew women in tech faced a certain degree of chauvinism and harassment, but I’d had no idea it was so barefaced and routine, in an industry that thinks of itself as egalitarian and forward-looking.

In the real world, however, it seems that traction is the best way to stop investors from hitting on you.

Payal Kadakia, the founder of ClassPass, thinks it’s the fact that her startup has started to gain significant traction and now investors who once had an upper hand actually want a piece of her business. And they don’t want to say or do something that could mess up their chances.

In a 2009 post about repentance I wrote, “Repeating the behavior makes it obvious that there is no real remorse and that you see getting caught as the true offense.”

Or, in the words of Friedich Nietzsche,

“The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we may have ‘improved’.”

Flickr image credit: Wesley Fryer

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Entrepreneurs are great, although I have to admit that the entitled, connected, mostly white, bros of Silicon Valley aren’t among the ones I like and respect.

And no matter how large the investment, high the valuation or great the returns, coming up with a new way to find a date/restaurant/cheap ticket for whatever or share your life (in order to believe you have one) I don’t find particularly impressive.

But I love those who solve real problems, whether for enterprise, healthcare, agriculture, and, especially, for our poor, beleaguered planet.

So I got a real kick out of seeing what  Arthur Kay, the UK founder of Bio-bean, is doing.

Most of the products his company makes from used coffee grounds are industrial, but they do have a consumer product called Coffee Logs (sadly not available in the US — yet).

Each carbon neutral Coffee Log is made from the grounds of 25 cups of coffee and contains about 20% more energy than wood – meaning it burns hotter and for longer than wood.

Now Bio-bean has teamed with Shell to produce biofuel.

The startup collects used coffee grounds from cafes, restaurants and factories, and transports them to its recycling facility. There, the grounds are dried before coffee oil is extracted.

The coffee oil is then blended with other fuels to create B20 biofuel, which can be used in diesel buses without modification.

Without modification, that’s huge and undercuts the biggest reason governments use to avoid greener options — cost of conversion.

And that doesn’t even factor in the benefits from not sending all those coffee grounds to the landfill.

The UK produces 500,000 metric tons of coffee grounds each year, but that pales in comparison to what is left in the US after making 400 million cups of coffee every single day.

Kay needs to bring his concept to the US—it would make quite a difference.

Image credit: HikingArtist and bio-bean

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

KG Charles-Harris, who has written here in the past, shared a Medium post from Brandon Evans explaining how/why startups are mostly minimum wage (or less) jobs.

For instance, 50% of founders are making less than $6 an hour.

After raising $15 million Evans company reached a million in revenue the first year and tripled that each of the next three, but when Evans wasn’t interested in raising another $20 million he was fired.

Our investors are great guys and were doing their job. But that job is to maximize the returns for their investors. Homan Yuen in his VC Math post clearly shows why VCs are almost exclusively focused on unicorns (or those rare $1B+ exits). For them to generate an acceptable financial return, they typically require 2 to 3 of them per fund. “Small” $50 million or $100 million dollar exits do little for keeping their investors happy.

What those “small” companies do do is drive the economy and create jobs, obviously a goal of little-to-no interest to VCs and those who invest in their funds — despite their talk to the contrary.

Even an IPO isn’t a guarantee for enormous founder wealth, as shown in the recent SendGrid IPO.

On the other hand, two of the three cofounders no longer own as much as 5% of the company: Tim Jenkins, and Jose Lopez. Both are still listed on the company’s website as engineers who work there. The biggest winner in this IPO among the three cofounders is Isaac Saldana. He still owns 4% of the company and, at $18, his stake is worth $33 million.

Not that $33 million is anything to sneeze at, but Foundry Group was the big winner walking away with $171 million.

It’s interesting to note that SendGrid seems to have put as much effort into its culture, via its four pillars, known as the four H’s: honest, hungry, humble and happy, as its growth.

“We’re so ridiculously over the top with it, it would absolutely scare you away. If these things didn’t resonate with you, you wouldn’t come to SendGrid because you’re like, ‘OK, these guys are like a cult with those four values. That’s not for me, I’m out,” CEO Sameer Dholakia said.

“I’ve been in software and high-tech for 22 years. I know a lot of absurdly talented professionals who would hate SendGrid. It would literally be their seventh Hell because there is nothing humble about them,” he said. “And that’s OK. They’re absurdly talented and in other cultures they can thrive where it’s a star-centered culture. Great! But they would hate us.”

Any one of those values, let alone all of them together, seem to be in short supply at most of the recently headlined unicorns.

And contrary to many in the startup world, values do scale if the focus goes all the way to the top. This is how you do it, according to Sameer Dholakia, SendGrid CEO

• Keep values simple so employees will remember.
• Make them distinctive to attract people who support them. Not everyone will or should fit.
• Be conscious of behaviors that impact the values and reinforce them.

The second is where most founders fail, because they aren’t willing to walk away from stars, AKA brilliant jerks.

Of course, many founders are members in good standing of the brilliant jerks club, but SendGrid is proof that you neither have to hire them  nor be one.

Image credit: HikingArtist

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

This is a short post, because it links to a longer one by Henry Mintzberg that should be required reading for every entrepreneur.

Three years ago I questioned the profits entrepreneurs derived from building incompatible systems for the electronic medical records (EMR) systems mandated by the Affordable Care Act.

The money in play is substantial; privately held Epic is one of the largest suppliers and its founder, Judith R. Faulkner, is supposed to be worth around $2.3 billion.

When you’re making that kind of money who worries about lives ruined or lost because of EMR incompatibility?

Last summer Ryan wrote a thoughtful post comparing ‘enough’, on a personal level, to an empty hole that needs filling and ending with this comment.

Perhaps there is never enough.

Perhaps all that matters is what you are filling up that hole with.

Mintzberg is the latest to write on the subject, but with far more knowledge and authority than most, and his focus on staying private, instead of IPOing truly changes the conversation: Enough of MORE: Better is better

We would do well by shifting our economies from MORE toward better. While MORE is about quantities, better is about qualities. They lift us up instead of dragging us down. We can invest our efforts and our resources in durable products, healthier foods, personalized services, properly-funded education. Rather than reducing employment, a shift to better can enhance it, with higher paying jobs in healthier enterprises. When we work better, we feel better, and so we do better and live better. Our societies become better…and sustainably democratic.

Any of these moves requires moving profit out of the top slot, which won’t be easy.

I looked up the example Mintzberg provided at the end of his post and it is proof of how difficult it will be to change the money focus.

…many shareholders expressed concern on Wednesday that the Germanwings tragedy risked distracting management from its turnaround efforts.

The “distraction” involved 149 intentional murders and one suicide.

More recently, money trumped responsibility (pun intended) for Facebook, Google and Twitter during the presidential election.

Hard research from Harvard provides proof that money isn’t the focus of successful startups..

If what really interests you is building a company that actually does make a difference and helps change the world, while providing you and yours a happy life along with the money, then read Mintzberg and seriously consider his advice.

Image credit: HikingArtist

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

The suicide of Austen Heinz, CEO of Cambrian Genomics and other founders in 2015 that focused a spotlight on the increasing levels of depression among entrepreneurs.

The same people who are responsible for their company’s environment, as well as its culture

Have you created an environment for your people in which they are as productive, creative, confident, and happy as possible?

Is it one that welcomes their ‘whole self’?

Or just the easy, socially acceptable, whatever-it-takes-to-fit-in version?

The above traits are enhanced when people can bring all of what makes them them to work.

It’s well-known that startups reflect the attitudes of their founders.

If founders choose to ignore or, much worse, deny the importance of ‘whole self’ and the positive mental health associated with it they should expect problems (not challenges).

The more pressure to fit in the more energy is spent camouflaging/hiding and even denying parts of one’s self.

That’s energy that would be spent on more positive efforts in a different environment.

An environment that actually welcomed ‘whole selves’ in fact, not just in talk.

Use the links; read the articles.

Then take a hard look at how many of your people are actually bringing their ‘whole’selves’ to work.

And if it’s not 100%, then do something about it.

Image credit: HikingArtist

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

The top stories currently engaging the tech world and spilling over to the real world are the Google memo and Uber.

A major underlying point of the memo is how unnecessary soft skills, such as empathy are in tech, which has been soundly refuted.  

Tech is an umbrella term embraced by a wide range of industries; hence there is fintech, medtech, legaltech, etc.

The inclusion of the word indicates that companies within that industry, frequently startups, are revamping/revolutionizing the business using various kinds of technology.

But none of it happens in a vacuum.

No matter how large or small or how disruptive — from Uber to a solitary founder — they are still part of a larger community.

Consider Uber.

It’s ideal because it is a perfect microcosm of a disruptive startup, with the machinations, interactions and effects on its industry and society in general, since it includes all the elements — positive and negative.

Founders take note.

Uber’s storyline hasn’t moved in a straight line, nor will it in the future, because it involves people.

Companies are people.

Societies are people.

People are messy.

Technology is not an end in itself, but a means to many ends.

One way or another, all those ends are people.

Successfully navigating people requires empathy (keyword: successfully).

Image credit: HikingArtist

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Back in the distant 1980s, when startups were valued for what they did, as opposed to the cash they raised, a founder made a casual comment that has stuck with me all these years.

He said, “There will be times when my team has to pull all-nighters, but if it happens often it is a failure of management to correctly schedule the work and set viable deadlines, as opposed to an unexpected emergency.”

Boy, has that changed. These days founders brag about their 80-120-always-on-hour-weeks and expect their team to do the same.

And they do.

It’s the new techie status symbol.

And not just in tech land.

The gig economy not only brags about it, they base their recruiting on it.

 “You eat a coffee for lunch,” the [Fiverr] ad proclaims. “You follow through on your follow through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.”

Doer? Or exploitee?

Or, more accurately, stupid, with a capital S.

“A culture of overwork is damaging because it turns brief binges of hard work into a long-term strategy, and, worse still, an expectation. When managers start measuring the worth of their employees according to how quickly they return emails at 3 a.m., that particular work culture is broken,” Adam Alter, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, told Business Insider in an email. (He wrote a book about how technology keeps us “always on.”)

Stupid because 80-100+ hour weeks lowers creativity and productivity, while increasing coding and other errors. Not to mention lost sales and misunderstandings.

Founders take note. Not of me, but of the research, crunch the numbers, and analyze the data.

Then think twice, send your team home and go yourself and get some sleep.

Even Uber is planning on that.

“Uber is a data-driven company, and the data shows unequivocally that when you work longer, you are not working smarter,” Uber board member Arianna Huffington told the company’s employees during an all-hands meeting last week, according to leaked audio obtained by Yahoo.
Huffington also added that employees won’t have to be “always on” and responsive to whatever is going on at the office, no matter where they are. Because “when you’re always on you’re depleted, you are distracted,” and “not as creative” as you are when you’re well-rested, Huffington also said, channeling the thesis of her new pro-sleep startup Thrive.

Image credit: HikingArtist

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

The words and images people share through social media have enormous spin.

This is especially true in the startup world where image is everything and perception is key to the next round of funding or investment.

The purpose is to tell the world how world-changing the tech, amazing the team, great the opportunity and how perfectly they are executing.

In other words, they are ‘crushing their goals’, ‘wowing the world’ and ‘killing it’.

Not only that, they are doing it with nary a bump or pothole along the way.

(If you believe that I have a great deal on a lovely orange bridge that would look great in your backyard after you IPO.)

Lee Hower, Co-founder & Partner of NextView Ventures and former entrepreneur at LinkedIn and PayPal, wrote a very needed commentary regarding the hyperbole that irrigates the startup ecosystem.

As he says, “not everybody is killing it and certainly not all the time.”

If anything, the constant social media barrage claiming to be ‘killing it’ is increasing denial, making it harder to admit the challenges, let alone actual problems, and further limiting entrepreneurs ability to talk about it.

Two years ago I wrote about the high incidence of depression and suicide among entrepreneurs and it hasn’t improved.

Entrepreneurs who go public do so after the fact offering useful insights on how they overcame. While this is valuable, it can make it even more difficult for those in the throes, with no one to talk to.

Entrepreneurship is a double-edged sword; while it can be enormously rewarding, it can also destroy and even kill you — or all of the above.

There are two important take-aways in all this.

1. Don’t believe everything you see/hear about how others are doing.
2. Never forget that your pursuits won’t thrive unless you survive.

Ttake care of yourself.

Image credit: HikingArtist

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

It is said that one picture is worth a thousand words.

This image provides a simple, easy-to-understand explanation of why apps often fail.

Note to founder/programmers, etc.

Contrary to what you may have heard (or experienced on the receiving end), users are not a necessary evil.

They pay your salary, as well as other incidentals, such as rent, electricity, pizza and beer.

Cherish them.

Image credit: Computer Funnies