If you interview or work for a unicorn or unicorn wannabe that excels at raising money you would be wise to take a step back.

Forget charisma and founder vision and consider what is really going on profit-wise and sustainability-wise.

Fast growth is good mainly for VCs, not employees.

If you can discipline yourself not to be dazzled by shiny words and concepts you can learn to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Do that, and you won’t need to buy this sign or tattoo the words on your frontal lobe.

Image credits: Sarah Rebecca on Instagram  and Zazzle

A long time ago I wrote about what I call ego-merge, which refers to buying into the idea that you and your company are one.

Ego-merge used to be the result of long-term employment with the same company; these days it’s more the result of buying too deeply into the founder’s vision.

“The initial thing of ‘making a life, not a living,’ ‘community,’ ‘better together’ — the terms WeWork pushed as marketing also seeped into this company’s culture in a very real way,” said Kevin Hsieh, a software engineer involved in the group. “There is a looming sense of betrayal and frustration that that wasn’t necessarily followed everywhere.”

Betrayal is no understatement.

Adam Neumann, WeWork’s CEO, walked away with a $1.7 billion golden parachute, while employees are getting worse than screwed.

Combining an intriguing vision, with intense passion and an invincible belief in self, is a recipe that can  hook investors, workers and users — and it did.

Caveat emptor, indeed.

Top bosses can create/ruin more than a company’s culture, they can literally destroy the company.

How much damage can one person inflict?

Ask Adam Neumann, founder and ex-CEO of WeWork.

Just six weeks ago, the coworking giant WeWork was the US’s most valuable tech startup.

How valuable? Try $47 billion, based on it’s last funding round.

Then it tried to go public.

Almost immediately, all hell broke loose. A steady stream of rapid-fire headlines detailed Neumann’s self-dealing, mismanagement, and bizarre behavior. Within 33 days the offering was scuttled, WeWork’s valuation plummeted 70% or more, and Neumann, who believed he would become the world’s first trillionaire, was ousted as CEO. What was supposed to be Neumann’s coronation as a visionary became one of the most catastrophically bungled attempted debuts in business history.

Hard to believe, but it seems a lesson has been learned and the so-called magic of Silicon Valley is waning. Visions and charisma are no longer enough.

Investors, reporters, and analysts, chastened after seeing Theranos revealed as a massive fraud and watching Uber fail to live up to the hype, didn’t let another visionary founder pull the wool over their eyes.

Without new funding, and with the IPO shelved, WeWork could run out of money by Thanksgiving and be forced to file bankruptcy.

Founders and CEOs aren’t gods.

They are mere mortals; human beings just as capable of screwing up as anyone else.

There’s an old Italian proverb that says it all — after the game, the King and the pawn go into the same box.

Image credit: Phillip Pessar

Poking through 13+ 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.

Last week’s look at the “new” Microsoft reminded me of a previous post that’s especially apropos in light of unicorn valuations crashing headlong into the reality of investor focus on profitability.

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.

Neither market cap nor valuation are cause for celebration.

Both are as ephemeral as morning fog.

Ask Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella his reaction when Microsoft became the most valuable company in the world for a few months last fall.

“I’m not one of those guys who says, ‘let’s celebrate some market cap measure.’ That’s just not stable.”

What does interest him?

The Microsoft-generated ecosystem.

“Our business model is about creating more surplus outside us. We will only be long-term success when the people are making more money around us,” he said.

This dovetails with what Bill Gates also believes, i.e., a company’s success is defined when the total value of the ecosystem around it is more valuable than the company that created it.

That ecosystem seems non-existent to the majority of founders of gig economy businesses, dating apps, social media, etc.

Or perhaps it’s just those with venture funding who are focused on growth at all costs.

That said, this post is dedicated to the founders who focus on building sustainable businesses/ecosystems.

As opposed to the fools who chase investment in lieu of revenue, celebrate valuation based on their last round of funding, and don’t care about ecosystem beyond its PR value.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Last week we saw how the best places to work rankings change — Google was number one for six straight years, now it’s number eight, while Facebook dropped to seventh place.

People change too. Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who was named the world’s most reputable CEO in 2018, didn’t even make the top 10 this year.

Friends and family often aren’t aware of the most current news about a company and even when they are they may minimize it, especially if the company is hot or an icon.

This isn’t just about Google; Facebook, Amazon or dozens of others that are just as problematical.

Hot startups encourage you to jump in without due diligence. WeWork may seem like an extreme example, but it’s not as uncommon as you might think — remember Theranos, Uber and Zenefits.

It’s about how fast things change, both the big stuff and the little stuff, all the stuff that underlies culture and trust, which can and should affect your decisions.

Because it’s your career, your life and, corny as it may sound, your soul.

Image credit: chaukhat.com

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

(‘Jerk’ is used here as an umbrella term for bullies, manipulators, bigots, rotten attitudes, rudeness, cruelty, etc.)

Jerks have been around since the dawn of man.

In today’s workplace you can find jerks at any level of an organization.

It’s always been difficult to call out the jerks, because they are usually bullies and good at intimidation.

The rise of individual jerks, some of them extremely powerful, has fostered the rise of institutional jerks, also very powerful.

Some are in tech and run for companies that are household names — Facebook, Google, Amazon — others aren’t as well-known, such as Palantir.

However, you can find them everywhere, in politics — national, regional and local. In religion — any of them. And any other arena you want to focus on.

Their power is more far-reaching and they believe they are untouchable.

Sadly, they often are.

But how much worse is it when the institution itself is the jerk?

Talk about untouchable.

WeWork is on a role to lead the newest crop of institutional jerks.

The company acquired and plans to monetize software that tracks employees throughout a company.

Euclid’s website says the company is “focused on redefining the workplace experience of the future.” Translation: optimizing every aspect of the physical workplace so workers are their most productive.

Euclid does this by tracking how people move around physical spaces. Its technology can track how many people showed up to a meeting or to that after-work happy hour. The company can see where employees tend to congregate and for how long. It’s all done over Wi-Fi.

Sound creepy?

It is.

Governments are getting into the act, too.

While the legislation varies slightly from state to state, it generally requires contractors to install software that allows “automatic verification” of their hours billed. Some bills, such as those being considered in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, are as exact as requiring a software solution that takes screenshots of “state-funded activity at least once every three (3) minutes” and store that data for seven years. The New Jersey and Pennsylvania proposals also require logging “keystroke and mouse event frequency.”

Now comes the question that the jerks never seem to think about.

How do you recruit talent, let alone top talent, into an environment that says up front, “we don’t trust you”?

As for the private sector, there is no way that any kind of monitoring or surveillance will remain secret — any more than salaries did.

Companies that choose not to go down that road will enjoy a more productive, creative and loyal workforce, not to mention one heck of a recruiting edge.

Image credit: Steve Baker

Yesterday’s Oldie talked about one of the biggest lies perpetrated on an already vulnerable Millennial audience — relentless striving 24/7.

It’s a great article — equal parts enlightening and alarming.

Welcome to hustle culture. It is obsessed with striving, relentlessly positive, devoid of humor, and — once you notice it — impossible to escape.

According to Erin Griffith (@eringriffith), writing in the New York Times, the biggest drivers perpetuating the scam do so to line their own pocket.

“The vast majority of people beating the drums of hustle-mania are not the people doing the actual work. They’re the managers, financiers and owners,” said David Heinemeier Hansson, the co-founder of Basecamp.

In 2016 Marissa Mayer, of Yahoo infamy, claimed a person could work 130 hours a week was possible “if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom.”

Many companies extoll the approach and incorporate it into their culture, but WeWork has gone further and built its business around it and is a good example of how this philosophy in action looks more like a cult than a culture.

It has exported its brand of performative workaholism to 27 countries, with 400,000 tenants, including workers from 30 percent of the Global Fortune 500.

But it took Gary Vaynerchuk, the patron saint of hustling and founder of One37pm to “glorify ambition not as a means to an end, but as a lifestyle.”

It’s a lifestyle that has made a fetish of convenience, not for the sake of a better, more well-rounded life, but as a way to free up more time to work.

Finally, without doubt, it can be stated that hustle is a culture with no redeeming features. It sucks humanity from its followers, then uses up and destroys the most devout.

Image credit: Hermann Kaser

KG Charles-Harris sent me an article about WeWork-as-a-cult, which prompted yesterday’s Oldie.

This post isn’t about WeWork, but about two things that struck me.

First, the pure adoration shown to Adam Neumann and the absolute blind following of all he preaches reeks of Jim Jones only with a far larger world vision.

The second were the words uttered by Neumann’s wife Rebekah at the recent Tunbridge Wells Summer Camp.

“A big part of being a woman is to help men [like Adam] manifest their calling in life.”

Shades of Phyllis Schlafly.

And here I thought the fight, from gender equity to #metoo was so women could pursue their own, independent manifest destiny.

Silly me.

All this is even more disturbing, since the great majority of both WeWork employees and devotees are Millennials.

Image credit: Yankech gary