In September, I met with a prominent entrepreneur looking for positive press on his new project. Meetings like these are a common, usually formulaic, part of my job—except in this one, the conversation drifted to the tech industry’s year of bad headlines. As we discussed the latest sexual harassment scandal, he posed a question: Will anyone ever write another positive story about a tech startup?
I said probably not.
We’ve been burned, I explained. The many hype-building stories about deceptive companies haven’t aged well. I once wrote a largely positive story about Zenefits CEO Parker Conrad, lightening his outsize personality by calling him “the enfant terrible of the back office.” Not long after, he was ousted after the company admitted its employees cheated on mandatory compliance training.
The issue is bigger than any single scandal, I told him. As headlines have exposed the troubling inner workings of company after company, startup culture no longer feels like fodder for gentle parodies about ping pong and hoodies. It feels ugly and rotten. Facebook, the greatest startup success story of this era, isn’t a merry band of hackers building cutesy tools that allow you to digitally Poke your friends. It’s a powerful and potentially sinister collector of personal data, a propaganda partner to government censors, and an enabler of discriminatory advertising.
The world is no longer interested in that kind of story, I told him. Anything that doesn’t address the thorny questions facing the tech industry feels beside the point.
The entrepreneur was disappointed by my cynicism. The industry’s problems, he believed, could be solved with more technology. As a matter of fact, his startup was working on just the thing: a tool that would tackle a problem caused by tech. If he was successful, the world (and his bank account, and his investors’ bank accounts) would be better off for it, he argued.
So if I could just do him—and by extension, everyone—a favor and explain that in an article, it would really help us all out.
Talking to tech founders every day, it’s clear how little their lives have changed in the last year, even as the world around them has shifted. Even top bosses who’ve noticed the change in public opinion aren’t willing to adjust. On his blog, Y Combinator president Sam Altman argued that political correctness was damaging the tech industry. “This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics,” he wrote. On the ground, the startup kings haven’t changed their behavior. They’re still pitching me their companies with the same all-out exuberance. They’re continuing their quest to move fast and break things—regardless of what broken objects are left in their wake.
Outside the bubble, things are different. We’re not egging on startups that willingly flout regulations. We’re wary of artificial intelligence and its potential to eliminate jobs. We’re dubious of tech leaders’ promises to make their products safe for their kids to use. We are all sick of the jokes that no longer feel funny: lines about the lack of women in tech, about obscenely rich 20-somethings, about awkward coders with bad people skills, about “hustling” and growth at any cost. It all feels inappropriate.
But this backlash against tech is difficult to see from inside the Silicon Valley bubble. And it’s not hard to understand how we got here. In the late 2000s, just after the financial crisis, the world was eager to hear positive stories about tech. The fast rise of services like Twitter and Facebook was thrilling—a spot of optimism in the gloomy aughts—and their geek genius founders made better heroes than the greedy Wall Street jerks that had just tanked the economy. Facebook was making the world more open and connected. Twitter was aiding revolutions in the Middle East. Sure, those fresh-faced founders became billionaires, but their mission-driven companies felt about as noble as capitalism gets.
The business world celebrated this swashbuckling freedom, adopting startup culture’s management philosophies, office designs, and ethos of innovation. It seemed impossible that a company like Uber, the most valuable privately held startup in history, could ever face a moral reckoning. But that was before 2017, when journalists revealed that Uber’s swaggering “bad boy” reputation had enabled a host of abhorrent and potentially illegal business practices. Uber’s meltdown was part of a steady drumbeat of revelations that have turned the headlines out of startup-land negative.