It will happen, within a year or few: the era of “unicorpses”. Startups currently valued at billions of dollars will collapse. Some will end entirely, while others will hit valuations of pennies on the dollar compared to their peak values. It’s coming. When? I honestly have no idea. It could happen later in 2016; it could be as late as 2020.
When it comes, I’ll enjoy it. I’m not ashamed of this. Yes, I generally believe, as a human being, that schadenfreude (joy in others’ misery) is a bad thing. I generally don’t wish for other people to fail. I wouldn’t laugh if I saw a stranger slip on the ice and fall. I’d help him up. That said, there are those who deserve to fail and, worse yet, there are those who must fail in order to make space for the good.
I came across this article about schadenfreude: Why Everyone Wants You To Fuck Up. The takeaway is, and I mean this with respect because it could just as easily apply to me: this guy has been in the tech industry for too long.
It’s worthwhile to distinguish several kinds of wanting someone to fail. For example, when George W. Bush became president, I was pretty sure that I didn’t like the guy, but I never found myself wishing, “Man, I hope he fucks up the country so bad that he’ll ruin our image and be judged a failure for fifty years to come”. I didn’t want him to fail at the job in a way that would hurt everyone (but, of course, he did). On the same token, I wish that he had failed at pushing through his brand of conservative values. The bad kind of wanting others to fail is when it dominates to such a degree that you’d be willing to make everyone lose in order to have them fail, or when you want them to fail because of who they are rather than what they are trying to do, when the two can be separated. (In terms of Silicon Valley personalities, they usually can’t be. If someone who beats his girlfriend is made a founder, it’s bad for the culture if he’s allowed to retain his executive position.)
For example, I want Snapchat to fail. I couldn’t care less about the product, but I hate what it says about us as a culture when an uncouth, sexist frat boy can be made into (yes, “made”, because his chickenhawking investors called the shots and are responsible for all of that) a billionaire while so many people struggle. I want merit to genuinely win, which means that Spiegel shall lose. Do I care if he’s reduced to poverty, as opposed to simply being taken out of view? I don’t. I don’t want him to have a miserable life. I just don’t want to live in a world where he’s visibly successful, because it’s unacceptably bad for the world’s values.
I’m not sure if “Silicon Valley”, the place and the culture, can survive “the Unicaust”. We might have twenty dark years after it. We might see another country, currently in obscurity, eclipse us at technology. I don’t know, so I can’t say. However, technology will come back (if it ever leaves, and it may not, since unicorns have zilch to do with true technology) as a force. I have my preferences, which involve its re-emergence as far away from Sand Hill Road as possible. That is, again, not because I have any personal hatred toward the venture capitalists who work there. I don’t even know them! But I hate the values that the current technology industry has embraced, and I look forward to seeing all of those beliefs refuted, brutally and with prejudice.
It’s necessary, before we can move forward, to wash out the founders (and, more importantly, the companies that they create) that believe “young people are just smarter“, or that open plan offices are “collaborative” instead of stifling, or that Agile Scrotums can compensate for an inability to hire top talent because of an awful culture. These people have to go into obscurity; they’re taking up too large a share of the attention and resources.
The technology industry is, of course, full of schadenfreude. One has to be careful about not falling into that mentality. We have a stupidly competitive culture, and we have an ageist culture which leads to people living with a perception of competition against everyone else. Among programmers especially, there is hard-core crab mentality, and it’s a big part of why we haven’t overcome Silicon Valley’s wage fixing, age discrimination, open-plan offices, and our lack of professional organization. If we beat each other down on Java versus Ruby, or on age (which is the stupidest source of division, like, ever) then we’re just making it easy for the slimy Damaso businessmen who’ve invaded our turf (and who run things) to divide us against each other.
However, it’s not schadenfreude to wish failure on that which is harmful. I don’t care if Evan Spiegel’s net worth, at the end of all of this, is $30 million or 17 cents or $5 million in the red. It doesn’t matter to me. He can retire with his millions and drink himself into a blissful stupor, and that’s fine with me; I don’t care. I do care about the simple fact that someone like him should never be held up as (or, as occurred on Sand Hill Road, produced into being) one of the most successful people of my generation. That’s the wrong thing for technology, for the country, and for the world. It’s not just decadent; it’s disgraceful.
We’ve been ignoring basic values and decency for too long. We’ve been allowing VCs to build companies with no ethics behind them, because they’re built to be sold or dead within five years. Here’s the thing: most of us who’ve spent time in and around the VC-funded technology industry know that it’s crooked to the core. We know that it’s in desperate need of reform and that if a few thousand executives’ jobs get vaporized in the process, that’s just fine. It’s hard to convince the rest of the world of the truth right now, though; the counter-refrain is, “It’s hard to argue with success.” I agree. It is very hard. This is why I’ll be elated when the bad guys’ success proves illusory and, at least, a large number of them collapse.
