Wishful Thinking

Sheryl Sandberg: the first lady of Facebook takes the world stage

This is not a bad article per se, and I don’t know enough about Sheryl Sandberg to say something about her either way, but as someone quite invested in opportunity and equality in business these types of “woman beating the men at their own game”-portraits always do strike me as feeding into a harmful narrative and perpetuating the myth that the game isn’t inherently rigged in itself but merely needs a better PR campaign.

Because most “making it in business” profiles can ultimately be boiled down to two major aspects — ambition as the key to success, and financial profit as gauging the degree to which this has been achieved. That leaves you with quotes such as:

Until women are as ambitious as men, they’re not going to achieve as much as men…

What does that even mean? Men want to be 100% successful and women only 62%? They just have to “want it” more and then everything will be a-ok?

The key is that when we say ambition what we really mean is ruthlessness. Show me the entrepreneurial profile that doesn’t glorify its protagonist’s hyper-competitiveness (“Even in kindergarten, he cried when he didn’t make the prettiest finger-painting”) and waxes lyrical about how driven that particular asshole is. So is it really that women should adapt to the current business culture to be successful and to combat inequality or should we look at what’s wrong with current business culture and change that?

I mean, it’s great for her that a Facebook IPO will possibly make her a billionaire (on paper) but that doesn’t automatically make her a good person, does it? Not that she is not - I don’t know, really - but surely whether she’s a billionaire or not is not the ultimate gauge of her character.

Similarly, kudos for her graduating at top of her class in Harvard, but again, that mostly implies she is very good at studying business and not that she is very good at being a decent person.

I’m not foolish enough to suggest that financial and academic success should not be important parameters in any managerial profile but that maybe we ought to look at what “success” really is and means and stop celebrating false idols.

Lastly:

The most important career choice you’ll make is who you marry.

I think that’s very problematic advice, at best. 

Tech Blogs Are From Mars, Music Blogs Are From Some Crazy-Ass Planet You've Probably Never Heard Of

As a founder, I have a personal goal that’s just as important and just as core to our culture: I do not want to sell this company.  I have opened nearly every meeting by telling potential investors and potential employees this, so I guess readers should know it from the beginning as well.

Of course, there’s the caveat that if someone calls me tomorrow and offers $1 billion, I might cave. I do have investors after all, and everyone has a price. And I’ve been around enough entrepreneurs to know the journey changes you in ways you can’t expect. I’m as aware as anyone this resolve might soften over time.

So let me put it this way: Selling is not success to me. If I wind up selling, I’ve failed in some way. We didn’t get as big as we should, we didn’t execute on the opportunity or I didn’t hire the right team and got too burned out. 

That is from an introductory post. On a fucking tech blog. That got funded with $2.5M venture capital. (And still looks like Wordpress amateur hour.)

Let me not count the ways in which popular tech blogs are the fucking worst (because that would end with me repeatedly banging my iPad against my head after the first thirty items or so) but only semi-jokingly note that all the music/publishing industry needs to escape its seemingly inevitable decline is a healthy dose of bubbly business hype & venture capital fairy dust. We just aren’t bullshitting enough!

***

UPDATE:

Oh my god this gets even better. One of the first posts deals with the publishing industry’s woes:

When you see Snooki’s book on the New York Times Best Seller List, you know publishing is in trouble.

You can blame readers and say publishing is just giving the public what they want. But that’s only half the problem.

The rest is a lazy publishing industry that does far too little of the work that got them here: Discovering new authors and giving them a shot. Instead, they go for the lazy lay-up: Overpaying on celebrity memoirs and pop culture phenomenons with a built in audience.

…

But I don’t have much more sympathy for publishing than Farhad Manjoo has for independent book stores. Amazon didn’t create publishing’s woes, any more than blogging created the challenges of newspapers. The company is just cleverly exploiting them.

And good for them. My hope is disgruntled publishing executives like the one above will quit their comfortable jobs at dysfunctional prehistoric companies and start innovating on the model. I don’t believe the public only wants books written by over-tanned drunks who go clubbing anymore than blog readers only want slideshows and posts on Apple.

WORDS FAIL ME.