Photo by Cassi Josh on Unsplash
Having been in tech for the better part of a decade—an unreasonably long time for someone who isn’t a sociopath—I was not as captured by the trial and subsequent conviction of Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes as the nation was. I was first introduced to Holmes and her nine billion dollar baby in 2018, after a guy I was seeing—also in tech—mentioned the Theranos scandal, and that he was enthralled by the case’s parallels to experiences he’d had with his own employer. “Am I Sunny Balwani?” he’d asked offhand, while we were getting ready for the gym one morning.
When I say that I am “in tech,” I don’t mean that I work for a company that builds technology, although I do. When people say they are “in tech,” they mean that their company’s technology purports itself as the solution to an inescapable problem they wouldn’t think to solve if not for the glittering mirage of monetary gain. I have worked for and with many companies that described themselves aspirationally as “The Uber of [Insert Industry Here],” despite Uber’s turbulence and public woes over time. Truly it is we who are creating the new world, those of us in Fin-Tech, Ad-Tech, or Med-Tech think—surrounded by other people in various abbreviation-techs who agree wholeheartedly.
I started reading John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood right away after my executive’s comment; was he a smarmy and manipulative corporate operator, pushing the agenda of a hot young upstart for a fat piece of the aforementioned’s company? Absolutely. What bothered me about it then wasn’t the affirmative answer to his question—his narcissism and tendency towards grin-fucking had actually allowed me the space I’d always craved for myself in a relationship. What bothered me was that up until human lives were involved, I hadn’t thought any part of Holmes’s activities, nor Balwani’s, were especially out of the ordinary for a tech company. Maybe having whistleblowers followed was taking anti-defamation a little far; but I didn’t even blink at their fudging demonstrations, putting a product in-market before it was truly ready, or overstating a relationship with a big name partner to try and hook an even bigger one.
The collective tech ego thrives on bending the rules as far as they’ll go, and if one does snap, there’s usually a huge, cash-based upside to make up for the indiscretion (see above reference to embellishing partnerships to win new contracts). Guys like Sunny Balwani and the executive I dated could be counted on to patch things up with whoever mattered to the situation, thereby avoiding serious consequences, while individually contributing employees were none the wiser when it came to the commission of those sins. A culture of deception and manipulation internally begets deception and manipulation externally.
This is not to say that tech companies have not changed the world for the better. Technological options for everything from banking to navigation to restaurant delivery have resulted in increased time and logistical efficiency, better data for record-keeping, and more, better consumer options across the board. But if you’ve ever been subjected to the same insurance ad three times in the same commercial break while binge-watching your favorite show on demand, you know that technology can have its downsides, and so does being “in tech.”
We “in tech” can easily forget that the rules of tech and the rules of law do not bend to the same degree. I started my own tech company not too long ago, but shut it down soon after, when the option to mislead potential investors and clients was not only presented, but encouraged. We would have been raising money for one thing, but executing entirely another behind the curtain. “I’m not telling you to lie,” one investor said to us, “but that’s what we did.” The decision to shut down stemmed from a philosophical question: were we foregoing our personal and professional values of honesty and creating a company to do good in the world—the reason we founded a tech company in the first place—in favor of nominal attainment? Deception and doublethink was not what I thought I had signed up for at the start, but when I checked the record of my career in tech startups, it turns out it was.
The tech ego grows by virtue of venture capital’s greed and the naïveté of young founders seeking to make their mark on the world. A CEO’s degree of impressiveness in tech is exponentially higher for every year under 30 they are when they start that company, regardless of their qualifications to do so. Elizabeth Holmes was nineteen when she leveraged a great-grandfather’s entrepreneurial spirit and a distant link to the medical field as reasons for investors to buy into her biotech dream. It isn’t that these infant startups don’t have positive intentions—Holmes did not set out with Theranos to defraud members of the public with preexisting medical conditions, and notably, she was not convicted on those charges. Her intent was to improve the way in which someone who needs frequent blood testing experiences what can be a stressful process. Elizabeth Holmes’s problem, and the problem of a swath of tech companies with young leadership (even the ones that turn out to be Facebook), was that in coming of age over the course of more than a decade in Silicon Valley’s startup culture, she began to believe that she would never have to consider any compromise on what was always known to be a very tall order of vision.
This company exists everywhere in the insular world of tech startups. I have worked for quite a few myself; the ones that tout a world-changing mission, and the unwillingness to accept anything less than massive, sector-dominating success. The employees of these companies are fed the cult-like line that they are part of something greater than themselves by being even the most entry level of individual contributors. Executives at these companies will encourage employees to speak publicly about selected company achievements; vote endlessly for arbitrary designations of “best places to work;” recruit new employees on social networks by use of ALL CAPS with impunity in posts about perks and culture; and minimize so much as to ignore the identification of anything—even if it’s obvious—that may call into question the radical hockey-stick trajectory of the presented success.
It may seem like harmless encouragement of enthusiasm for the company mission, but what we refer to as “Drinking the Kool-Aid” functions (often deliberately) so as to mask the swirling dysfunction—and sometimes even malevolence—beneath the surface. The companies I worked for paid low salaries to individual contributors, but promised equity, upward mobility, beer on tap, and, down the road, big dollars following an acquisition or IPO. The catch to this was that you had to survive the strenuous, nearly 24/7 onslaught of work rolling downhill from inexperienced managers (who got their roles by virtue of knowing the CEO before they were funded) until the time of cash-out, which was always promised to be just over the horizon of the next round of funding. What they’d neglect to disclose was that you’d get passed over at every turn for new employees poached from competitors, and that each time the company raised more money, your paltry equity would diminish in value. Even the beer on tap was usually shitty.
Often, the employees who did the most (usually thankless and sometimes meaningless) work were women, though most executive and managerial titles belonged to men. Theranos was not an exception in that regard, despite the CEO and founder prominently lauded as a woman executive. Having worked also for women-led startups, I’ve seen firsthand how young, hard-working women determined to rise in the ranks of an industry they admire are sold the false bill of goods that is a woman-led startup.
Tech is an industry whose gates are kept by very few, very wealthy men. The women leaders whose companies get funded can easily fall into a trap of relegation to token status, after hiring an inner circle of “industry veterans” as executives and advisors who all happen to be men. Further, as sociopathy lends itself well to being an executive in the intense environment of tech, Elizabeth Holmes and her ilk frequently understand that their position as a female CEO is a card to be played strategically, not a platform on which to lift up other women.
Sunny Balwani, a one-time tech founder and alumnus of software companies like Lotus and Microsoft, is exactly the type of man that exists across the gamut of tech startups today. He knows everyone in his industry, and they know him; he prefers to work closely with (young) women who believe that since he has the boss’s ear, following his guidance is a sure route to professional success. He may come off as doing the job as a favor to someone, though he is invariably well compensated—sometimes even the highest paid employee at the company, as well as the one with the most equity. He knows exactly which rules are malleable and how far they can stretch before needing to be reigned in, and he is the smooth talker who massages that rule to its ultimate flexibility. You’d be hard pressed to find a company past a certain age who does not employ a Balwani-like figure as the adult in the room.
The Zuckerbergian fantasy of starting a tech company in your dorm room and working all night every night to pull yourself up by your bootstraps does not exist. Every tech startup I’ve worked for has leveraged fraud extensively—telling itself the whole time that the end state is the same, no matter which path you take to get there. One startup I worked for operated for years touting a fully automated suite of software products, the capabilities of which, in reality, were carried out by a half dozen relatively low-paid workers in Microsoft Excel until 9 or 10pm every night. The beers were covered, so what did we care about how late it was? When the company was acquired by a massive, multinational corporation, and the automated platform could begin development in earnest, we each made a few thousand dollars for our efforts.
Was it worth it? One could ask Elizabeth Holmes the same thing.
Melanie Brown is a poet and essayist who has been struggling with the dichotomy of my art and paying the bills while working in technology since 2012. When she’s not working or writing, you can find her ballroom dancing, doing Pilates, or watching creative people compete on reality TV.
