The ugly side of Silicon Valley and the tech industry culture

Here are four problems I see:

1. There’s this idea that if you give it your all, you'll make it. If you don't get rich, it must be your fault. The truth is, it takes years of hard work to see if a start up will get anywhere, and most startups fail. The vast majority of people who try to make it with startups work incredibly hard. Marissa Mayer had that ridiculous quote about how you need to work 130 hours a week. Many people take that seriously. The problem is hard work doesn't guarantee a win. Very very few companies get an exit worth $100m, and very little of that goes to the employees. One day, you wake up and realize they're 40 or 50 years old, deep in debt, and you blew a few decades on companies that went nowhere.
2. People don't do the math on how much they might make, and get burned by this all the time. I’ve hired a lot of people into startups, and almost none have asked what percent of the company they get. They hear “twenty thousand shares” and think they’ll make millions. Imagine you are employee 20 at a startup that has a $100M exit, which is pretty good. Your options package might be around .2%. After two years of working like a dog, and getting lucky on the exit, you get $60k after taxes. That’s one of the best case scenarios. I was at a startup that got bought while in hyper growth mode. Many employees who’d been there less than a year hadn’t vested their options, and got nothing besides two weeks severance.
3. People think laws and morals don't apply if you’re “disrupting” something. Uber is one example, and they're clearly bad. But look at Theranos. They were giving bad measurements on clotting factors in blood. That's a life or death thing for people on blood thinnners, and the whole company just went for it. I was at a startup where the CEO seriously proposed bribing someone to buy our software. (“Take him out to dinner and tell him we’ll give him $20,000 in cash if he gets this through purchasing at $400K.”) When I said that was illegal, he said I just wasn’t thinking outside the box. Laws are for chumps. Morals are for little people. Decency is weakness. Many people think Travis is a winner, so they want to be like him.
4. For all the liberal west coast feel goodism of the Bay Area, tech is generally racist, sexist, and ageist. The sexism and racism are known well, so I’ll comment on age discrimination. Zuckerberg had that famous quote about how young people are “just smarter.” Venture capitalists are very open about their unwillingness to invest in older founders. Recruiters won't even forward resumes of people in their 40s unless it is a senior manager type. I saw a candidate a few months ago who had a very good track record of delivering results as a marketing events coordinator. But she was probably 45 or so. The CEO took one look and said “"at her age, if she was any good, she'd be a VP.” So she got passed on because if you aren't a VP in your 40s, you're a washout. I did push back about how maybe she just liked that role, but the response was that we should hire people who are trying to claw their way up. If you have one VP per ten employees, that means 90% of people over 40 are unemployable.

The outputs of the the tech revolution are really awesome. But the underlying machinery is really ugly.