 It's really good to live long enough to get old enough that something in your life can be described as you're historically known for doing something. Thank you for putting up with me for a few minutes. I also want to thank Jim and the conference and the organizers for inviting me to speak. I spoke at one of their other conferences in Lake Tahoe last winter and it was an amazing event. My son, this is a picture of my son who came with me and met Linus. I think it's a moment he'll remember for all his life. We actually hung out with Linus for a little bit and listened to his talk and my son has just turned 12. I think it was an amazing experience and people were so nice to both of us. Linus was so nice. I also really think that you guys, the open source community are the good guys of the tech industry, the ones who build things, build most of what we use today. I want to start with sort of an apology or a mea culpa or a fall on the sword moment whereas some people might remember a long time ago I was a journalist at Forge and I covered open source and I covered IBM and I was famously somewhat skeptical about open source and about Linux and here we are in 2017. So my skepticism was misplaced. I also, on the fake Steve blog, I used to kind of have fun with the sort of more radical elements of the movement. This is one where he's killing a shark that violated the GPL but I just thought he was kind of too extreme, too radical that his ideas were maybe even good but they were impractical. The funny thing is as I've got older I've kind of become radicalized which isn't supposed to happen. You're supposed to go the other way and become I guess more conservative. Anyway, that didn't happen for me. So I'll get to what I'm going to talk about. It's a very quick story and the full version is in this book that I published last year and if you're interested in it you can get it and read it but I'm just going to give you a nutshell of it today which is that I went to work in a startup thinking that I knew a lot about the tech industry and came away realizing that a lot of what I thought I knew was wrong and that the industry had changed in some profound ways and in ways that I think have gone off the rail a bit and could end up affecting all of us and becoming a problem for us. So I got laid off at Newsweek. I was the tech editor at Newsweek. I got laid off and I went to work at the startup in Cambridge. I live in Boston and it's a place called HubSpot which some of you might use at your company. They make marketing software for marketing automation and the weird thing was the average age of the company was 26 and I was 52. I was exactly twice double the age of the average employee and most people were right out of college and they had every startup cliche you can imagine as if there's like a catalog for goofy startup stuff and they just said it will take one of those two of those one of those. So we had the dogs in the office. We had beanbag chair meeting rooms. We had all the you know the open offices. Nobody has an office. You're all at these big tables. We had the big bright basic colors as you can tell on the slide orange was the corporate colors we had orange everything. We had these sales bro guys these like former lacrosse players who did a push-up club in the lobby every day like where they would be like bro you know join in you know and do you even lift and and then we had beer like beer everywhere like refrigerators full of beer and the bros would like after the push-up club go down in their flip-flops in the backward baseball caps and get some beer go back to the desk make their calls for the afternoon and then we had a nap room with a big hammock and a nice little Hawaiian theme you could go in there and sleep off you know the buzz from the beer anyway so it's like I had never worked in a place like this right and I kind of always wanted to but but it was like a frat house mixed with a Montessori kindergarten and a Scientology compound right it was like you put those three things in one room right and along the lines of the Scientology thing that's actually the scariest and coolest part of this because it was really culty in a way that I had never experienced before so when you joined the first thing I had to do is go through two weeks of training and ostensibly it was to learn how to use the software but really it was a kind of brainwashing really it was like indoctrination you're really being told what it took to be a member of the cult right and everyone we're all rock stars I don't know why that we're all rock stars now and we had superpowers and it was like you know you've been accepted into the X-Men Academy right like they would tell us it's harder to get a job here than it is to get into Harvard right and I'm sitting there going like this is bullshit right like I'm I'm the one old guy in the room right and the other kids are the kids are like okay harder than Harvard right okay you know they're all first job right and we had to go around and talk about ourselves and you know introduce ourselves and tell us what's the one thing that makes you a special snowflake what's something that nobody here knows about you or makes you special like and the leaders like I'll tell you my thing is I play in a heavy metal band on the weekends right I'm like okay great I got nothing and I hate this shit right but you know who I hate the one they come around talk about yourself and I'm like I'm the only one in the room has had a colonoscopy right you know and they're like happy to describe it kids because it's coming your way you know hang in there there's a hose seriously yeah but those of you who haven't turned 50 yet God you have something to live for now so we had a culture code the founder of the company one of the founders had created this long thing the culture code in this subtitle was creating a company we love right and we're supposed to love the company and as far as I could tell for a long time I didn't even know what my job was but I didn't know the way to succeed was just to love the company just be super enthusiastic like these guys wear orange to work jump up if it's a picture being taken jump for the picture right be super positive there was a woman who would end her emails and sign off like go HubSpot go with a bunch of exclamation points because I love exclamation points right they're marketing people right if any of you work in marketing you know what I mean and they had this thing that I came to call a praise gasm where they found out you could figure out pretty quickly that the way you got rewarded was also by how much you praised other people right which is a kind of a cool idea right so because you get people sending praise to everybody right so the really people really want to get attention for themselves it wasn't about bragging about yourself what you did was just find anything to praise in anyone else and so Julie would decide that Ashley was did a great job last week and she wanted to say Ashley rocks but the way you do that is you don't in any place I work what you do is you tend to ask a no saying hey by the way last week that thing you did that was awesome right and if you really wanted to you know help her out you'd CC her boss and just say this one great right but at HubSpot what you did is you CC the whole department so you'd come in on the morning to be this thing where somebody had written a love note to someone else right okay great cool I don't care I don't know either of you fine fuck off right so but then the protocol was everyone on the email would reply to all to say you know yeah I agree you kick ass man like you're the best you're a rock star right and and so your email would just fill up and I'm sitting there like I'm old and I'm a prick anyway and I'm just like I could delete delete delete right so and then I decided no then I look like a commudgent right I got to make this work so I started joining in but on things like yeah woohoo Ashley and then I put like a thousand exclamation points like woo and then they figured out you know you're being a dick stop that right so oh it really very quickly went off the rails this job they were so super positive that when they fired you they called it graduation right seriously and they would send around this really cheery email saying hey gang just want hate note hey team just want everyone to know that Derek has graduated and we can't wait to see what he's gonna do with his superpowers and his next big rock star adventure and we wish him the best I said dude you just fired that guy right and you look over in the desk is empty he's already gone like there was no wanting to book he's gone like it was like living in Argentina in the 1970s just people disappear well I don't even know why right and they're never spoken of again nobody would ever gossip about it ever right you know like spinal tap drummers just a little like a little pile of dust left on the chair and I never saw anything like this and and you know people would be out in their cars crying because they graduated a lot of people even though we were growing graduation happened all the time right and nobody there thought it was a problem this is the twist for me nobody thought oh this huge turnover is a problem like maybe means we're not hiring well they were actually proud of this they didn't feel bad about it and they had this thing we're a team not a family you know it's like being on the Yankees and hey maybe you're not cut you know you're not able to play in the big league so you know just be ready for this this was in the culture code but buried way and like by the way we can fire you we probably will right but we'll call it graduation so don't feel too bad right the only request I had when they finally terminated me was like don't call it graduation please you know I'm 52 but there was also something really callous about this something really uncaring and it didn't jive with the the rhetoric on the top of creating a company we love and this is such a fun place and we have beer and dogs and beanbag chairs it's Nerf gun wars you know so much fun but like when it came down to it it was way more callous than any of the old media places that I had ever worked out and it turns out this wasn't unique to them they got this idea from Netflix which came out with this their own culture deck in 2009 right and I'm old enough to remember when I first started covering tech one of the things I was impressed about going to tech companies was even if they didn't mean it they would say you know our best assets walk out the door at night people is really what we're about we really need to take care of our employees because we're in the intellectual property business right it's your brains that's what we are right and this had changed and not just at HubSpot and Netflix but kind of across the industry Reid Hoffman at LinkedIn has this idea that a job isn't a job anymore it's a tour of duty right it's a it's a transaction you're gonna be here for 18 months two years you have companies that will brag about how well they fire I've seen people on Twitter talking about how good we are at firing people and it's like to me it's like it's like you know proposing marriage to a woman and saying and by the way when we get divorced I just want you to know I'm really good at it like I'm really good at divorce it's gonna be a great divorce right so but this is this new compact that had been formed and honestly I wasn't aware of it even though it was covering tech I wasn't aware of what life was like on the ground for people inside some of these companies so my book came out and this guy from Stanford Jeffrey Pfeffer who's a big business professor wrote this essay called why modern work culture makes people so miserable and it's not to realize like there's something in the air like there's something weird happening in work like what work is and how we work and how we think of work and why we work and Pfeffer is saying you know it's it's bad enough being an employee at where I was where with no job security and you can get graduated whenever it's worse if you're in the gig economy you never even get that you never even get to be an employee with no job security and lousy benefits you get none of that right and the weirder thing is is I've started reading more about it the gig economy is coming for all of us right the notion of an employee is gonna be an antiquated notion in 1020 30 and my kids lifetime white collar workers are all being forced out into the situation where we're free agents which is okay that's sold is like hey free agent nation you're the brand of you isn't that cool well no because now the brand of you has to go compete for peace work in an open marketplace where you're forced to compete against everybody else who's looking for work and it's gonna grind wages down right that's the inevitable outcome now depending on which side of that transaction you're on it's a great thing or a bad thing for companies it's pictures like we're wringing all the inefficiency out of the system for us it means like we're gonna you know you're gonna pay it even less right that for says basically what we're doing is this isn't an internet enabled innovation which is how it's sold right it's sold is like hey this is great we can wring all that inefficiency out and everybody can find fulfillment no what we're doing is returning to what we had 140 years ago a century's worth of progress in worker rights have have been rolled back I did a piece in the Times a couple weekends ago about how a century ago workers were going on strike for better working conditions you know they were forming unions and going on strike in textile mills to get better hours better protections now we've flipped it up to it's so inside out and in Silicon Valley of people wearing t-shirts to say nine to five or so over the week you know celebrating their workaholism celebrating their own exploitation right it's so pervasive that economists have created a name for a new class of people the precarious basically people who have precarious employment who have no benefits who don't know where how they're gonna pay the bills next month next year right and this is happening at a time when more wealth is being created than ever before and it's happening in the industry where most of that wealth is being created I'll give you three examples of the precariat last year in Scotland a reporter found that workers at an Amazon warehouse factory in Scotland were living in a tent city outside the factory because Amazon provided a bus but charged 10 pounds a day to ride the bus and they only paid seven pounds an hour so for some people it was just worth it to live in a tent right now Jeff Bezos is worth 82 billion dollars right six months ago when he gave this talk he was worth 70 billion he's made 12 billion dollars in six months and his workers are living in tents this is Victor and Nicole they both work in a cafeteria at Facebook right they live with their three children in a garage in Menlo Park right because they can't and they can't afford the health insurance that they could buy through their employer if they wanted it they don't make enough right Facebook made 10 billion dollars in profit last year they have 30 billion dollars in cash Mark Zuckerberg is worth 56 billion dollars he's the fifth richest person on the planet people working in the cafeteria at Facebook should be happy right I mean that should be a great job you should be like I died and went to heaven I got a job in the cafeteria at Facebook I'm set for life I'm not going to be a Brazilian air but I should be able to buy a house put my kids through college right there's no reason for this this is Renkstorf Park in Mountain View I went there in June this 40 or 50 campers permanently set along the side of this road right these are working people who basically got priced out of their apartments they took the last bit of money they had and they bought a camper and they parked it on the street and they put a generator out there and they live there these are working people right the town wants them to be swept out but they can't get rid of them right this is two miles from the Googleplex eight miles from Facebook so this is a weird thing the rising tide is rising but it's not lifting all boats something weird is happening you know we're at work playing beer pong right but we're not noticing what's being taken away these things that we took for granted about our jobs at least people my age sorry who entered the workforce you know in the 20th century security stability dignity benefits those things are being taken away and I almost suspect that the fun in games and the dogs in the beer pong is a magician's trick that it's a form of misdirection it's like we're having fun work is fun and like just don't look at what's coming out of your pocket on the other side right so then the question is why and I apologize I think this slide is hard to read but if you look at venture capital and you look at where it was in 1995 and where it was in 2015 so 95 the beginning of the boom to a couple years ago right it's four times as many or twice as many firms and funds four times as many active investors seven times as much money invested right 95 is when this all began or I think Netscape went public in was it 90 in around there and what these guys have created is a new business model right which is grow fast lose money go public cash out right that's the model it started with Netscape Netscape was the first company that could go public while losing money until this till then the public markets wouldn't pay for a company that wasn't both growing really quickly and posting a profit but Netscape pulled it off you wonder how widespread is this I'll show you in a second but the other thing to remember is every bad thing springs from this this business model grow fast lose money go public cash out every bad thing comes from this I did a roll up a few months ago of all the tech IPO since 2011 that I subtracted anything that had been acquired so just the ones that left independent I got 60 companies only 10 had ever made a profit right so you wonder suddenly it hit me if you want to know why is the workplace changing this is it right if you don't make a profit if you don't make any money you can't take care of your employees more to the point if you don't ever intend to make a profit if you know from the beginning that this company will never make a profit you even have even less concern for employees so consider companies like Zynga and Groupon that went public in 2011 at the beginning of this latest rush as soon as the everybody made their money and the vcs cashed out and the founders cashed out those companies collapsed they never made money these aren't really companies these are vehicles these are financial instruments these are little wagons that these guys build they roll them into the public markets fill them up with money roll them back put them in their pocket and get the hell out before the whole thing falls apart not in every case not in every case but a lot the other ill effects that come from this quickly i want to go through bro culture income inequality and what i call even worse stuff i couldn't come up with a better name bro culture has become a rampant and we're all aware of it it's another thing i've written about in the times recently right vcs are bros they invest in bros the bros hire bros and they build a frat house because somewhere along the line john door or kliner perkins or some other venture capitalist i guess was walking around stanford on a friday night looking at some drunk dorm and go this is a great model for how to build a company why don't we just give these guys millions of dollars like that makes sense right a frat house of course right you know yeah um and you have this idea of culture fit right they hire for culture fit which just basically is a euphemism for we hire other white guys like us right and the best example of this to me is uber and the problem with it isn't just that it excludes people is that these guys don't really know how to run companies frat boys are not the best business people in the world believe it or not right i love the picture of travis on the cover of fortune i think this by the way came out the same week he was fired anyway i don't think i'm an asshole it's like the rest of us would like to respectfully disagree trav you know i think maybe just think about that for a little a little second more you know bro culture brings with it bias on every vector right on age turn 40 and you're out you don't even get in right race no forget it when i was at hub spot the first time we had an all hands meeting and i saw all 500 people in one big room i realized there's no black people and not only that there was only one kind of white people they all they look like they all came from cape cod right it was like they made them in a lab right if you ever want to get really amused or incredibly sad do a thing where you roll up the management pages of all the unicorns all the american unicorns and roll up their boards of directors like and do like you know little thumbnail sketches and it's just like white guys made in some lab at stanford i don't know where they come from right they all look the same right and gender i mean genders god that's the you know the biggest victim of the bro culture thing is women get in but they only go this high up in the organization they don't become promoted and even here they just get harassed to death i mean that's what amazing thing to me about uber it's the uber story unraveled with one woman who was brave enough to just stand up and say what happened to her right to me she's an enormous hero because it was took a lot of courage to do that oh thank you now and her name is susan fowler i hope someday they have like a statue or an award named after her sir she's went to the supreme court and and testified there i've written to her and um corresponded a bit with her i i i i i admire her courage i can't say how much um so the next one is income inequality right now there are eight guys whose combined wealth equals the combined wealth of the bottom half of the world a few years ago this was a few hundred people then it came to 30 now it's eight four of them are techies five if you count bloomberg right although i think bloomberg fell off more recently but anyway you get the idea the industry is creating this radical concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands right and this started a while ago but it spiked in the internet era this is the the ratio of what a average ceo makes to the average worker for a long time it was in the 20s then look at spike in 2000 at the height of the dot-com bubble kind of falls back and you think well maybe we're going back to 20s like no no we're back at 300 and we're gonna we like it here we're just gonna stay we'll stay with the 300 ratio thank you right um 40 years ago wages represented 52 percent of the us gdp today they represent 46 percent so where did that six percent go corporate profits went from six percent to 12 percent six percent of gdp shifted from our pockets into corporate profits which they're not reinvesting they're keeping as profits in order to line their own pockets by making the stock go up and then getting bigger bonuses right that six percent is worth one trillion dollars a trillion dollars has been stolen from us right so i talked about even worse stuff and this is the first example right the precarious kind of realizes something bad has happened i think i used to have a trillion dollars and i don't know what happened to it there is a right but they don't really know what or how and they lash out with brexit with trumpism you know they know they're being screwed but they feel powerless and they say you know i still have one thing that larry ellison has the same that's the same as larry ellison i have a vote and i'm going to use it i'm going to punish you right now that's just the first step it gets worse right if we keep going this way there are people like this guy nick hanauer who's fortunate enough to be one of the early maybe the first investor in amazon he's amazingly rich he's the guy who ginned up that trillion dollar number i mean he didn't gin it up it's a real number but uh who pointed it out he thinks we're facing a revolution right that this is just the the first inklings of what's going to become you know the pitchforks are coming for us and his solution is very simple that trillion dollars that got stolen just let's give it back like like we can take the money we just fix the problem we created um the response from silicon valley has been quite different right it's just run away right so it's like they're willfully blind to the problem they have cost right and if oddly enough look at all of the interesting highfalutin rhetoric that comes out of silicon valley the most interesting stuff that they all sit around navel gazing about it's all about escape right silicon valley is all about escape right now so they're gonna do seasteading well you know we won't fix this world it's all fucked up anyway we'll just build an island where we're in charge and we'll live there right or we'll carve california up into six states and one will be silicon valley so we won't have to support all those assholes in the other parts of california right or we'll have some sort of tech utopia either part of a city or we'll create these worlds that are outside government control and we'll just let like google control it sorry apana but you know we'll let big tech companies will that that or let peter teal run it that'll be good right or you have ray Kurzweil talking about the singularity which is a basically let's escape biology right well let's escape death itself we don't even have to die we can just we can become immortal right ilan mosses no fuck that let's go to mars right we'll just live on mars right that's what we'll do right and then they have a big debate can we get to mars i don't know can we do it in our lifetime will the singularity happens like meanwhile they're stepping over homeless people on the way to work they have to drive past rankstorf park in the campers to go have this stupid conversation right that only really stupid rich people could even have they have the luxury of having these conversations right the best version of escapism and it's a near term one this is a story from the new yorker a few months ago which definitely should read doomsday prep for the super rich oligarchs are buying land right stocking up on guns and food and ammunition right to prepare for the apocalypse that they think is coming right um that they cost peter teal has bought a built a big compound in new zealand with a landing strip you know and an armored bunker so that if the shit really hits the fan right he can fly to new zealand and just hide in a hole with his billions of dollars right instead of fixing the problem like nick hanner says just take the money give it back fix the problem right they're just going to go hide out with their money teal who by the way campaigned for trump and then suddenly you don't hear about him he just vanished right when trump won so they don't want to take responsibility for the problem they created which is a long way of getting to the point that installment was right the whole time right like this is what i finally realized 20 years later it's like i thought he was crazy because he's living on a cot in mit right but um he wasn't you know we um on the hbo show silicon valley we had a big running joke about how these smarmy marketing tech people come out and talk about changing the world and making the world a better place you know gavin belson who's just a complete villain right but the thing i want to leave you with is i still believe that we can make the world a better place right i think it's first by abandoning that model of grow fast lose money cash out and run away right um we can easily easily create companies where amazon workers don't have to live in tents and where uber drivers can be real employees with real benefits and some dignity and a decent life right and where cafeteria workers at facebook can actually have a good life they shouldn't have to live in a garage right we can do that right um the reason i first fell in love with covering technology a long time ago historically speaking was that it was an industry that had lifted up thousands of people had created prosperity for entire communities right that industry has been hijacked by people who just want to get rich quick and to hell with everybody else but you guys the people who build things who build companies you're the ones who can fix it um thank you very much