Sabbatical Reflections: Our Role in Making a Better Society

After 11 years of running hard, 24/7 as a startup founder, I did something over the last five months I thought I'd never do– I stopped working. To pause. And reflect on the year that changed everything for so many people, including me. I’ve relished watching my five-year old grow up in hyper-resolution, going for long walks with my mom, and on some days, doing nothing but decompress. Reading and writing have helped me distill what’s happening in the world, reflect on smart decisions we made at Hearsay, post-mortem my most painful mistakes, and try to plan for an uncertain future. 

I have lots of notes scribbled in my journal and the margins of books I’ve read and reread, and decided to type up the highlights in case others might find it interesting. This post is focused on technology and society. Future posts will cover lessons in leadership, strategy, bias in our thinking, and startup management.

Early in my sabbatical, I watched my friend Tristan Harris’s riveting documentary-drama, The Social Dilemma, sounding the alarm on the role social networking sites are (accidentally) playing in spreading fake news and pitting groups against each other. Today’s ads-driven consumer internet business models prize “eyeballs” and clicks above all else, including truth and moderation; it turns out incendiary fake news and demagoguery drive the most clicks, which is why they end up dominating many people’s social feeds. 

Disruption, displacement, and divisiveness

Reflecting further, I think Tristan is right about social networks being an enabler, but I do not believe they're the root cause. Twitter tirades, culture wars, and even the opioid epidemic are reactions to the blinding pace of technology-induced displacement of workers. I’d truly wanted to be optimistic after reading Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s Second Machine Age and joining the Markle Foundation Rework America Task Force in 2013. But the optimism is not bearing out in today's local economic data and reality across America. Nearly 40M jobs have been eliminated in the last 12 months; many will not come back post-pandemic.

People whose jobs have been globalized or automated struggle to pay the bills and start to feel hopeless and desperate. Our brains are no match for the powerful machine learning algorithms feeding fake news to us on social networks, and it’s easy to become susceptible to simple narratives about who to blame and get angry– which deepens the divide between groups, and the cycle repeats itself every day in the news and on social media. 

Venture for America founder (and New York Mayoral candidate) Andrew Yang’s narrative is more accurate and grim. His book The War on Normal People is the best articulation I’ve read of how technology has unintentionally negatively disrupted our economy and democracy. I’d assumed Andrew was anti-capital markets but it’s evident in his book that he is very pro-capitalism. This is not a political endorsement, but rather an endorsement of his fact-based, data-driven articulation of what I believe to be the biggest root cause issue facing society today. 

Visiting post-industrial cities and towns like Akron (where I spent part of my childhood), Andrew has seen, as I have seen, the same phenomenon: “In places where jobs disappear, society falls apart. The public sector and civic institutions are poorly equipped to do much about it. When a community truly disintegrates, knitting it back together becomes a herculean, perhaps impossible task. Virtue, task, and cohesion — the stuff of civilization — are difficult to restore. If anything, it’s striking how public corruption seems to often arrive hand-in-hand with economic hardship... A culture of scarcity is a culture of negativity. People think about what can go wrong. They attack each other. Tribalism and divisiveness go way up. Reason starts to lose ground. Decision-making gets systematically worse. Acts of sustained optimism — getting married, starting a business, moving for a new job — all go down. If this seems familiar, this is exactly what we’re seeing by the numbers here in America. We’re quickly transitioning from the land of plenty to the land of ‘you get yours, I get mine.”

Among low- and middle-skill workers, even those lucky enough to find employment are reporting record-low levels of job satisfaction and feeling treated as dispensable cogs micromanaged by technology, as Michel Foucault warned about 100 years ago. In her book On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane, Emily Guendelsberger shares the modern take on this and how blind many of us may be to what’s happening: “Nearly everyone with influence in this country, regardless of political affiliation, is incredibly insulated from how miserable and dehumanizing the daily experience of work has gotten over the past decade or two. Many have never had a service job… [Today, monitoring equipment] can be set up to harass, nag, startle, or otherwise trigger a worker’s stress response every time she lags behind the desired pace.” Social media trolls and algorithms only fan the flames.

Venture for America, Markle, Opportunity@Work, and other like-minded organizations are laying an important foundation for us to ensure continued economic opportunity for all, but they can't do it alone. We have to help.

A time for leadership

The business leaders we admire understand something is broken and are taking steps to fix it. They know that built-to-last corporations serve a greater purpose than total shareholder return. 

In 1988, Starbucks founder, then-CEO and Chairman Howard Schultz introduced healthcare benefits to part-time retail store employees, followed by Bean Stock a few years later, turning Starbucks employees into partners by providing the opportunity to share in the financial success of the company through Starbucks equity. This was at a time when every other corporation was squeezing every last drop of profit. In 2010, Howard warned against “[embracing] growth as a reason for being instead of a strategy.” Kevin Johnson, who took over as CEO in 2016 has continued to lead in corporate social impact, growing the Starbucks College Achievement Plan (which offers 100% college tuition reimbursement) and introducing mental health benefits to partners and their families last year.

In his seminal 2018 letter to shareholders, Blackrock founder, CEO, and Chairman Larry Fink echoed this sentiment: "To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society. Companies must benefit all of their stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, customers, and the communities in which they operate… What role do we play in the community? How are we managing our impact on the environment? Are we working to create a diverse workforce?” 

Last October, Salesforce founder, Chairman, and CEO Marc Benioff wrote in the New York Times, “The culture of corporate America needs to change, and it shouldn’t take an act of Congress to do it. Every C.E.O. and every company must recognize that their responsibilities do not stop at the edge of the corporate campus. When we finally start focusing on stakeholder value as well as shareholder value, our companies will be more successful, our communities will be more equal, our societies will be more just and our planet will be healthier.”

A way forward

I believe technology companies need to take greater responsibility, and that all leaders must take the time to deeply understand how technology automation affects our employees and communities. To understand what our lowest-paid employees experience day-to-day and treat them with dignity and respect. To know that long-term profit and sustainability require being more intentional in the short and medium-term. 

There are no simple solutions, but as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step.” In this spirit, there are three actions I believe every person today must take: 

1. Define a new yardstick of success. It's the leader's responsibility to define reality and articulate what matters, then back it up with words, actions, and metrics. I’ll pass along sage advice Howard Schultz once gave me: Always imagine two empty chairs in your meetings– one for your front-line employee and one for a customer. (For those of us working in tech, there’s a third chair for the people who use our software, are subjected to our software, or whose jobs will be replaced by it.) When making a decision, ask yourself if your actions would make these constituents proud. I ask all of us to continue this tradition, and let the answer guide us. 
2. Nurture authentic diversity & inclusion. Diversity, inclusion, and equality have never been more important. They require much more than hiring a diversity officer and issuing a press release. The “why” for every company is different and needs to be highly authentic to the organization’s needs as well as personal to each leader. Otherwise, D&I comes off as insincere and is more harmful than helpful. We should start with business outcomes when considering what D&I means for our organization– attracting the best talent by tapping into the widest talent pool, avoiding groupthink by fostering diverse thought and debate, and reflecting the demographics of our customers to develop relevant products. Know your why– why D&I matters for your business and for you personally. 
3. Take responsibility for your employees’ emotional well-being. This is perhaps the biggest change in what’s now expected of leaders compared to previous decades. CEOs of yesteryear did not comment on racism, riots, and current events unless they directly involved the business, and even then, after-the-fact press releases were the norm. But in this age of a pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and Capitol riots, leaders are now expected to be well-informed on what’s happening in the world, be able to connect these events back to employee and customer experience, and articulate an authentic point of view in real-time. For years, I was scared to talk about race. As an Asian-American and immigrant, I did not believe I had the privilege to speak up. But the stories of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and so many others last year shook me to my core, and I realized it isn't about privilege, it's about duty. Duty to our friends, neighbors, and coworkers. That silence is unacceptable, and that we all have to be color brave, not color blind.

These actions are by no means perfect or comprehensive. I would love to hear your ideas and expand the list.

As Andrew writes: “It will not be easy. We all have dysfunction within us... Greed and fear. Pride and self-consciousness… [Through all of the doubt, we] must fight for the world that is still possible. Imagine it in our minds and hearts and fight for it. With all of our hearts and spirits. As hands reach out clutching our arms, take them and pull them along... Fight for each other like our souls depend on it… And build the society we want on the other side.” 

What makes us human? How will we show up? What will we be remembered for and what kind of world will we leave behind?

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Thank you to my undergraduate professors from back in the day– Eric Roberts, Ramón Saldívar, and Robert McGinn– for making sure us techies considered the social and ethical implications of our work. The books we read and our debates have stayed with me even after all these years. Thanks also to my dear friends Nikki Pechet and Dr. Rebecca Graciano for working with me on this draft.