Don’t paint every company in the Valley with Uber’s tarred brush.
Now that the other shoe has dropped, and Uber’s CEO has been (somewhat) restrained, it’s time for the schadenfreude. Given Uber’s remarkable string of screwups and controversies, it’s coming in thick, in particular from the East coast. And while I believe Uber deserves the scrutiny — there are certainly critical lessons to be learned — the hot takes from many media outlets are starting to get lazy.
Here’s why. Uber does not reflect the entirety of the Valley, particularly when it comes to how companies are run. As I wrote in The Myth of the Valley Douchebag, there are far more companies here run by decent, earnest, well meaning people than there are Ubers. But of course, the Ubers get most of the attention, because they confirm an easy bias that all of tech is off the rails, and deserves to be taken down a notch.
Such is the case with this piece in Time — painting all of Uber’s failures broadly as the Valley’s failures. And to a point, the piece is correct — but only to a point. While the entire Valley (and let’s face it, Congress, the judiciary, the Fortune 500, nearly every public board in America, etc. etc.) has a major race and gender problem, Uber has far more troubles than just gender and race. Far more. And painting every company in the Valley with the tarred brush of Uber’s approach to business is simply unfair.
To that bias, I’d like to counter with Matt Mullenwegg, from Automattic, or Jen Pahlka, from Code for America, or Ben Silbermann, from Pinterest, or Michelle Zatlyn, from CloudFlare, or Jeff Huber, from Grail Bio. Sure, their companies aren’t worth billions (on second thought, Pinterest, CloudFlare, and Automattic are, and Grail may be on its way), but they are excellent examples of game changing organizations run by good people who, while they may not be perfect, are driven by far more than arrogance, lucre, and winning at all costs.
It’s certainly a good thing that Uber has been chastened. There are still far too many frothy startups driven by immature, bro-tastic founders eager to “move fast and break things” and “ask for forgiveness, not for permission.” Kalanick and Uber’s fall from grace is visceral proof that they must change their ways. But the Silicon Valley trope is starting to wear thin. Let’s not forget the good as we excise the bad. We’ve got a lot of important work to do.