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I really liked Ben Horowitz's new book "What You Do Is Who You Are". However, the only passage that I disliked and stood out to me is when he defended David Dru

I really liked Ben Horowitz's new book "What You Do Is Who You Are". However, the only passage that I disliked and stood out to me is when he defended David Drummond for his ability to thrive at Google for a long time despite the corporate culture changing. This was after Drummond was called out publicly for abandoning his kid he had with a subordinate: https://www.law.com/corpcounsel/2018/10/25/report-alphabet-clo-drummond-secretly-fathered-child-with-subordinate/?slreturn=20200010162407 https://www.law.com/corpcounsel/2018/10/25/report-alphabet-c... I am sure he's made a lot of people money, but it's not like Google couldn't find a great legal chief who also wasn't a terrible person. Edit: First article I linked to was paywalled, so here is the underlying story: https://medium.com/@jennifer.blakely/my-time-at-google-and-after-b0af688ec3ab https://medium.com/@jennifer.blakely/my-time-at-google-and-a...

Aqua 7y ago
That's not how business works.
- loganfrederick 7y ago
  You're correct, that's not how companies usually make their personnel decisions. But one would think more companies would factor in PR-risk as a real financial risk. But Google being Google economically-speaking, this still probably isn't a material event.
  - shawnz 7y ago
    There's also the risk of employees not being able to work effectively if they don't feel safe/comfortable in their work environment.
    - dmix 7y ago
      So it is in fact very much how business works... between bad PR and company cultural issues. This stuff matters. Not to mention businesses have customers and investors who care about these things.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
  The idea that business cares only about profit is just plain wrong. The law people think of is almost never relevant. Each year, millions of business decisions are made knowing full well that it will cost a bit of money, not bring in any (or even good PR), but is the decent thing to do. As but one example: Google once gave us money for a non-profit event, in no way related to their business, with explicit instructions not to mention them.
  - seibelj 7y ago
    If your anecdote is true then how do you know that?
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      Because they were involved in it??
    - IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
      I called them and asked for money. See my use of the word "us". So, yes, maybe they did it because they knew I'd be going around using them as an example of altruism in business, 12 years later.
      - shawnz 7y ago
        I think it's more likely the rationale was to support a local business, thus building a stronger community for their employees to live in, thus allowing them to be more attractive to prospective employees. Maybe they also thought it'd increase the chance that you'd apply there.
    - GhettoMaestro 7y ago
      On the basis of your extreme pedantry, please consider killing yourself. You would be doing the world a massive favor.
  - minikites 7y ago
    And then the shareholders punish them: https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/4/29/15471634/american-airlines-raise https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/4/29/15471634/american-ai... >American Airlines agreed this week to do something nice for its employees and arguably foresighted for its business by giving flight attendants and pilots a preemptive raise, in order to close a gap that had opened up between their compensation and the compensation paid by rival airlines Delta and United. >Wall Street freaked out, sending American shares plummeting. After all, this is capitalism and the capital owners are supposed to reap the rewards of business success. >“This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again,” wrote Citi analyst Kevin Crissey in a widely circulated note. “Shareholders get leftovers.”
qroshan 7y ago
Steve Jobs also abandoned his kid. He created a $1 Trillion company.
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  Exactly. Success as a business person has nothing to do with success as a moral or ethical person. In fact it's probably easier to be one when not being the others. Being good at business does not make you a "good person".
  - LordFast 7y ago
    Agreed. And it's up to the citizens to make choices that reflect what they wish to reward or not reward as citizenry.
  - glogla 7y ago
    Some could argue, that under sufficiently corrupt or inherently unfair regime, business success is mutually exclusive with being moral/ethical person.
    - theli0nheart 7y ago
      I completely disagree. Power and influence allow one to be a shitty person without having to deal with the consequences that other folks might, so the situations where that happens are outrageous and rightfully get a lot of exposure. However, this is a consequence of the fact that you already need to be powerful. Unless you get lucky, or otherwise hit the jackpot, you generally have to be a nice person to work your way up to that point. Not going to lie; taking advantage of others can be a great short-term business strategy. Long-term, not so much. People tend to remember shitty behavior.
      - glogla 7y ago
        > Long-term, not so much. People tend to remember shitty behavior. People remember Amazon workers have to piss in bottles to not get fired, but they don't stop shopping there. People know of Chinese factories with anti-suicide nets but they keep buying iPhones.
pinewurst 7y ago
This is the same Ben Horowitz who defended illegal option price fixing and other ethically dubious behavior in his last book. I'll probably get penalized for this, but achieving success is not equivalent to being a role model.
- loganfrederick 7y ago
  In Horowitz's defense (on the options pricing matter, hopefully not taking this thread too far off course), I thought he had explained his position on options pricing reasonably: https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/02/06/how-ben-horowitz-avoided-an-options-backdating-scandal/ https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/02/06/how-ben-horowitz-avo...
- icelancer 7y ago
  >> defended illegal option price fixing That's literally the opposite of what he did in the book, and in subsequent interviews.
KingMachiavelli 7y ago
I would assume there is extensive child support that would more then compensate? (Article is paywaled, so I don't know the details).
- rayiner 7y ago
  I’m pretty sure money doesn’t compensate someone for growing up without a father.
tmpz22 7y ago
> "HR told me that Sergey's response to it was, 'Why not? They're my employees,'" Ayers said. "But you don't have employees for f---ing! That's not what the job is." Ooooof. That shatters the "Early on Google's culture was great!" narrative... [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sergey-brin-employees-masseuse-room-2018-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sergey-brin-employees...
- nostrademons 7y ago
  Not really. Eric Schmidt (also a notorious womanizer) had a saying while I was there: "More revenue solves all known problems." When everybody at the company is getting rich, they're all working on exciting problems, Fortune and Time and BusinessWeek and Playboy magazines are featuring employees on the cover, and everyone you meet is impressed at where you work, then employees are willing to overlook a large number of shenanigans and petty injustices. It's only when there's no chance at getting rich that people care about the little things like being treated fairly, not being sexually harassed, and so on. Lest you think I'm being cynical (I am, but also realistic), note that similar cultural shifts have also played out at other Silicon Valley startups (notably Uber and Zenefits), that the financial and cryptocurrency worlds have even worse cultural problems, and that 49% of America elected a president whose attitude toward women is "grab 'em by the pussy!", usually explicitly citing his promise to bring back jobs, glory, and power to America as the reason why they overlook his personal failings.
  - Nuzzerino 7y ago
    I don't think the 2016 election is a good analogy, as both candidates had their share of skeletons in the closet, with the non-winning party arguably having skeletons that were more of a national security risk than a cultural one. People seem to conveniently forget this fact though.
    - okaram 7y ago
      1. That is unarguably false. 2. There were other candidates. 3. Mr Trump also won the primary.
baddox 7y ago
> but it's not like Google couldn't find a great legal chief who also wasn't a terrible person. This is actually an argument I wish would come up more often in cases where prominent people are fired or lose opportunities due to misconduct. Critics invariably react as if there aren't hundreds or thousands of qualified people for the position who didn't conduct themselves inappropriately, but I would argue that there almost always were. There are hundreds of talented directors who could direct your children's movie and never tweeted about molesting children in a movie theater.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- microtherion 7y ago
  In general, I agree, and I also agree this is not acknowledged often enough. I can think of one exception, though: I think Apple would have done significantly worse if they had forced Steve Jobs out in response to the option backdating scandal or the non-poaching collusion scandal.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    That’s not an exception; that’s the norm. Talent in every field is wildly unequally distributed. Messi makes the average international player look kind of ok. The average international player makes club players look like a weekend hobby player. The hobby player can run rings around people who don’t care about football. Satya Nadella has what? Quintupled Microsoft’s market capitalization during his tenure? Steve Ballmer was so bad the stock jumped ~20% on the news he was resigning.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  Qualified is not the same as good. Passing the minimum quality bar to be acceptable on some level is very different to having even one success, never mind having multiple, massive successes. Qualified is what you’re looking for in areas so routinised that everyone is adequate and no one is worth even ten times the average performer.
iandanforth 7y ago
That article describes abhorrent behavior, good lord, he should have been fired multiple times over.
joncrane 7y ago
Assuming that the story in https://medium.com/@jennifer.blakely https://medium.com/@jennifer.blakely is accurate, that man is a monster.
- mellosouls 7y ago
  David was married and had a son She's not exactly squeaky clean either.
  - orf 7y ago
    An estranged wife though.
    - mellosouls 7y ago
      He claimed. He was still married to her years later, so not that estranged. Plenty of decent single men out there, she went for the married one with kids. Not disputing the guy's behaviour seems appalling; so her due diligence on his character and his actual single status appears to have been poor.
  - koonsolo 7y ago
    The story of these men is always that they are going to leave their wife, which they obviously won't.
    - mellosouls 7y ago
      Agree - so presumably the author believed what she wanted to believe, or didn't really care.
awb 7y ago
> it's not like Google couldn't find a great legal chief who also wasn't a terrible person. Did he commit a fireable offense while on the job? It's not an employers responsibility or right to dismiss someone for conduct in their personal life.
- vkou 7y ago
  Fucking your reports is not your personal life. It's your professional life. It opens both you and your employer to professional liability. Under American law, if my manager, Bill, is having a secret - or not-secret affair/relationship/'friendly' arrangement with Sally, who reports to him, I have grounds to sue both Bill, and my employer, on the allegations that this is a quid-pro-quo relationship. If they break up, Sally also has grounds to sue both Bill, and the employer, on allegations that she was pressured into this relationship. It turns into an incredibly nasty game of he-said-she-said, which is why the professional thing to do is... Not sleeping with your reports. Professionals don't open their employer up for liability, in exchange for personal gain. If he were sleeping with some rando engineer that worked on Cloud, that would be his personal life - because he is outside that engineer's reporting chain.

Aqua 7y ago

That's not how business works.

loganfrederick 7y ago
You're correct, that's not how companies usually make their personnel decisions. But one would think more companies would factor in PR-risk as a real financial risk. But Google being Google economically-speaking, this still probably isn't a material event.
- shawnz 7y ago
  There's also the risk of employees not being able to work effectively if they don't feel safe/comfortable in their work environment.
  - dmix 7y ago
    So it is in fact very much how business works... between bad PR and company cultural issues. This stuff matters. Not to mention businesses have customers and investors who care about these things.
IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
The idea that business cares only about profit is just plain wrong. The law people think of is almost never relevant. Each year, millions of business decisions are made knowing full well that it will cost a bit of money, not bring in any (or even good PR), but is the decent thing to do. As but one example: Google once gave us money for a non-profit event, in no way related to their business, with explicit instructions not to mention them.
- seibelj 7y ago
  If your anecdote is true then how do you know that?
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    Because they were involved in it??
  - IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
    I called them and asked for money. See my use of the word "us". So, yes, maybe they did it because they knew I'd be going around using them as an example of altruism in business, 12 years later.
    - shawnz 7y ago
      I think it's more likely the rationale was to support a local business, thus building a stronger community for their employees to live in, thus allowing them to be more attractive to prospective employees. Maybe they also thought it'd increase the chance that you'd apply there.
  - GhettoMaestro 7y ago
    On the basis of your extreme pedantry, please consider killing yourself. You would be doing the world a massive favor.
- minikites 7y ago
  And then the shareholders punish them: https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/4/29/15471634/american-airlines-raise https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/4/29/15471634/american-ai... >American Airlines agreed this week to do something nice for its employees and arguably foresighted for its business by giving flight attendants and pilots a preemptive raise, in order to close a gap that had opened up between their compensation and the compensation paid by rival airlines Delta and United. >Wall Street freaked out, sending American shares plummeting. After all, this is capitalism and the capital owners are supposed to reap the rewards of business success. >“This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again,” wrote Citi analyst Kevin Crissey in a widely circulated note. “Shareholders get leftovers.”

qroshan 7y ago

Steve Jobs also abandoned his kid. He created a $1 Trillion company.

Waterluvian 7y ago
Exactly. Success as a business person has nothing to do with success as a moral or ethical person. In fact it's probably easier to be one when not being the others. Being good at business does not make you a "good person".
- LordFast 7y ago
  Agreed. And it's up to the citizens to make choices that reflect what they wish to reward or not reward as citizenry.
- glogla 7y ago
  Some could argue, that under sufficiently corrupt or inherently unfair regime, business success is mutually exclusive with being moral/ethical person.
  - theli0nheart 7y ago
    I completely disagree. Power and influence allow one to be a shitty person without having to deal with the consequences that other folks might, so the situations where that happens are outrageous and rightfully get a lot of exposure. However, this is a consequence of the fact that you already need to be powerful. Unless you get lucky, or otherwise hit the jackpot, you generally have to be a nice person to work your way up to that point. Not going to lie; taking advantage of others can be a great short-term business strategy. Long-term, not so much. People tend to remember shitty behavior.
    - glogla 7y ago
      > Long-term, not so much. People tend to remember shitty behavior. People remember Amazon workers have to piss in bottles to not get fired, but they don't stop shopping there. People know of Chinese factories with anti-suicide nets but they keep buying iPhones.

pinewurst 7y ago

This is the same Ben Horowitz who defended illegal option price fixing and other ethically dubious behavior in his last book. I'll probably get penalized for this, but achieving success is not equivalent to being a role model.

loganfrederick 7y ago
In Horowitz's defense (on the options pricing matter, hopefully not taking this thread too far off course), I thought he had explained his position on options pricing reasonably: https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/02/06/how-ben-horowitz-avoided-an-options-backdating-scandal/ https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/02/06/how-ben-horowitz-avo...
icelancer 7y ago
>> defended illegal option price fixing That's literally the opposite of what he did in the book, and in subsequent interviews.

KingMachiavelli 7y ago

I would assume there is extensive child support that would more then compensate? (Article is paywaled, so I don't know the details).

rayiner 7y ago
I’m pretty sure money doesn’t compensate someone for growing up without a father.

tmpz22 7y ago

> "HR told me that Sergey's response to it was, 'Why not? They're my employees,'" Ayers said. "But you don't have employees for f---ing! That's not what the job is." Ooooof. That shatters the "Early on Google's culture was great!" narrative... [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sergey-brin-employees-masseuse-room-2018-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sergey-brin-employees...

nostrademons 7y ago
Not really. Eric Schmidt (also a notorious womanizer) had a saying while I was there: "More revenue solves all known problems." When everybody at the company is getting rich, they're all working on exciting problems, Fortune and Time and BusinessWeek and Playboy magazines are featuring employees on the cover, and everyone you meet is impressed at where you work, then employees are willing to overlook a large number of shenanigans and petty injustices. It's only when there's no chance at getting rich that people care about the little things like being treated fairly, not being sexually harassed, and so on. Lest you think I'm being cynical (I am, but also realistic), note that similar cultural shifts have also played out at other Silicon Valley startups (notably Uber and Zenefits), that the financial and cryptocurrency worlds have even worse cultural problems, and that 49% of America elected a president whose attitude toward women is "grab 'em by the pussy!", usually explicitly citing his promise to bring back jobs, glory, and power to America as the reason why they overlook his personal failings.
- Nuzzerino 7y ago
  I don't think the 2016 election is a good analogy, as both candidates had their share of skeletons in the closet, with the non-winning party arguably having skeletons that were more of a national security risk than a cultural one. People seem to conveniently forget this fact though.
  - okaram 7y ago
    1. That is unarguably false. 2. There were other candidates. 3. Mr Trump also won the primary.

baddox 7y ago

> but it's not like Google couldn't find a great legal chief who also wasn't a terrible person. This is actually an argument I wish would come up more often in cases where prominent people are fired or lose opportunities due to misconduct. Critics invariably react as if there aren't hundreds or thousands of qualified people for the position who didn't conduct themselves inappropriately, but I would argue that there almost always were. There are hundreds of talented directors who could direct your children's movie and never tweeted about molesting children in a movie theater.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
microtherion 7y ago
In general, I agree, and I also agree this is not acknowledged often enough. I can think of one exception, though: I think Apple would have done significantly worse if they had forced Steve Jobs out in response to the option backdating scandal or the non-poaching collusion scandal.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  That’s not an exception; that’s the norm. Talent in every field is wildly unequally distributed. Messi makes the average international player look kind of ok. The average international player makes club players look like a weekend hobby player. The hobby player can run rings around people who don’t care about football. Satya Nadella has what? Quintupled Microsoft’s market capitalization during his tenure? Steve Ballmer was so bad the stock jumped ~20% on the news he was resigning.
barry-cotter 7y ago
Qualified is not the same as good. Passing the minimum quality bar to be acceptable on some level is very different to having even one success, never mind having multiple, massive successes. Qualified is what you’re looking for in areas so routinised that everyone is adequate and no one is worth even ten times the average performer.

iandanforth 7y ago

That article describes abhorrent behavior, good lord, he should have been fired multiple times over.

joncrane 7y ago

Assuming that the story in https://medium.com/@jennifer.blakely https://medium.com/@jennifer.blakely is accurate, that man is a monster.

mellosouls 7y ago
David was married and had a son She's not exactly squeaky clean either.
- orf 7y ago
  An estranged wife though.
  - mellosouls 7y ago
    He claimed. He was still married to her years later, so not that estranged. Plenty of decent single men out there, she went for the married one with kids. Not disputing the guy's behaviour seems appalling; so her due diligence on his character and his actual single status appears to have been poor.
- koonsolo 7y ago
  The story of these men is always that they are going to leave their wife, which they obviously won't.
  - mellosouls 7y ago
    Agree - so presumably the author believed what she wanted to believe, or didn't really care.

awb 7y ago

> it's not like Google couldn't find a great legal chief who also wasn't a terrible person. Did he commit a fireable offense while on the job? It's not an employers responsibility or right to dismiss someone for conduct in their personal life.

vkou 7y ago
Fucking your reports is not your personal life. It's your professional life. It opens both you and your employer to professional liability. Under American law, if my manager, Bill, is having a secret - or not-secret affair/relationship/'friendly' arrangement with Sally, who reports to him, I have grounds to sue both Bill, and my employer, on the allegations that this is a quid-pro-quo relationship. If they break up, Sally also has grounds to sue both Bill, and the employer, on allegations that she was pressured into this relationship. It turns into an incredibly nasty game of he-said-she-said, which is why the professional thing to do is... Not sleeping with your reports. Professionals don't open their employer up for liability, in exchange for personal gain. If he were sleeping with some rando engineer that worked on Cloud, that would be his personal life - because he is outside that engineer's reporting chain.