How to make a company or an industry as far as possible in the right direction?

Original author Leo Polovets, former LinkedIn, factual engineer. Former Google employees. Now for Susa Ventures partner, the original published in blog Job VC.

The current Internet industry may be a good place to be compared to other industries, but there are still a lot of problems: discrimination, professional ceilings, poor working conditions, and so on. As the founder or investor in the industry, there are probably some concerns about these issues. How to make a company or an industry as far as possible in the right direction?

Let things change in the direction you want them to be

Last week, John Lilly, a partner in Silicon Valley's top VC Greylock, said on Twitter:

A lot of people are telling you what's going to happen in 2015 years. You can listen to it. Or you can run and do what you think you need to do.

I think his advice also applies to structural innovation and the development of new products.

If you are starting a business, you are actually influencing the world through your own projects. If you are an investor, you are influencing the world by choosing the projects you support. Both groups are important not only in influencing the future, but also in the way things are done and by whom.

I think that if entrepreneurs and investors can choose to do the right thing while avoiding failure, standing up to make money is also excellent, and will bring a positive impact on the industry. For example, if you choose to invest in a group of under-represented people, such as women, minorities, of course, the first is to consider the issue of income, but at the same time you also hinted at your position: 1 You think these entrepreneurs can be reliable; 2 you believe that investors can make more money by supporting these groups. Conversely, if you are an entrepreneur, if your company has a long-term employment of minorities or gives employees more maternity or paternity leave, or has been practicing better transparency (such as stripe and buffer), and has achieved success, it shows that maintaining diversity/supporting employee family/transparency will not delay making money.

For my own example, I often hear entrepreneurs cry from most VC there is no clear feedback. As a fan of feedback systems and optimization, I was frustrated when I found that most investment decisions in the investment community had no public information. I would like to do something to improve the situation, so I choose to blog regularly to let people know what I know, as far as possible to provide useful standards, when we (Susa Ventures) decided to give up a project, will certainly give the entrepreneur direct feedback, hope for their future development useful. I hope that when we become a 10x fund, we can use good data to show that there is no need for transparency to make a financial return.

Issues to be noted

In the tech industry, I think there are some issues that founders and investors need to deal with:

Allocation of preferred shares of employees

The main problems are four: 1. Employees often do not get enough preferred stock; 2 If the employee leaves the office, he/she may not be able to bear the cost of exercising the option, as well as the cost of the tax; 3 the employee's options sometimes bring them adverse tax treatment; 4 employees are always unable to get enough information about stocks and options.

Women and ethnic minorities are under-represented groups

Pinterest, a young female engineer, Tracy Chou A statistical analysis of the imbalance in the technology industry. She wrote a blog post on the Medium to bring together the data on the proportion of their female programmers to major technology companies. 185 technology companies have submitted data to her database. Other companies such as Google and Facebook subsequently published their own data.

The data are brutal. Mozilla's female programmers are less than 9%. In Google's technical team, women accounted for only 17%, and some of the company's technical teams had no women at all. Even in the Chou Pinterest (75% of female users), only 12%.

Overtime culture, 24/7 stand by, no life outside of work, etc.

In November 2014, a founder in an article entitled "Founder's Suicide" explores the astonishing suicide rate and depression in entrepreneurs. Keen Io's CEO, Kyle Wild, is very much in agreement with the Internet industry's work-time problems mentioned in this article.

The mainstream culture in a tech start-up company is always working overtime, a culture that eats up a person's time and space.

When an entrepreneur or/and his company are in a period of expansion, the most common advice in their minds is to "keep the momentum", "strike the Iron" and "do everything". But I want to say that this time they need to hear more about "climb the Mountain", "go to the distance", "go to the meditation class for five days" and even just "try to work a few days a week for a day".

Everything related to Brogrammer culture

Quora There is a question: How does a programmer become brogrammer? One answer is this: eat a lot of red meat, one hand to take the meat, the other hand programming, always wearing sunglasses, collar must be erected. If someone calls you Geek or Nerd, you can show them that you are a sister, but at the same time you must really understand the "Star Wars" movies and some programming concepts, such as recursion and inheritance.

This kind of Facebook "program Ape" tag let some people in the industry feel that regardless of the context of the use of the word to describe this career, but a very unsuccessful comedy, but also embodies the use of words of the poor.

The founder of the pit dad

Business Insider once had an article titled "Why Some Bastards can succeed in Silicon Valley". Of course the founders may not always be like this, but from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg, there have been some disreputable records of behavior. The article tries to explore whether it is possible to achieve business success while staying friendly with others. Former Silicon Valley investor, now London Passion Capital VC Eileen Burbidge said:

I don't give money to jerks, I personally think life is too short, not worth it. But I wonder if this is a bad philosophy for investors. I hope not, but I know I should invest in the founders based on the best Roi, not the character.

What if you're not an investor or a founder?

They do have a lot of opportunities to change the industry, but the flattening and ease of technology gives everyone a chance to change the world. You can write out the questions you see, let them be taken seriously; You can try to speak at some industry meetings; You can openly challenge authority in forums such as Twitter; you can talk to your CEO or boss and convince them to give priority to making the industry better; you can make the right choices. , like not taking the money that shouldn't be taken.

Finally, crowdsourcing is a great tool. Tracy Chou a beautiful vote through GitHub. Semil Shah has also recently made a list of under-represented group Twitter concerns. If you are creative, you can do a lot of things with a lot of free tools.

The world is a great place, but it is not perfect. Entrepreneurs can make what they think is the right choice and then affect the entire Internet ecosystem, making the world a better place.