Jerks and the start-ups they ruin

Bro culture favours good-looking, cocky young men at everyone else's expense

The tech industry has a problem with “bro culture”. People have been complaining about it for years. Yet nobody has done much to fix it.

That may finally change, if the people in charge of Silicon Valley — venture capitalists, who control the money — start to realise that the real problem with tech bros is not just that they’re boorish jerks. It’s that they’re boorish jerks who don’t know how to run companies.

Look at Uber, the ride-hailing start-up. It’s the biggest tech unicorn in the world, with a valuation of $69 billion. Not long ago Uber seemed invincible. Now it’s in free fall, and top executives have fled. The company’s woes spring entirely from its toxic bro culture, created by its chief executive, Travis Kalanick.

What is bro culture? Basically, a world that favours young men at the expense of everyone else. A “bro co.” has a “bro” CEO, or CE-Bro, usually a young man who has little work experience but is good-looking, cocky and slightly amoral — a hustler. Instead of being forced by investors to surround himself with seasoned executives, he is left to make decisions on his own.

The bro CEO does what you’d expect an immature young man to do when you give him lots of money and surround him with fawning admirers — he creates a culture built on reckless spending and excessive partying, where bad behaviour is not just tolerated but even encouraged. He creates the kind of company in which going to an escort bar with your colleagues, as Kalanick did in South Korea in 2014, according to recent reports, seems like a good idea. (The visit led, understandably, to a complaint to the personnel department.)

Bro cos become corporate frat houses, where employees are chosen like pledges, based on “culture fit”. Women get hired, but they rarely get promoted and sometimes complain of being harassed. Minorities and older workers are excluded.

Bro culture also values speedy growth over sustainable profits, and encourages cutting corners, ignoring regulations and doing whatever it takes to win.

Sometimes it works. But often the whole thing just flames out. The bros blow through the money and find they have no viable business. For example: Quirky, founded in 2009 by the 20-something Ben Kaufman. It raised $185 million to build a “social product development platform” that sold kooky gadgets, but filed for bankruptcy basically because the “brash” and “unorthodox” chief executive had no business being a chief executive. One indication that Kaufman is a bro? Well, the first reference he lists on his LinkedIn page is: “He’s a dick… but hilarious.”

Zenefits, a human resources start-up and another bro co, raised $583 million, at a peak valuation of $4.5 billion, then crashed after reports that it had used software to cheat on licensing courses for insurance brokers, and operated a hard-partying workplace where cups of beer and used condoms were left in stairwells. Zenefits limps on, but its CE-Bro co-founder has left the company, and nearly half the staff has been laid off.

© 2017 New York Times News Service