One thing the book is particularly effective at is deflating the myth that these entrepreneurs were somehow gifted seers of (and investors in) a future the rest of us simply couldn’t comprehend or predict.
Sure, someone like Thiel made what turned out to be a savvy investment in Facebook early on, but he also made some very costly mistakes with that stake. As Lalka points out, Thiel’s Founders Fund dumped tens of millions of shares shortly after Facebook went public, and Thiel himself went from owning 2.5% of the company in 2012 to 0.000004% less than a decade later (around the same time Facebook hit its trillion-dollar valuation). Throw in his objectively terrible wagers in 2008, 2009, and beyond, when he effectively shorted what turned out to be one of the longest bull markets in world history, and you get the impression he’s less oracle and more ideologue who happened to take some big risks that paid off.
One of Lalka’s favorite mantras throughout The Venture Alchemists is that “words matter.” Indeed, he uses a lot of these entrepreneurs’ own words to expose their hypocrisy, bullying, juvenile contrarianism, casual racism, and—yes—outright greed and self-interest. It is not a flattering picture, to say the least.
Unfortunately, instead of simply letting those words and deeds speak for themselves, Lalka often feels the need to interject with his own, frequently enjoining readers against finger-pointing or judging these men too harshly even after he’s chronicled their many transgressions. Whether this is done to try to convey some sense of objectivity or simply to remind readers that these entrepreneurs are complex and complicated men making difficult decisions, it doesn’t work. At all.
For one thing, Lalka clearly has his own strong opinions about the behavior of these entrepreneurs—opinions he doesn’t try to disguise. At one point in the book he suggests that Kalanick’s alpha-male, dominance-at-any-cost approach to running Uber is “almost, but not quite” like rape, which is maybe not the comparison you’d make if you wanted to seem like an arbiter of impartiality. And if he truly wants readers to come to a different conclusion about these men, he certainly doesn’t provide many reasons for doing so. Simply telling us to “judge less, and discern more” seems worse than a cop-out. It comes across as “almost, but not quite” like victim-blaming—as if we’re somehow just as culpable as they are for using their platforms and buying into their self-mythologizing.
“In many ways, Silicon Valley has become the antithesis of what its early pioneers set out to be.”
Marietje Schaake
Equally frustrating is the crescendo of empty platitudes that ends the book. “The technologies of the future must be pursued thoughtfully, ethically, and cautiously,” Lalka says after spending 313 pages showing readers how these entrepreneurs have willfully ignored all three adverbs. What they’ve built instead are massive wealth-creation machines that divide, distract, and spy on us. Maybe it’s just me, but that kind of behavior seems ripe not only for judgment, but also for action.
So what exactly do you do with a group of men seemingly incapable of serious self-reflection—men who believe unequivocally in their own greatness and who are comfortable making decisions on behalf of hundreds of millions of people who did not elect them, and who do not necessarily share their values?
You regulate them, of course. Or at least you regulate the companies they run and fund. In Marietje Schaake’s The Tech Coup, readers are presented with a road map for how such regulation might take shape, along with an eye-opening account of just how much power has already been ceded to these corporations over the past 20 years.