Silicon Valley, The Present Day Las Vegas

I recently read the article Silicon Valley Has a Vulnerability Problem where Maren Kate appeals to the audience to be vulnerable in business. I generally agree with this concept but I do think the term “vulnerable” has become a standard business buzz word of late and not necessarily one that is followed. Let’s just call it for what it is: honesty.

In Kate’s article she contrasts the different leadership styles of vulnerability (honesty) and the “fake it ’til you make it” syndrome. Kate brings up the physical representation of this latter point with the observation “Why do you think most people buy nice cars, expensive watches, or an even better example: faux expensive watches.”

This line stopped me in my tracks.

I happened to live in Las Vegas, Nevada from January 2007 and had a first row seat to the economy taking a huge nose dive. Much of this was not only brought on by the subprime mortgages we have heard so much about, but also from the abundant spending in order to “keep up with the Jones’s.” It was not uncommon to meet someone who wore the latest designer clothes, drove a BMW M series and lived in a house with five other people in order to keep the rent low. Outside of the home it looked like this person was extremely successful but once you dug a bit deeper you found that they were just getting by (with debt). We all know how that story ended. I remember seeing cars repossessed, the general population extremely underemployed if not unemployed, and you couldn’t sell a house due to competition with the foreclosure market. It was a sad, sad time.

If this type of behavior is going on in one of the most successful regions of our country, Silicon Valley, we have problems. Not only do we have problems with the nature of business, but we also have problems with the possible impact to our economy. A lot of money is tied up in Silicon Valley and there are rumblings about how a housing bubble may already be in place leading to a possible future housing crisis due to low interest rates and near zero down payments.

Tech is hard. My profession currently resides in the cloud hosting marketplace and I can tell you… tech. is. hard. This is evident not only by articles like Kate’s, but also in our daily headlines regarding large established companies alongside startups trying to meet earning targets and get the next big thing right. It’s a dynamic, fast-paced, disruptive market. Then you add a layer of leadership on top of that. Of course we’re going to screw up and make mistakes. Leadership can be hard when the market is simple. Multiply that to an X factor of infinity and you have what leadership looks like within tech. What’s important is that we are honest about what we have learned and where we are struggling.

So please, for the sake of all of us, stop putting on heirs if you can’t live up to it. Be honest and let’s try and learn from each other rather an one-upping. As Confucius said “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” In the end we all succeed and fail together.