Happy Talk versus Hard Talk

David Sacks
Craft Ventures
Published in
4 min readMar 15, 2020

On Friday President Trump declared a national emergency. The market shot up 10% in a relief rally. Why would people be relieved that there was an emergency? Because they already knew we were in one.

Previously they were only getting “happy talk” from leaders — invocations to stay calm, dismissals of the seriousness of the problem, empty reassurances that things would get better. What people wanted was “hard talk” —…

David Sacks
Craft Ventures

General Partner and Co-Founder of Craft Ventures. Previously: Founder/CEO of Yammer. Original COO of PayPal.