Blitzscaling Emancipation
While CS183C has been an amazing experience packed full with insight, it proved difficult to write on anything else without first discussing the most bizarre moment of my entire Stanford career. Michael Dearing’s impassioned lecture on “The Heroes of Capitalism” sought to inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs to tackle some of humanity’s most pressing challenges: health, inequality, hunger. However, the rhetoric employed for this task — that entrepreneurs driving the engines of capitalism directly ended slavery — crystallized my general feelings about Silicon Valley’s “diversity problem”.
As a Palo Alto native, I am no stranger to the self-aggrandizement and intellectual masturbation that accompanies tech-enabled wealth generation. While the seemingly humanitarian battle cries of the area (as HBO’s Silicon Valley would say, “making the world a better place…through cloud-based, lossless compression”) conjure imagery of some of the great enclaves of intellectualism and advancement in human civilization, the tangible product has yet to approach this lofty standard unless you are a white, upper-middle class Bay Area technocrat. Everyday, Black and Latino students fight to exonerate themselves from the ruthless efficiency of the School to Prison Pipeline, while Silicon Valley responds with MOOCs and nano-degrees. As poor communities fight to maintain their health in food deserts, we marvel at the convenience of DoorDash.
Listening to Dearing wax poetic raised so many cascading questions. If this is the intellectual outlook of a leader of industry and conduit of capital, then how is it any wonder that tech fails marginalized communities? To ignore the role of capitalism in accelerating the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, to erase the legacy of African labor in constructing the American (and world) economy, to praise the inventor of the cotton gin without mentioning the purpose for which it was created, is to completely misunderstand the world we wish to improve. Can we really tackle poverty, hunger, and violence in communities that don’t even exist in our revisionist histories? How can you design for a user that doesn’t exist?
One day during an internship in tech, I overheard several coworkers discussing housing in the Bay Area, and East Palo Alto specifically (disclaimer: much of my family is from East Palo Alto). I thought nothing of it until I heard a worker exclaim, “I can’t wait until they move all the thugs out of there and gentrify that shit! Then it’ll be a great place to invest!” In hiring we often talk about culture fit — what does it say about tech when that is a culture fit? When “entrepreneurship ended slavery” is a culture fit? What does it tell you when a course seeking to fill the cognitive quivers of our future leaders only includes a handful of women and two black guys?
This may all seem a very negative, overly critical reading of what was meant to be an inspirational message — this is not my intent. In fact, as I unpack the experience I can only help but feel inspired. This solidifies the belief behind my passion for entrepreneurship — that in order to truly change the face of tech and affect change, we (the invisible class of Silicon Valley) must be the creators of our own revolution.
Sam Altman mentioned that diversity is a great asset, but diversity of vision is a poison pill — thus our standard for the next-generation of innovation cannot be minority-blind until it’s time to publish numbers. We must craft spaces of empowerment and innovation, not spaces where we overhear favorable discussions on the gentrification of our communities. We should be looking for the startup that disrupts campus sexual assault or makes #SayHerName unnecessary. Sure those are difficult problems stemming from complex, seemingly intractable sociopolitical systems that have existed for centuries.
But hey, if entrepreneurs ended slavery why can’t we blitzscale our own emancipation?
