Freada Kapor Klein says there’s a way out of this mess
She’s been campaigning her whole career — and progress has been slow. But Project Include’s founding advisor thinks change is going to come.
After a lifetime listening to entrepreneurs and investors, Freada Kapor Klein doesn’t believe much in the stories Silicon Valley likes to tell itself.
“There’s a lot of mythology among both investors and founders,” she says. “But if you begin to peel it away, you find something very different.”
Among the fictions? That founders and venture capitalists are “investing in people” or “building a great team.” In fact, she says, the opposite is often true — people are merely the operators inside machines aimed at short-term financial gain.
“When you talk to founders, they say they’re building a team,” she explains. “But they’re not interested in a team that works over the long haul, because if they cared then the logic would say that, if this is a marathon and not a sprint, you need a diverse team. But they don’t do it.”
“And if you look at how often investors actually replace CEOs, it’s rather often. They are ‘investing in people,’ but then replacing those people because they’re looking at an exit. It’s all about financial success — and within seven years, preferably.”
Instead, she believes founders and investors should live up to their promises to build robust, resilient organizations that are ready to overcome their own failings.
“When your product is too buggy, or your version didn’t ship, there are endless post-mortems,” she points out. “There are no post-mortems about allegations of racism, or sexual harassment… and that tells you exactly what the Valley values, and what it doesn’t.”
Kapor Klein speaks from experience. She’s worked in pioneering organizations, invested in many others, and experienced her fair share of hits and misses.
Most recently — and most controversially — there’s Uber. With her husband Mitch Kapor, she was one of its earliest investors, and had a front row seat to witness Uber’s explosive, aggressive, and problematic growth. But after a career of speaking out, she was one of the few prepared to stand up during the recent turmoil and ask for real accountability from CEO Travis Kalanick over accusations of malpractice, harassment, and troubled leadership.
“We have tried for years to work behind the scenes to exert a constructive influence on company culture,” she and Mitch wrote in an open letter. “We hope our actions will help hold Uber leadership accountable, since it seems all other mechanisms have failed.”
This is not a new direction. Ten years ago, she wrote a book about prejudice in American business. Giving Notice outlined the people — and the opportunities — left behind in the chase for short-term profit. A decade later, she’s frustrated that the arguments remain just as relevant.
“I don’t think there’s anything in there that’s outdated,” she says. “Which is pathetic.”
“A decade in the tech industry covers much more than the lifecycle of many companies and products. We’ve had whole industries, whole sectors, created or disrupted since that book — and we’ve gone nowhere.”
She got her start in activism in Southern California in the 1960s, and her sense of justice built on her background as a descendant of Jewish immigrants who escaped pogroms in Russia. She studied criminology, became an advocate for victims of sexual assault, and a social policy researcher. Then, as the software boom of the 1980s got underway, she became a senior employee at Lotus. Again, she was a bellwether for the future: Lotus planned to woo the best and brightest candidates by being “the most progressive employer in the United States.”
It’s a deep, informed perspective that she brings to Project Include as a founding advisor. That history and on-the-ground experience is an important part of building success, she says.
“I think Project Include put a big stake in the ground by its launch,” she says. “I think it was important to say ‘Look, we need a group of inside experts, not outside consultants, not lawyers. It’s a group that has diverse experience in terms of roles, and in terms of employers in tech, that’s engineering heavy.”
This is one reason she remains optimistic about progress, even if things don’t seem to be changing fast. She believes that the right application of ideas, at the right moment, with the right context, can unlock a whole new workforce. And it doesn’t have to come at the cost of freedom, despite what critics suggest.
“I do see a way out, if you say to people that a fundamental principle in this company is that everybody has the right to define the boundary for himself, herself, themselves, between appropriate and inappropriate behavior.”
One of the biggest missteps she says, is to assume that ideas can be beaten into an unwilling participant — whether it’s a business, or an employee.
“Every piece of evidence is that you can’t force people,” she says. “When you try and force them into something, they rebel. I mean, we have a president who’s largely here because people were rebelling against what was felt to be inevitable, or politically correct.”
“It’s why I am adamantly opposed to these very rigid policies, mandatory investigation, mandatory training,” she says. “I’ve never been a fan of those overly rigid solutions, because I don’t think they work. You want values and principles, not rules and mandates.”
Cue Project Include’s 87 recommendations for companies that want to create diverse, inclusive and forward-thinking cultures. “Open-sourcing those recommendations that think through the question of how startups can bake in diversity and inclusion from the beginning… . No one had done that until now,” she says.
These ideas are real, informed, and can be acted on — and they are designed for real long term thinkers.
“If investors actually cared, then we’d see very different companies,” she says. “But in my view what we’ve got, unfortunately, is a very narrow definition of success: dollars. It doesn’t matter how you get there, just that you get there. It’s the only scorecard that matters.”
