What Bono Can Teach Us About Entrepreneurship
And all the unlearning required to be a successful entrepreneur
This week, we’re talking:
How the skills that make for a good executive are often antithetical to the skills required of a good entrepreneur (and vice-versa) 👩💼≠👨💼
Vermont’s Privacy Law may have been killed with a veto but we haven’t seen the end of it 🔐 ⚖️ 🚫
Why the EU is considering breaking encryption 💬 🗨️
The Wired reporting that is blowing up Perplexity 🤖 🧨
Why quietly changing your privacy policy is a terrible business strategy (as proved by Sonos) 📝 🗑️
Why *you* might soon own a stake in ClearView AI 📈 💰
Why the Surgeon General is calling for a warning label on social media 🤳⚠️
My Take:
I heard an interview with Bono where he said that he’s occasionally been invited to sing other people’s music. He said he can’t – not because he’s stubborn or difficult, but because if it’s not his music and his band behind him, the spirit doesn’t move him. He can’t hit the notes.
When Microsoft was considering acquiring my first company, to interview me they sent an old hand, someone who formerly worked as Bill Gates' technical assistant -- a huge role at the time. He gave me a bunch of case studies from other companies and asked me a series of questions to appraise my business acumen. I wanted my company to be acquired so I did my absolute best. My interviewer went back to Microsoft bosses and said, “Listen, not only should we not acquire the company, I can tell you we wouldn’t hire Chavez for a staff job around here. He’s dumb as a rock.”
I can’t fault the guy. I'm sure he was offering a pretty fair assessment of my performance that day. But I'm reminded of the Bono interview, and as I try to make sense of it all these years later, the truth is that if you’re giving me a case study in a space that's outside something I'm interested in, I'm going to fall totally flat. It's not because I'm not trying; it's because I just don't give a shit.
There’s a deeper thread here, one I see play out again and again all these years later as I work with up-and-coming entrepreneurs who decided to pursue the completely irrational act of building a company from scratch.
The qualities that make for a good entrepreneur tend to be antithetical to the qualities that make for a good overall executive or employee – and vice versa.
Employees are climbing a ladder. This mostly requires biding your time and trying not to rock any boats. Rocking boats makes you difficult or “not a team player,” which can get you fired. Climbing a corporate ladder is inherently a risk avoidance strategy – stay in line, keep your head down, work hard, and eventually you become an executive.
I was employee 35,642 at Sun Microsystems. I had incredible bosses who gave me the leeway to take some big swings, but many of my co-workers didn't like me very much. They saw me as a young buck with too much piss and vinegar -- in the best case, too much unbridled energy pointed in the wrong direction. I left Sun in my 20's, knowing very little but with the totally irrational idea that it was time to hang a shingle and start a business. I maxed out multiple credit cards trying to get my first project off the ground. My poor, poor mother – the number of rosaries she prayed and candles she burned in a futile effort to persuade God to bring me back to my senses. She called every weekend and said, “Tommy, Tommy, Tommy – Sandia Lab is hiring! You’ve got a PhD from Stanford. You could be a member of the technical staff here!”
Hurtling into entrepreneurship was a choice I made for many reasons, but one of the things that kept me going was the realization that, after my experience at Sun, I couldn’t hack it as an employee or an executive. Like most entrepreneurs, I wasn't employable in any conventional sense. I just couldn’t sing other people’s songs, even if I wanted to.
This theme plays out frequently at super{set}. Our co-founders come from diverse backgrounds, but they frequently weren't thriving in their previous "employee" or "executive" roles. They needed to write and sing their own songs.
If you're an entrepreneur-for-real, don't apologize for the compulsion to break the mold and find your voice. Ya gotta sing your own song.
Stories I’m Following:
Clearview AI Used Your Face. Now You May Get a Stake in the Company by Kashmir Hill VIA The NYTimes 📈 💰
I’ve been raising the alarm on ClearView since 2020 when they landed a deal with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE.) I wasn’t the only one. They’ve now reached a creative settlement on the class action lawsuit that followed. “Rather than cash payments, it would give a 23 percent stake in the company to Americans whose faces are in its database.” This is interesting for a lot of reasons — if the judge approves the settlement, this could lay a framework for how individuals might find recourse when LLMs feed their model with our unpermissioned data.
Vermont’s landmark privacy bill killed as legislature fails to override veto by Suzanne Smalley VIA The Record 🔐 ⚖️ 🚫
This was a fierce bill and it scared the 💩💩 out of Big Tech. They put their lobbyists and money into the effort and successfully killed it but my friend and bill co-sponsor, Monique Priestley, isn’t throwing in the towel. “No dust is settling on this effort,” says Priestley. “This bill provided a masterclass on what we’re up against and we are already coordinating next steps.” As my ETP colleague Jonathan Joseph has said, this bill would have been the strongest data privacy law in the country and while it failed this time, it leaves behind a blueprint that others will surely follow.
EU chat control law proposes scanning your messages — even encrypted ones by Emma Roth VIA The Verge 💬 🗨️
In an effort to protect children from sexual abuse, EU legislators are considering a proposal which would essentially break encryption and require every message you send to be uploaded and scanned for abusive material. Signal president Meredith Whittaker says the app will stop functioning in the EU if the rules become law. “We can call it a backdoor, a front door, or ‘upload moderation,’” Whittaker writes. “But whatever we call it, each one of these approaches creates a vulnerability that can be exploited by hackers and hostile nation states, removing the protection of unbreakable math and putting in its place a high-value vulnerability.” #BadIdeaGenes 🫣🫣
What I’m Reading:
Perplexity is a bullshit machine by Dhruv Mehrotra & Tim Marchman VIA Wired 🤖 🧨
A WIRED analysis and one carried out by developer Robb Knight suggest that Perplexity is… ignoring a widely accepted web standard known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol to surreptitiously scrape areas of websites that operators do not want accessed by bots, despite claiming that it won’t. WIRED observed a machine tied to Perplexity—more specifically, one on an Amazon server and almost certainly operated by Perplexity—doing this on wired.com and across other Condé Nast publications.
Sonos says its privacy policy change wasn’t for dubious reasons by Chris Welch VIA The Verge 📝 🗑️
This keeps playing out: company quietly changes privacy policy, privacy wonks on the internet raise the alarms about the change, news spreads, company puts out a statement to pinky promise that they’re not abusing our data. You’d think companies would have learned that this is not a winning strategy — it erodes consumer trust and in this climate, trust is currency.
Surgeon General: Why I’m Calling for a Warning Label on Social Media Platforms by Dr. Vivek H. Murthy VIA The NYTimes 🤳⚠️
It is time to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents. A surgeon general’s warning label, which requires congressional action, would regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe. Evidence from tobacco studies show that warning labels can increase awareness and change behavior.
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