This is not the utopia we were promised. 

We started in this industry during the first dot-com boom. Do you remember? There was an idealism that underscored everything. We were making a better world. We imagined a connected, borderless, nationless place. The future is already here, we said, it’s just not evenly distributed.

We’ve spent our lives working in tech. The world is now almost unrecognizable from those early days. Technology has driven that change. Software has eaten the world. It’s in our pockets, our homes, our kids’ toys. It's in our salt shakers for some reason.

We want to feel proud of what our industry has built. We achieved incredible things over the past twenty years. But we don’t feel proud. No one who’s paying attention can feel proud of the way tech looks right now. For all the good we’ve built, the tech industry has become a toxic, overgrown frat party.

We’re a young industry. We forget our history sometimes. But we still tell the stories from when the dot-com bubble burst. The media regularly ask if we’re in another bubble. We trade advice about the current investment climate and the conditions for growth. We want to know if winter is coming, and how to prepare.

We are in a bubble right now. It is large and looming and it casts a shadow over our whole industry. We are in a growth at all costs bubble. We are in a who gets promoted, who gets funded, who gets to succeed bubble. We are in a values bubble. And it’s going to burst.

Tech has undervalued good leadership and management, and underinvested in the people who build it.

We’ve got a lot of work to do.
 

We believe

  • We believe the measure of a leader is the excellence of their team.

  • We believe that execution beats vision. One is knowing where you're going, the other is whether or not you'll get there. 

  • We believe in showing up like a grown up. Own your shit. You will fuck up. Apologize, and then do better.

  • We believe that senior talent is what you get when you invest in people. 

  • We believe that diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones. And no system that routinely puts sociopaths at the top and women and people of colour at the bottom can claim to be about merit. 

  • We believe in the long game. We believe in trends over spikes, and leaving things better than you found them.

  • We believe great leaders are made, not born.

 

Melissa Nightingale
Johnathan Nightingale

June 2017