Photo by Simon Berger.
A few weeks ago, we told you we were sitting on a secret. That it was a safe assumption that we’re basically always plotting something. But that we had one thing that was so under wraps that we weren’t even sure about teasing it, lest we jinx it.
Back in Oct, Arlan Hamilton was in town for a keynote at the BFUTR Tech Summit and then a fireside chat with Venture Out. In the early morning, we got to record an episode for her podcast, Your First Million.
We left the recording and then did the thing we always do when something cool might happen. We went into a spiral of superstition. I am told that when your local sports team is in the playoffs, some of you get equally weird.
Here is a partial list of the ways in which we got fully and totally strange.
- We didn’t tell anyone outside of our team that we’d recorded the podcast lest we jinx it.
- We didn’t wash our Raw Signal Group hoodies lest some of the luck end up in the dryer.
- We washed our Raw Signal Group hoodies lest smelling bad be some sort of curse all on its own.
- We wondered which was luckier – washing or not washing hoodies. Should we wash them more? Or stop washing them again in hopes of good favour returning? We opted for the latter. Naturally.
- We installed a bot to alert us whenever new podcast episodes posted. We would yell when the bot dinged. If you ever want to totally disrupt Raw Signal Group, just put a notify bot in our team slack.
- We developed time of day theories about when podcast pages get updated and cached. We pinned tabs with stitcher vs apple podcasts. The cmd+shft+R buttons are all wearing off on our laptops.
Anyway, we’re delighted to share that the podcast is live, our hoodies are clean, and the notify bot still makes us jump every time it dings.
— Melissa & Johnathan
TK What Melissa’s reading
The Problem with Pattern Matching
A few days ago, one of our alum* sent me a link. No words. No description. Just the link.
I opened a new tab and left it there. Next to all the other things I’d been meaning to read or watch or do. And while the video is only 15 minutes, finding an uninterrupted block took some doing. Today I watched it and I don’t know if I exhaled during the whole thing.
The speaker is Denise Hewett. She’s the Founder & CEO of a company called Scriptd. And in the opening, she’s talking about marginalization and underrepresentation in entertainment. She outlines why she left the industry to found her company. Scriptd lets creators share scripts, have them read by an audience, all with the hope of getting picked up. What makes it unique is that it’s free from traditional entertainment industry gatekeepers (nearly 80% of whom are white and male).
She talks about what it’s like to build a technology company on a fraction of the resources she sees going to male founders. And her experience of fundraising in the valley – where the party line is about merit and disruption. But the lived experience is about pattern matching.
There’s a moment at the end of the talk where the emotion catches in her voice. And she is all of us. She is every single one of us who has ever tried to lift a big, heavy thing. She is every person who ever felt like the odds were stacked before the starter pistol went off.
I won’t spoil the ending for you. But I will say that there’s a lot I recognize here. Raw Signal Group is the only time in my career I haven’t had to apologize for my ambition. The only job where I haven’t worried people will misunderstand platonic business interactions. And where I don’t have to shout just to be heard in meetings.
It’s not lost on me that the most ambitious I’ve ever been is alongside my husband. I’m not sure if that says wonderful things about Johnathan or depressing things about tech and business. Or maybe both.
Tech likes to crow about talent and grit. And we spend so much time tying ourselves in knots about hiring the best. We throw around superlatives, only to kneecap people once they get in the door by asking them to be less ambitious. To take up less space. To shine less brightly.
At my last company, I was in a meeting and one of the cofounders said “You never want to stand between Melissa and a goal.” He meant it as a compliment. Genuinely.
I think about that all the time. When we’re going hard and trying to get all the pieces to line up. And stressing about the details because they are worth getting right. It comes back to me. And I am so proud, that for the first time in my life, I get to work in a company that can absorb that drive.
I wish that for everyone. That every person can go to work and feel seen. Can know that their contributions are valued. And that the energy and enthusiasm they bring to their work is never a thing they have to apologize for.
What Johnathan’s reading
So Larry and Sergey are handing over the management reins:
A letter from Larry and Sergey
I’m writing this Tuesday night. So by the time you read this, the hot take machine will have a thousand to choose from. And maybe something dramatic will be revealed in the months ahead. It feels like there might be another shoe to drop.
I’ve never been much for palace intrigue. I didn’t predict this, but I don’t find it very surprising. The next few years are going be a very not-fun time to be in charge of Google/Alphabet. Their labour stuff is going to get worse, not better. The big tech backlash and breakup talk is going to get worse, not better. The advertising and privacy scrutiny. The military contracts. The stories of youtube algorithm and moderation failures, too.
Remember that old Wired piece about how every company’s narrative makes its way around the clock? It’s a shaky metaphor for a company as big and hydra-headed as Alphabet. But still, they feel like they’re somewhere around 10:30pm.
That’s not a fun place to be. And the thing that strikes me about Larry and Sergey’s note is how much they want their story telling to be about the fun. Hell, Alphabet itself sort of feels like a way for Larry and Sergey to be able to have fun with self-driving cars and drones while Sundar and Susan and a few other bosses run the businesses that have grown past the early fun stage.
I don’t know Larry and Sergey at all. And certainly I’m not painting a deep and nuanced portrait. But most of what I’ve seen with them hangs together with this theory. Smart. Intentional. Clear-eyed about what they want to build, and able to step in and steer things when they’re off course. And prone to run away from or delegate the not-fun stuff.
Read their letter again. It’s not long. Would you know, from reading it, that YouTube is driving white nationalism? Or that its algorithms automatically assemble playlists of engaging home videos for pedophiles? Would you know that Google is facing continued backlash from years of sheltering sexual harassers? Would you know that they just retaliated against the organizers of the google walkout? The not-fun bits don’t show up anywhere. Not in this letter, and not in anything I can recall hearing from Larry or Sergey any time in the last few years.
I want to bottom line this to be about something other than Larry and Sergey, and I think it’s this. We need you.
You are reading this newsletter and so my deep belief is that you will be the ones shaping the future of work. You’re the whole reason we write this thing. You know that work needs to be different, and maybe you hope we have some glimpse of that to offer. When Melissa and I talk about you — when we really get going and the wine is good — we talk about how the thousands of you that read this are a secret movement that’s going to change things. You’re going to be in seats of power (several of you already are, hello!) And at some point you’re going to confront your own not-fun stuff.
We need you to face it head-on. We need you to make that stuff a priority. We need you not to redirect the question to be about the good things you’ve done. Of course you’ll do great things. Google has done great things. They’ve built immense value for the world. Immense. I’m not taking any of that away. But we’re learning how bad the not-fun stuff can get when you run away from it.
If there are not-fun things happening where you are, I hope you’ll act. We need you to act. Especially if you’re running things. Because that’s the job.
