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The alternative to the four-hour workweek mindset
Often when I attend a conference or a networking event I am surprised by how many people operate at the periphery of the tech industry. Social media gurus, SEO “ninjas,” bloggers, etc. It’s a coterie of tech “club promoters.” The hype men of the industry.
“Hack your way to success.” “Meet the right people.” “Become a business superstar.” They’ve found their silver bullet. They boast of building a passive income from a web business, all while traveling the world as the rest of us mortals are slaving away at our 9-5 jobs.
In a world where we are searching for silver bullets, these people seem to have amassed an arsenal of them. Moreover, they’ve found audiences to sell their silver bullets to, en masse.
The most blatant example of this are some of the disciples of the 4-Hour Workweek, by Tim Ferriss. The book itself is not really the issue. Ferriss indeed outlines some interesting tips on managing resources to get the highest ROI on your work. What is objectionable, however, is the hack-your-way-to-success mentality it has spawned in entrepreneurial circles.
It’s a mindset that is antithetical to everything I know about entrepreneurship; a mindset that I see when I hear people talk about having an amazing idea that they want to farm out to a young college student who can code, or outsourcing development of a product to a cheap dev house. It’s a mindset that assumes entrepreneurship is a series of networking events and fundraising meetings, or even some silver-bullet business connection they have, in lieu of a real distribution strategy. It’s taking a passive approach to a very difficult undertaking.
What is missed in all of this is the mindset of craftsmanship; that one’s expertise and deliberate focus on one’s craft is actually the primary driver for success — and not some crapshoot of a series of hacks.
What happens on the periphery — whether it be the towel slapping we see on Twitter from tech celebrities or headline gossip out of TechCrunch — is not actually meaningful as a foundation of a business or a profession. Neither are the number of coffee meetings you have scheduled or the amount of networking meetings you attend. These things are tertiary at best, and, at worst, just plain-old distractions.
Startup graveyards are full of visionaries without expertise or the proper skills to execute.
To be successful over the course of a career requires the application and accumulation of expertise. This assumes that for any given undertaking you either provide expertise or you are just a bystander. It’s the experts that are the drivers — an expertise that is gained from a curiosity, and a mindset of treating one’s craft very seriously.
A startup is by nature a crash-course in developing expertise. What makes startups unique is the sheer dearth of resources. This dearth of resources forces founders to rapidly adapt their skills to meet the demands of the project.
“I didn’t know how to do x, so I just had to figure it out.” This is what I regularly hear from successful founders, whereas “I couldn’t find someone to do x, so I had to reconsider whether to pursue it at all” is a common refrain from unsuccessful founders.
If you step up to the challenge, you’ll realize that the startup is nothing more than a teacher. It, in fact, is a great teacher for no other reason than it demands the accumulation of knowledge quickly for the startup to survive.
A technical founder, whose experience may relegate her or him to a specialist role in a large company, for example, has to adapt and take on more expertise in adjacent technical areas. There simply aren’t the human resources to delegate these tasks to another specialist.
This is true for taking on tasks in other domains, whether that be sales, finance, marketing, management or design. You have to take an interest in these domains because there is no one else to fill these roles in your early-stage company.
It’s in exploring these unknown territories and facing the headwind of startup challenges that it becomes clear that the startup is merely a force of catalytic professional and character growth. With actual success of any given venture subject to the whim of outside forces, this growth is the non-monetary dividend that makes the experience priceless.
That is why the passive, 4-Hour Mindset is so self-defeating. To lounge on a beach or travel the world and not actively engage in building your arsenal of expertise is professional malpractice.
It’s also not practical. No serious company has been created passively — the passive mindset that leads people to say “I’ve got a great idea, I’ll hire a team to build it out” or “I have this great connection who will drive sales” while I play armchair visionary simply doesn’t work. Startup graveyards are full of visionaries without expertise or the proper skills to execute, for no other reason than ideas are not self-executing, but are rather made into being by intense engagement by skilled operators.
Most importantly, to think of a business as a series of hacks and transactional relationships, you’ll never amass the expertise that your future self and future businesses need to succeed. Startups fail withstanding founder expertise, of course. It is certainly not sufficient to be an expert. However, expertise does make it possible to traverse the struggles of creating businesses over the course of a career. You’re not simply working on the idea in front of you, you’re building the knowledge to succeed at your next projects, as well.
It is the expertise and the mindset of craftsmanship that allows someone like Elon Musk to jump from project to project and sector to sector with the knowledge of how to execute on the highest-level problems. It’s not simply his ability to find interesting ideas — it’s his command of the domains of the business that allow him to execute the way he does. He is the epitome of an interdisciplinary student of his businesses.
If you are to optimize for anything, optimize for the long-term. Use the challenges of your business today to build mastery in your craft. There is no guarantee that any one venture will succeed, but that mastery will bend luck in your favor over the long course of your career.
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The real threat to Facebook is the Kool-Aid turning sour
These kinds of leaks didn’t happen when I started reporting on Facebook eight years ago. It was a tight-knit cult convinced of its mission to connect everyone, but with the discipline of a military unit where everyone knew loose lips sink ships. Motivational posters with bold corporate slogans dotted its offices, rallying the troops. Employees were happy to be evangelists.
But then came the fake news, News Feed addiction, violence on Facebook Live, cyberbullying, abusive ad targeting, election interference and, most recently, the Cambridge Analytica app data privacy scandals. All the while, Facebook either willfully believed the worst case scenarios could never come true, was naive to their existence or calculated the benefits and growth outweighed the risks. And when finally confronted, Facebook often dragged its feet before admitting the extent of the issues.
Inside the social network’s offices, the bonds began to fray. An ethics problem metastisized into a morale problem. Slogans took on sinister second meanings. The Kool-Aid tasted different.
Some hoped they could right the ship but couldn’t. Some craved the influence and intellectual thrill of running one of humanity’s most popular inventions, but now question if that influence and their work is positive. Others surely just wanted to collect salaries, stock and resumé highlights, but lost the stomach for it.
Now the convergence of scandals has come to a head in the form of constant leaks.
The trouble tipping point
The more benign leaks merely cost Facebook a bit of competitive advantage. We’ve learned it’s building a smart speaker, a standalone VR headset and a Houseparty split-screen video chat clone.
Yet policy-focused leaks have exacerbated the backlash against Facebook, putting more pressure on the conscience of employees. As blame fell to Facebook for Trump’s election, word of Facebook prototyping a censorship tool for operating in China escaped, triggering questions about its respect for human rights and free speech. Facebook’s content rulebook got out alongside disturbing tales of the filth the company’s contracted moderators have to sift through. Its ad targeting was revealed to be able to pinpoint emotionally vulnerable teens.
In recent weeks, the leaks have accelerated to a maddening pace in the wake of Facebook’s soggy apologies regarding the Cambridge Analytica debacle. Its weak policy enforcement left the door open to exploitation of data users gave third-party apps, deepening the perception that Facebook doesn’t care about privacy.
And it all culminated with BuzzFeed publishing a leaked “growth at all costs” internal post from Facebook VP Andrew “Boz” Bosworth that substantiated people’s worst fears about the company’s disregard for user safety in pursuit of world domination. Even the ensuing internal discussion about the damage caused by leaks and how to prevent them…leaked.
But the leaks are not the disease, just the symptom. Sunken morale is the cause, and it’s dragging down the company. Former Facebook employee and Wired writer Antonio Garcia Martinez sums it up, saying this kind of vindictive, intentionally destructive leak fills Facebook’s leadership with “horror”:
The fact that some Facebooker would place their personal grudge and views above the interests of the company fills anyone on the home team with horror (in the same way that the current administration colluding with foreigners to secure a domestic victory does Americans).
— Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) March 30, 2018
And that sentiment was confirmed by Facebook’s VP of News Feed Adam Mosseri, who tweeted that leaks “create strong incentives to be less transparent internally and they certainly slow us down,” and will make it tougher to deal with the big problems.
I’m really worried about this. I worry it’ll make it much more difficult to step up to the challenges we face.
— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) March 30, 2018
Those thoughts weigh heavy on Facebook’s team. A source close to several Facebook executives tells us they feel “embarrassed to work there” and are increasingly open to other job opportunities. One current employee told us to assume anything certain execs tell the media is “100% false.”
If Facebook can’t internally discuss the problems it faces without being exposed, how can it solve them?
Implosion
The consequences of Facebook’s failures are typically pegged as external hazards.
You might assume the government will finally step in and regulate Facebook. But the Honest Ads Act and other rules about ads transparency and data privacy could end up protecting Facebook by being simply a paperwork speed bump for it while making it tough for competitors to build a rival database of personal info. In our corporation-loving society, it seems unlikely that the administration would go so far as to split up Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — one of the few feasible ways to limit the company’s power.
Users have watched Facebook make misstep after misstep over the years, but can’t help but stay glued to its feed. Even those who don’t scroll rely on it as a fundamental utility for messaging and login on other sites. Privacy and transparency are too abstract for most people to care about. Hence, first-time Facebook downloads held steady and its App Store rank actually rose in the week after the Cambridge Analytica fiasco broke. In regards to the #DeleteFacebook movement, Mark Zuckerberg himself said “I don’t think we’ve seen a meaningful number of people act on that.” And as long as they’re browsing, advertisers will keep paying Facebook to reach them.
That’s why the greatest threat of the scandal convergence comes from inside. The leaks are the canary in the noxious blue coal mine.
Can Facebook survive slowing down?
If employees wake up each day unsure whether Facebook’s mission is actually harming the world, they won’t stay. Facebook doesn’t have the same internal work culture problems as some giants like Uber. But there are plenty of other tech companies with less questionable impacts. Some are still private and offer the chance to win big on an IPO or acquisition. At the very least, those in the Bay could find somewhere to work without a spending hours a day on the traffic-snarled 101 freeway.
If they do stay, they won’t work as hard. It’s tough to build if you think you’re building a weapon. Especially if you thought you were going to be making helpful tools. The melancholy and malaise set in. People go into rest-and-vest mode, living out their days at Facebook as a sentence not an opportunity. The next killer product Facebook needs a year or two from now might never coalesce.
And if they do work hard, a culture of anxiety and paralysis will work against them. No one wants to code with their hands tied, and some would prefer a less scrutinized environment. Every decision will require endless philosophizing and risk-reduction. Product changes will be reduced to the lowest common denominator, designed not to offend or appear too tyrannical.
Source: Volkan Furuncu/Anadolu Agency + David Ramos/Getty Images
In fact, that’s partly how Facebook got into this whole mess. A leak by an anonymous former contractor led Gizmodo to report Facebook was suppressing conservative news in its Trending section. Terrified of appearing liberally biased, Facebook reportedly hesitated to take decisive action against fake news. That hands-off approach led to the post-election criticism that degraded morale and pushed the growing snowball of leaks down the mountain.
It’s still rolling.
How to stop morale’s downward momentum will be one of Facebook’s greatest tests of leadership. This isn’t a bug to be squashed. It can’t just roll back a feature update. And an apology won’t suffice. It will have to expel or reeducate the leakers and those disloyal without instilling a witch hunt’s sense of dread. Compensation may have to jump upwards to keep talent aboard like Twitter did when it was floundering. Its top brass will need to show candor and accountability without fueling more indiscretion. And it may need to make a shocking, landmark act of contrition to convince employees its capable of change.
When asked how Facebook could address the morale problem, Mosseri told me “it starts with owning our mistakes and being very clear about what we’re doing now” and noted that “it took a while to get into this place and I think it’ll take a while to work our way out . . . Trust is lost quickly, and takes a long time to rebuild.”
I think it starts with owning our mistakes and being very clear about what we’re doing now. For much of the company November 2016 was their first negative cycle, so it’s also good to share old stories. And then you have to deliver, you have to make real progress on the issues.
— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) March 30, 2018
This isn’t about whether Facebook will disappear tomorrow, but whether it will remain unconquerable for the forseeable future.
Growth has been the driving mantra for Facebook since its inception. No matter how employees are evaluated, it’s still the underlying ethos. Facebook has poised itself as a mission-driven company. The implication was always that connecting people is good so connecting more people is better. The only question was how to grow faster.
Now Zuckerberg will have to figure out how to get Facebook to cautiously foresee the consequences of what it says and does while remaining an appealing place to work. “Move slow and think things through” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
If you’re a Facebook employee or anyone else that has information to share with TechCrunch, you can contact us at Tips@techcrunch.com or this article’s author Josh Constine’s DMs are open on Twitter. Here are some of our feature stories on Facebook’s recent issues:
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Regulation could protect Facebook, not punish it
You know what tech startups hate? Complicated legal compliance. The problem is, Facebook isn’t a startup any more, but its competitors are.
There have been plenty of calls from congress and critics to regulate Facebook following the election interference scandal and now the Cambridge Analytica debacle. The government could require extensive ads transparency reporting or data privacy protections. That could cost Facebook a lot of money, slow down its operations, or inhibit its ability to build new products.
But the danger is that those same requirements could be much more onerous for a tiny upstart company to uphold. Without much cash or enough employees, and with product-market fit still to nail down, young startups might be anchored by the weight of regulation. It could prevent them from ever rising to become a true alternative to Facebook. Venture capitalists choosing whether to fund the next Facebook killer might look at the regulations as too high of a price of entry.
STANFORD, CA – JUNE 24: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (R) hugs U.S. President Barack Obama during the 2016 Global Entrepeneurship Summit at Stanford University on June 24, 2016 in Stanford, California. President Obama joined Silicon Valley leaders on the final day of the Global Entrepreneurship Summit. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
The lack of viable alternatives has made the #DeleteFacebook movement toothless. Where are people going to go? Instagram? WhatsApp? The government already missed its chances to stop Facebook from acquiring these companies that are massive social networks in their own right.
The only social networks to carve out communities since Facebook’s rise did so largely by being completely different, like the ephemeral Snapchat that purposefully doesn’t serve as a web identity platform, and the mostly-public Twitter that caters to thought leaders and celebrities more than normal people sharing their personal lives. Blockchain-based decentralized social networks sound nice but may be impossible to spin up.
That’s left few places for Facebook haters to migrate. This might explain why despite having so many more users, #DeleteFacebook peaked last week at substantially fewer Twitter mentions than the big #DeleteUber campaign from last January, according to financial data dashboard Sentieo. Lyft’s existence makes #DeleteUber a tenable stance, because you don’t have to change your behavior pattern, just your brand of choice.
If the government actually wants to protect the public against Facebook abusing its power, it would need to go harder than the Honest Ads Act that would put political advertising on Internet platforms under the same scrutiny regarding disclosure of buyers as the rules for TV and radio advertising. That’s basically just extra paperwork for Facebook. We’ve seen regulatory expenses deter competition amongst broadband internet service providers and in other industries. Real change would necessitate regulation that either creates alternatives to Facebook or at least doesn’t inhibit their creation.
That could mean only requiring certain transparency and privacy protections from apps over a certain size, like 200 million daily users. This would put the cap a bit above Twitter and Snapchat’s size today, giving them time to prepare for compliance, while immediately regulating Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Google’s social problem child YouTube.
Still, with Facebook earning billions in profit per quarter and a massive war chest built up, Mark Zuckerberg could effectively pay his way out of the problem. That’s why it makes perfect sense for him to have told CNN “I’m not sure we shouldn’t be regulated” and that “There are things like ad transparency regulation that I would love to see.” Particular regulatory hurdles amount to just tiny speed bumps for Facebook. Courting this level of regulation could bat down the question of whether it should be broken up or its News Feed algorithm needs to change.
Meanwhile, if the government instituted new rules for tech platforms collecting persona information going forward, it could effectively lock in Facebook’s lead in the data race. If it becomes more cumbersome to gather this kind of data, no competitor might ever amass an index of psychographic profiles and social graphs able to rival Facebook’s.
A much more consequential approach would be to break up Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Facebook is trying to preempt these drastic measures with Zuckerberg’s recent apology tour and its purchase of full-page ads in nine newspapers today claiming it understands its responsibility.
Establishing them as truly independent companies that compete would create meaningful alternatives to Facebook. Instagram and WhatsApp would have to concern themselves with actually becoming sustainable businesses. They’d all lose some economies of data scale, forfeiting the ability to share engineering, anti-spam, localization, ad sales, and other resources that a source close to Instagram told me it gained by being acquired in 2012, and that Facebook later applied to WhatsApp too.
Both permanent photo sharing and messaging would become two-horse races again. That could lead to the consumer-benefiting competition and innovation the government hopes for from regulation.
Yet with strong regulation like dismantling Facebook seeming beyond the resolve of congress, and weak regulation potentially protecting Facebook, perhaps it’s losing the moral high ground that will be Facebook’s real punishment.
Facebook chief legal officer Colin Stretch testifies before congress regarding Russian election interference
We’ve already seen that first-time download rates aren’t plummeting for Facebook, its App Store ranking has actually increased since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, and blue chip advertisers aren’t bailing, according to BuzzFeed. But Facebook relies on the perception of its benevolent mission to recruit top talent in Silicon Valley and beyond.
Techies take the job because they wake up each day believing that they’re having a massive positive influence by connecting the world. These people could have founded or worked at a new startup where they’d have discernible input on the direction of the product, and a chance to earn huge return multiples on their stock. Many have historically worked at Facebook because its ads say it’s the “Best place to build and make an impact”.
But if workers start to see that impact as negative, they might not enlist. This is what could achieve that which surface-level regulation can’t. It’s perhaps the most important repercussion of all the backlash about fake news, election interference, well-being, and data privacy: that losing talent could lead to a slow-down of innovation at Facebook that might leave the door open for a new challenger.
For more on Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, read our feature pieces:
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Going public pits Spotify’s suggestions against everyone
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How ad-free subscriptions could solve Facebook
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Facebook should actually be Tinder too
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The difference between good and bad Facebooking
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To fix SoundCloud, it must become the anti-Spotify
Startups die by suicide, not competition. It wasn’t that anyone was stealing SoundCloud’s underground rappers, bedroom remixers and garage bands. SoundCloud stumbled because it neglected these hardcore loyalists as it wrongly strove to usurp Spotify as the streaming home of music’s superstars. Read More
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