The Price of Progress

Its hard not to think about what the future holds for us. In the last fifty years we have seen nearly every sector disrupted because of technology, and it doesnt look like that process is going to stop anytime soon.

One of the things I think about are people who make a living driving. We use Uber pretty often, and I sometimes talk to the drivers to see how and when they started out as Uber drivers. There are some folks who say they gave up their day jobs because this was paying more. One that I was talking to just a few days ago said she had not had any other job for more than one and a half years. And she has a Masters degree from NYU! She talked about how difficult it was to find a decently paying job, and that no one cares about her degree. It was sad to listen to her because I know that sooner or later she will find herself out of this job as well - my guess is that in five to ten years, unless this country puts regulations in place, we will have a self driving car service that will be way cheaper. And these guys will unfortunately not be able to compete against those, and will soon have to find something else to do. Its the same with truck and bus drivers.

Another area where disruption is going to happen is delivery services. All those delivery service folks who are raking in money now because of the popularity of the rise in demand for delivery will sooner or later find themselves out of a job - when the drones figure out how to do it faster and cheaper.

There are so many areas like these where change is happening. Folks who make this kind of progress happen think they are doing everyone a service - it takes away the need to have people engaged in work that can easily be automated, freeing people to engage in more creative pursuits. Their reasoning is : no one should have to sit behind the wheel of a truck for hours at a time to earn a living. Instead, we should have folks who create software that can drive cars around automatically.

Unfortunately, the question arises: what can these folks do instead that will not require specialized skills? The trouble with all the progress we are making is that it removes large numbers of jobs that dont need a lot of skill and adds a few jobs that are extremely specialized and skill based. The folks whose jobs got taken away will never be able to hold the jobs that got created by this type of disruption. We will eventually eliminate the need for unskilled / low skilled labor and only have a market open for smart, creative, skilled and extremely competitive folks who are willing to work round the clock to keep their jobs. And because these jobs are going to be few in number, they will have to work harder and harder to make sure they are not taken away by someone else. And obviously, their work is going to make more and more jobs irrelevant as time passes by. Essentially, we are progressing in a direction where we will eventually put most folks out of a means of livelihood, and the gap between the rich and poor will increase further. The only difference will be that the everyone will have the opportunity to try to get one of those few jobs; the ones who dont will only be able to blame their genes and upbringing.

So what am I proposing? That we call the world to a halt and stop all progress? Grind growth and subsequently the economy to a halt? Where would that leave us?

For a long time I had this post written up until here and I felt I couldnt post it because I had no answers. I thought the answers will come to me in time, but it hasnt. So I am going to post this, hoping the answer will arrive afterwards and it can be added in as an update later.

Update as of Aug 2017: There is a company called Humu that is attempting to solve this problem. There is also some research into Basic Income that Ycombinator is doing, that seems like it is attempting to solve the same issues. Happy to realize that I am not the only one thinking this way and that we are hopefully going to make some progress on this problem.

Ellen Pao vs Kleiner Perkins

In the last few weeks there has been so much going on in terms of gender all around me. I dont know if I am seeing more of it because I am more attentive to these things or if it is really just a coincidence. The first one was the comments from the Delhi rapist about how the victim really was to blame. If it was just that, I might have let it go, because after all I am aware that the prevailing notion among a large proportion of Indian men are somewhere along those lines. Having grown up in India, I would be stupid to think that a large portion of Indian men thought otherwise. But then there was a former Googler who publicly stated that she was sexually harassed while still working for the company and the rape and death threats that she has been facing since the public disclosure. And then there was Ellen Pao vs Kleiner Perkins, showing how regressive even a country like US is when it comes to women's work rights. On top of all this, I am reading Lean In currently, which I guess has made me especially sensitive to the small issues that women face while trying to be in the workforce.

This post is about the trial and what I think are some of the mistakes KPCB made while dealing with Pao. My own thinking about the trial has been muddled, because of conflicting press reports that seem to favor one or the other side. Like in all cases, without knowing the absolute truth, all one can do is form your own judgement. This is my way of clearing up some of my thinking... It is not a full or fair account of the trial, it is just some things I noted about the trial and the firm that surprised me. I have been following their investments for a while now, and I always looked on them with respect, but this trial changes things a lot.

There are several things about that trial that surprised me.

The first one was what the firm's line of defense was. Even in this day and age, in a country as progressive as this one, the way one conducts a lawsuit against a powerful woman who is alleging gender based discrimination is by character assassination. She gets portrayed as an overbearing and aggressive bitch who no one can get along with, the intention being that the jury would be traditional enough to consider likeability of the woman in question more than whether there was gender bias involved or not. In my view, her likeability should not be discussed at all. Whats relevant is whether there was bias or not, and just because a woman is not very likeable doesnt make gender bias any less of an issue. Powerful women only get there because they are tough and are willing to be assertive enough not to back down when others try to push them over. Unfortunately, cultures around the world portray these women as "bad" women. It is less in the US, but it is still there... a woman who is assertive is just not "nice" too. Men simply dont face this problem, they are just seen as powerful and assertive because that is what we expect men to be.

The second one was how the firm in question dealt with someone against whom two of their female employees levelled sexual harassment charges. When the first complaint was made by Pao, he was talked to, but not really reprimanded. The firm says his bonus was cut, but his biggest "punishment" was that he was told the firm's most senior leader had lost faith in his ability to lead the firm. The following year though, he was given a promotion and made senior partner because they thought "he would be a good investor". Only after a second complaint was made by a different employee was he finally let go of.  So in the man's case, all that mattered was whether or not he would be a good investor, and how he behaved with female employees at the firm was not looked upon seriously, whereas in the woman's case (Ms. Pao's) she couldnt be made senior partner because she was too aggressive and difficult to get along with. No wonder Pao is suing them.

The third one was how the women in firm were assigned their traditional stereotypes even in their written performance reviews: Pao's reviews before she levelled harassment charges against them consistently contained "encouraging" words such as "quietly effective" and in an email she was mentioned as having a , "quiet, tenacious leadership". In cases where improvements were suggested, it contained words such as "We encourage you to soften your style". Referring to another female investor at the firm, the same email contained the words "patient, firm, savvy, and mother of two young kids", whereas the same email when describing a male investor did not mention his family status in any way despite him having children as well. While it is fine to describe the family status of employees, I think it definitely is not necessary to call that out only in case of women. In a separate email, while talking about another female employee, the same partner writes : "Her willingness to travel works, unless / until she becomes a mom".

The fourth surprise for me was the "unwritten guidelines" that were applied unequally to men and women. Apparently junior partners were expected to only sit on one board. This was told to women who had the opportunity to be on more than one board, but most men were exempted from the guideline.

The fifth surprise was that the firm seem to have had differing policies w.r.t. offering work to men vs women. Pao worked to hire and mentor another man who was given the opportunity earlier to invest and prove himself. Pao's opportunities to do so were however limited since she was asked to mostly spend time writing press releases and speeches, with her being told that she was being assigned that stuff because she was good at it. Obviously, she would not have been foolish enough to think that writing press releases and speeches for the majority of the time was not going to make a case for her promotion. Eventually the man that Ellen hired and mentored got promoted before she did. The other major incident that comes to light here is that another male senior partner was given a board seat for a company that she primarily did all the groundwork for, because "he needed a win" and because it was "her job to support her senior partners".

The sixth surprise was : The firm was approached by Google Ventures asking whether they could recruit Ellen Pao for themselves. At the time Kleiner Perkins did not want to let her go, because they felt she was valuable enough as an employee and had spent a long time developing her. So they decided to offer her a position on their "digital team" so Google Ventures would not hire her away. Google Ventures realized what was happening and it looks like they finally did not make an offer. (It must be noted that their attorney later twisted this out of context to say that she was "rejected" by Google Ventures.) A couple of years after this they decided that her performance was not good enough and that she will never make general partner. She sued the firm after this, while still employed there, and waited until they terminated her employment.

To me, if in fact all of this is true, there has been harassment. It wasnt exactly one particular event of harassment, it was more death by a thousand cuts (although I will say that some cuts were pretty deep here). Compounding these issues together makes for an unfriendly workplace for women, and I believe that (and some financial compensation) is what Pao is fighting for. It must be obvious by now that I am on Pao's side. Regardless of what the verdict is from this trial, I think from now on I will think of KPCB as on old school firm that has fifties style value systems. I expected them to be different, mostly because of what I had heard of John Doerr's non investing work (which by the way was mentioned in the trial, perhaps to improve his likeability, just the way the defense tried to reduce Pao's likeability stating that she was too assertive to be likeable.). I now see that as just the creation of a public image to benefit his business. It is even likely that it is mostly his wife who manages it; while he stays as the public face of it.

A trial is a tricky thing to handle; most of it is he-said, she-said, with documents to prove some of them, although even the best documented proof can be misleading when taken out of context. I hope the jury is able to wade through the legal battle that is going on and make a just decision. I hope this brings some change into the tech industry, which, although perhaps the most supportive of diversity, is still not supportive enough. Good luck, Pao!