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!

The Indian Startup Scene

Yahoo shut down its development offices in India recently. I think most large software development companies with most of their teams in the US will eventually come to the same conclusion and do the same thing. My guess is that the only ones that will remain are the ones that make their teams there strictly independent and focused on problems facing the Indian market.

Unfortunately, that is not how those offices typically operate - they usually end up doing small projects that people in the main offices in the US think are safe to be handled overseas. It is not like they think the folks in India are less capable or dedicated - it just makes more logical sense to have everyone working on important projects to all be in the same timezone, located more or less close by geographically and able to communicate well with each other. Since that is not easy to do between the US and India, even if a project of importance happens to have arisen at the Bangalore office, it eventually gets moved to the US because it is too important to be done by a team that no one has much contact with.

Also, folks sitting in the US do not have as much perspective on the Indian market (or any other market for that matter) so they tend to miss opportunities that people there would normally see.  Typically I have not seen these offices solving too many problems for the developing world. Historically, I think the number of new solutions that came out for the Indian market from these large companies has been low, especially from an engineering viewpoint. All the new ideas such seem to have come from small startups and not from the smaller offices of the established companies. Even when the established companies do come out with solutions for the local market, it seems like the initiatives originated from Indian employees in the US, not in India.

So from the perspective of the large companies, it makes sense to close down operations in India - if they are unable to innovate for the local market, and it is known that communication can be a problem, why keep these offices running? I know some folks do it because it is cheaper there - but that gap is quickly reducing..people's starting salaries have nearly doubled in the last 5-6 years. It is already nearly half of what folks make in the US, so it seems like in the next 10 years or so the gap in salaries will be mostly gone. So it wont make much financial sense to keep engineers there either.

So is this a bad thing? Are we moving in a direction where unemployment for engineers will once again become a problem? I dont think so - I think India will have its own strong startups coming out soon. There are already quite a few that seem to be doing well, and it will get better over time. The startup scene there is heating up, and college grads there are increasingly opting to work at one of those rather than join a conventional large company with a big name. Eventually we will have our own big names, perhaps ones that will compete or surpass the likes of Google and Facebook. China is already moving in that direction and I believe India will soon catch up. In fact I think most countries with strong engineering education will develop its own version of a Silicon Valley with startups churning out innovative solutions for their people.

I am curious how the next 5-10 years will play out in India, startup-scene-wise.

Dealing with Complexity

Have you paused for a moment to marvel at some of the things we have been doing lately?

Self driving cars.
Drones that deliver packages.
Contact lenses that can measure eye pressure.
Gadgets that take pictures when you just think about taking pictures (yep, that exists).

Only fifteen years ago, I would not have thought this kind of stuff would come about while I was still alive. While I see the upside of all this - in fact I make a living out of the upside, I also see some downsides. This post is mostly about the downsides. It does not mean I am anti-technology. I am very much pro-progress, and I definitely think we are better off today than we were just 60 years ago. I also think that is true on most fronts - we have better medical care, better technology and definitely a better political climate. But I have my times of doubt, and this one such moment.

The first problem I see with such complex systems is the need for specialized knowledge before one can contribute anything. The more sophisticated the stuff you make, longer someone has to spend trying to learn all the basics before they can add on top of it. And once they get all that training, they are not going to easily adapt into another job, because they will need a bunch of retraining. Not many companies are willing to hire just "smart" people and pay they until they get up to speed. Most are looking for specific skills that they can start applying on day one on their new jobs. Instead of valuing experience, most places will hire people who have been "ready-made" for the specific roles they have. Once that ready-made position is no longer relevant, heaven help them if they need a new job.

The second problem is avoiding absurdities in the system. When building something complex, it is always difficult to make sure that all the parts make sense together. In the medical system here, it has come to a point where if you dont have medical insurance, you cannot see a doctor. And the number of times you are allowed to see a doctor for any reason whatsoever is also dictated by medical insurance. Take one of my experiences for example: I had a skin problem, which was on my face and my back. I wanted to see a doctor, and called a skin specialist to fix an appointment. They told me that the doctor could only look at one part of my body during one appointment (apparently the insurance restricts the doctor from looking beyond one specific problem). So I asked for 2 consecutive appointments so I could show my face and my back and avoid another trip to the same doctor on another day. Again, insurance prohibited the same doctor from seeing the same patient in two appointments on the same day. The only thing I could do was take appointments on two different days. What kind of nonsense is that?

The third problem is conveying this knowledge to common people. Take the financial system. I dont think anyone understands the entire system, fully, including the people who designed it. And because people like you and me dont understand it, you are supposed to get yourself a "broker" or a "financial planner" who will understand these things for you and make your life smooth. I recently attended a panel discussion organized by financial planners. Their biggest advice was to get yourself a financial planner and invest as much as you can in your 401k. When asked what a financial planner did, they said it is a "halo person" who talks to your accountant, lawyer, broker, doctor, nanny, knows your family and relatives and decides what the right financial decisions are for you. Apparently they control the actions of all these people on your lives so that financially, it all makes sense. What they dont mention is that they charge thousands of dollars in fees, just like all these other people in your life that they are supposed to "work" with, such as lawyers, accountants and so forth. A lot of people came out of that panel discussion feeling like they had a "lot to catch up on and do". I came out deeply concerned that (a) our system was so complicated that something so simple as "inheritance" required working with a financial planner, a lawyer and an accountant. Its something everyone has to do, so why dont we make it as simple as possible? Why make the system such that there is one loop hole that you can go through to make sure your money goes to your children without paying too much in taxes, but for that you need to do this complicated trust fund thing? Why not just offer everyone the same thing instead of limiting these options to those people who are educated enough to navigate the laws and have money to pay lawyers who know how to deal with it?

Of course, financial planners did not mention the fine print that they charge thousands of dollars for their services. I wonder if them and the IRS setup this system so that the IRS can take a cut out of all the money from people who dont know the system, and the financial planners can take the money out of all the people who learn a few things about the system..

When I was at IITM, there was a T shirt that was made by the students of the CS department that read "Complexities Simplified for Everyone". The complexity they had in mind when they made the Tshirt must have been the algorithmic kind... but that phrase indicates what we need on almost all fronts on which we have made progress. I wish all the new grads coming out of college in the coming years will figure out a way to simplify the various systems around us so as to make it more understandable to the common man instead of introducing more complexity when they join the workforce.

The Rise and Fall of Large Corporations

I was reading an article about Sony's struggles to keep themselves profitable today. It is a company whose products I have used a lot while growing up - there was this implicit assumption that if it was from this company, it would meet a certain quality standard. Today though, the inevitable has already happened. They have been disrupted, and they are feeling the pain.

Microsoft is another example of a company that is becoming more and more irrelevant. These days when I see someone take out a laptop that runs Windows, I think they must be either dated or works in consulting and is just doing powerpoint slides everyday ;). Perhaps I feel this way because I worked for MS a while ago. Perhaps I am wrong about what I think about Microsoft. Perhaps everyone will start thinking Windows is cool and start using it again. Perhaps Satya Nadella can save that company. But my guess would be that it will not happen. They have been disrupted so many times over - they missed internet, they missed mobile, and most recently they missed social. And with each new wave that came along, they tried coming up with similar products to try to beat the disrupting company out of their own space. I wonder why they dont know any better. Its not like the individuals there dont know that this is not going to work - at least at a grassroots level they all know. When they decided to work on a product to compete with iPhone sometime in mid 2008 to hit the market 2 years from then, there were people who worked there who asked why they were doing it - Apple was going to come up with something better by 2010, why were they making something that would have features that were competitive with the iPhone released in 2007? There was no answer coming forth. They did it because thats what "management" decided the strategy was. I guess the management thought that Apple was like Netscape. Clearly, that proved wrong.

Corporations are so much like people.

The birth of a company is a lot of hard work and pain. Its infancy is a lot of learning and work. Then it goes through a phase of maturing and figuring out what its place in the world must be. Then it tries to make a decent living out of its chosen path. After a while, a newcomer eats its lunch and it is left struggling to figure out how to compete. Some manage to reinvent themselves. Most retire. In the end though, all of them die. And these are just the successful ones. There are many others who die along the way. Some die in their infancy, never having managed to take off. Some get killed. Some commit suicide. Banks seem to have a strong preference for suicide. And goverments seem to like covering it up and making it look like it was accidental poisoning.

Whats interesting to note though, is that the life cycle has been shrinking into a smaller and smaller time scale lately. In the 1950s, the average age of a company that was in the S&P 500 was around 75. These days it is more like 10.

Apparently corporations mature a lot faster these days. Just like cattle and livestock. And people.

To fuel this type of insane growth, people are perhaps working harder than ever before - with the introduction of laptops, our work now stretches into our homes, making it harder for us to detach from work at will. And since more and more people are willing to put in this type of work, everyone feels pressurized to do the same thing.

So here we are - a set of people running faster than ever before to make more wealth than ever before to spend on more stuff than ever before, dying faster than ever before with more diseases than ever before.

Sometimes I wonder what the point of it all is. The Amish lifestyle makes so much sense sometimes.

And yet I know I will not let go of my job or my chosen life no matter what conclusions I come to logically. I know in my head that it is all in vain, yet I do exactly what everyone else does. Perhaps it is peer pressure. When I was in school I used to do things to make sure I wasnt going to buckle in to peer pressure. Apparently it wasnt enough - I am still swayed be everyone else's measure of success. I still care about what impressions people have about me. One day hopefully, I will be able to rid myself of that and take a more zen like approach to work and life. And some other day, hopefully, everyone else will feel the same way and do what they love.

The New Royalty

Recently, I read about the 65th Birthday party of Prince Charles that was funded by a "philanthropist" Indian origin couple based in London. The party had apparently cost 500k pounds, and I couldnt help but wonder why any self respecting individual who wanted to known as "philanthropist" would spend money pampering the royalty of a country whose colonization and plundering has resulted in the sorry state of affairs that many countries face today. People from this country amassed great wealth either as loot, pretty much the same way pirates do their job. If it wasnt straight forward theft, they did it by enslaving the natives of the country they were colonizing. I wonder how they can look at their history and not feel shame. Do they teach their children what really happened or do they teach them about "conquests" that brought in great wealth?

It is not just England that has this type of history though - if one looks around the Americas, one can see that Portugal and Spain did the same thing. The Spanish were in fact worse - they usually exterminated the natives if they could not be converted into slaves, and then shipped Africans across the sea and used them to work the land. Why was there nothing similar to the Nuremberg trials for colonialists? How did their conscience permit them to act in such inhuman ways? Why was it not considered genocide? And what on earth was the church doing meanwhile? What was their role in all of this?

But that was not what I started out saying.. So why would this Indian "philanthropist" want to host this birthday party?After amassing more wealth than they know what to do with, I guess they hear a little voice in their heads that tell them that the only thing they lack is "titles". If one wants to buy titles, one must know someone who can sell them, right?

Enormous wealth makes all kinds of things possible - one gets powerful, knows all the right people, can fund political organizations - which means one can have a hand in almost all decision making processes, can fund election campaigns, fund universities - which means one's children will most likely receive the best education, and finally, one can also control the media.

And that is how the New Royalty emerges.
Like Reliance Royalty.
Or Kingfisher Royalty.
Or Mittal Royalty.

Think I exaggerate? One of Mittal's palaces was built with marble from the same quarry that was used for the Taj Mahal. This residence is jokingly referred to as "Taj Mittal". His daughter's wedding was the second most expensive wedding in recorded history, second only to Prince Charles and Diana, and followed by Prince William and Kate Middleton who got the third place. Doesnt that sound like royalty?

So what has really changed over the last 100 years?
It depends on your perspective.

From the average Joe's perspective, nothing really has changed. He is born, he lives an ordinary life, reads about the New Royalty's excesses and has dreams that will never come true.

From the perspective of an entrepreneur though, everything has changed. If one is born with enough ability, ambition, a willingness to work hard, and got a few lucky breaks in life, one could join the ranks of the New Royalty almost overnight. Trust me, this was not something that could be done in the old world. In the old world, one really had to be born into wealth. So in that sense, the world is now a lot more democratic. Any one of us can be Royalty tomorrow. In fact, no one knows who the next member of Royalty will be. What we have really done is taken away the ability to be wealthy from a few who were born privileged and made it possible for anyone to be wealthy. It will still be a few, but it could be anyone.

Since "wealth" is a relative term and being wealthy would no longer mean anything if everyone had it, I suppose this is exactly how we want our world to be.

Perfection

After working on a fairly complicated problem for the past few weeks, I was reflecting on the process of writing software one day. It occurred to me that a good piece of software is not just working code - it is code that the writer spent a fair amount of time perfecting until there are no rough edges anywhere. It is what you get when you have nothing more that can be removed (I didnt come up with that, search online to see who did). Not one line more, nor one line less would do exactly the same thing. (Thats another reference. Checkout Byron)

And suddenly, I was enlightened. It isnt just software where this is true. It is true of everything I could think of so far - cooking, movie making, art, music, structural engineering... pretty much everything.

So.. my learning, which is the point of this entry is: Perfection is a prerequisite for greatness.

Goodbye, Reader.

The announcement about Reader's shutdown came as a shock to me. Even though I work for the company that produced and hosted it all these years. There were enough people shocked by the decision who voiced their opinions loudly to no avail, so I did not waste my energy doing that. Instead I decided to enjoy the time remaining, in what way I could.

And now my dear friend has passed on, to Software Heaven.. I miss you, Google Reader. From June 30 onwards, I watched Facebook streams carefully to see who else seemed to miss you. Apparently not many of my friends. None wrote a word about you. Perhaps we made the right decision after all. Perhaps there werent that many that were using you. Which obviously, in our world, means demise. But if it makes you feel better, I have tried Feedly, and it is not very good. Maybe that will make you smile from Software Heaven?

But your death got me thinking.
About Software life, death and afterlife. It is just like Human life, death and afterlife.

Maybe when I reach my human afterlife (and I am in no hurry to, but when I do), I will get to read with you again?