Sheryl Sandberg

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Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

on the wrong side of history: Richard Branson and Sheryl Sandberg, “Sheryl Sandberg and Richard Branson: Balancing Act (04/24),” interview by author, Bloomberg, April 23, 2015, video, 20:53, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-04-25/sheryl-sandberg-richard-branson-balancing-act-04-24-. Under her direction, Facebook’s revenues: Matt Rosoff, “Look at How Much Sheryl Sandberg Has Done for Facebook,” Business Insider, Mar. 23, 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com/sheryl-sandberg-8-years-at-facebook-2016-3. not to “lean back”: Sheryl Sandberg, “Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders,” TED talk, Dec. 21, 2010, video, 14:58, https://www.ted.com/talks/sheryl_sandberg_why_we_have_too_few_women_leaders.

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The Twitter tiff resurfaced: Shyam Sankar, “The Case Against Work- Life Balance: Owning Your Future,” shyamsankar.com, Nov. 16, 2015, http://shyamsankar.com/the-case-against-work-life-balance-owning-your-future. In a 2012 interview: Sheryl Sandberg, “I Am Leaving Work at 5:30p,” Makers, 2012, https://www.makers.com/moments/leaving-work-530pm. “couldn’t have gotten more publicity”: Sarah Frier, “How Sheryl Sandberg’s Manifesto Drives Facebook,” Bloomberg, April 27, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-27/how-sheryl-sandberg-s-sharing-manifesto-drives-facebook. “Thank you, we’re all leaving”: Ibid. hide her exit time: Ibid. “Of course I do”: Sheryl Sandberg, “Sheryl Sandberg: Bloomberg Studio 1.0 (Full Show),” interview by author, Bloomberg, Aug. 9, 2017, video, 24:16, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-08-10/sheryl-sandberg-bloomberg-studio-1-0-full-show-video.

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Form 10-K for the Fiscal Year Ended Dec. 31, 2014, Feb. 6, 2015, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000128877615000008/goog2014123110-k.htm. Sandberg’s first assignment: Kashmir Hill, “Sheryl Sandberg to Harvard Biz Grads: ‘Find a Rocket Ship,’” Forbes, May 24, 2012, https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/05/24/sheryl-sandberg-to-harvard-biz-grads-find-a-rocket-ship. She went on to create: “Facebook Names Sheryl Sandberg Chief Operating Officer,” Facebook Newsroom, March 4, 2008, https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2008/03/facebook-names-sheryl-sandberg-chief-operating-officer. “I think the thing”: Wojcicki, interview by author, Bloomberg, Nov. 14, 2016. “something out of a rebooted soap opera”: Reed Albergotti, “Google Reckoning with History of Interoffice Romance by Top Execs,” The Information, Nov. 29, 2017, https://www.theinformation.com/google-reckoning-with-history-of-interoffice-romance-by-top-execs.

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg

affirmative action, business process, Cass Sunstein, constrained optimization, experimental economics, fear of failure, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, old-boy network, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social graph, Susan Wojcicki, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

The article “Sheryl Sandberg Is the Valley’s ‘It’ Girl—Just Like Kim Polese Once Was” can be found at the end of Eric Jackson, “Apology to Sheryl Sandberg and to Kim Polese [Updated],” Forbes, May 23, 2012, http://​www.​forbes.​com/​sites/​eric​jackson/​2012/​05/​23/​apology-​sheryl-​sandberg-​kim-​polese/. 8. Kim Polese, “Stop Comparing Female Execs and Just Let Sheryl Sandberg Do Her Job,” Forbes, May 25, 2012, http://​www.​forbes.​com/​sites/​carolinehoward/​2012/​05/​25/​stop-​comparing-​female-​execs-​and-​just-​let-​sheryl-​sandberg-​do-​her-​job/. 9. Jackson, “Apology to Sheryl Sandberg and to Kim Polese [Updated].” 10.

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Sheryl Sandberg is donating all of her income from this book to establish Lean In, a nonprofit organization that encourages women to lean in to their ambitions. For more information, please visit www.aaknopf.com Lean In By Sheryl Sandberg Reading Group Guide ABOUT THIS READING GROUP GUIDE The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. ABOUT THE BOOK Sheryl Sandberg—Facebook COO, ranked eighth on Fortune’s list of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business—has become one of America’s most galvanizing leaders, and an icon for millions of women juggling work and family.

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This is not just unfair to the individuals but reinforces the stigma that successful women are unlikeable. A perfect and personal example occurred in May 2012, when a Forbes blogger posted an article entitled “Sheryl Sandberg Is the Valley’s ‘It’ Girl—Just Like Kim Polese Once Was.” He began his comparison by describing Kim, an early tech entrepreneur, as a “luminary” in the mid-1990s who never really earned her success, but was “in the right place at the right time [and was] young, pretty and a good speaker.” The blogger then argued, “I think Polese is a good cautionary tale for … Sheryl Sandberg.”7 Ouch. Kim and I had never met or spoken before this incident, but she defended both of us. In a published response, she described reading the blog post and how her “immediate thought was—how sad.

The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, basic income, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, crony capitalism, do what you love, feminist movement, follow your passion, food desert, Food sovereignty, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, Khan Academy, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, microapartment, performance metric, post-Fordism, post-work, profit motive, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, structural adjustment programs, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

See the work of Alan Finlayson on “Bonoism.” 8Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 1:181, 1990, 110. 9The 2006 film written by and starring Žižek, A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, offers a concise explanation of his views on ideology. 10Pierre Bourdieu, “A Reasoned Utopia and Economic Fatalism,” New Left Review 1: 227, 1998, 125–30, quoted in Weeks, The Problem with Work, pp. 180–81. 1 Sheryl Sandberg and the Business of Feminism Fifteen years ago Silicon Valley was inhabited by packs of brogrammers slouching around in hoodies and sandals, hacking code on bean bag chairs, and regurgitating South Park jokes. In the intervening years the start-up scene has changed—a bit. Computer technology has been mainstreamed, and women have joined the high-tech gold rush. Tech mammoths like Facebook, IBM, Yahoo!, Hewlett-Packard, and Google all employ women in leading roles. But despite the power of women like Sheryl Sandberg, Ginni Rometty, Marissa Meyer, Meg Whitman, and Susan Wojcicki, the gender balance in Silicon Valley and the larger corporate world remains highly skewed, and most leadership positions are held by men.

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Other titles in this series available from Verso Books: Playing the Whore by Melissa Gira Grant Utopia or Bust by Benjamin Kunkel Strike for America by Micah Uetricht The New Prophets of Capital by NICOLE ASCHOFF For Ila and Simi First published by Verso 2015 © Nicole Aschoff 2015 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-810-6 (PB) eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-811-3 (US) eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-812-0 (UK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Fournier MT by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed in the US by Maple Press Contents Introduction: Storytelling 1.Sheryl Sandberg and the Business of Feminism 2.Capital’s Id: Whole Foods, Conscious Capitalism and Sustainability 3.The Oracle of O: Oprah and the Neoliberal Subject 4.The Gates Foundation and the Rise of Philanthrocapitalism 5.Looking Forward Further Reading Acknowledgements Introduction: Storytelling We are all storytellers.

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According to a 2013 Gallup Poll, 80 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the way the nation is handling poverty and more than half of the middle class names financial insecurity as their chief concern.6 In this moment, a new generation of storytellers has emerged to tell us what’s wrong with society and how to fix it. The most powerful of these storytellers aren’t poor or working people, they are the super-elite. The loudest critics of capitalism these days are people like Bill Gates, who decries poverty and inequality, and Sheryl Sandberg, who laments persistent gender divides, but they are not calling for an end to capitalism. Instead, they are part of a chorus of new elite voices calling for a different kind of capitalism. The long list of “new” capitalisms being touted or disdained—conscious capitalism, creative capitalism, sustainable capitalism, equitable capitalism, philanthrocapitalism, eco-capitalism, inclusive capitalism, crony capitalism—illustrates the widespread feeling that capitalism needs to change.

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, offshore financial centre, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks

“I lost the coin flip as to where we were going to live”: Peter Holley, “Dave Goldberg, Husband of Facebook Exec Sheryl Sandberg, Dies Overnight, Family Says,” Washington Post, May 2, 2015. 5. Sandberg thrived: Brad Stone and Miguel Helft, “Facebook Hires a Google Executive as No. 2,” New York Times, March 5, 2008. 6. She met Zuckerberg at a Christmas party: Patricia Sellers, “The New Valley Girls,” Fortune, October 13, 2008. 7. “That they would cross paths was inevitable”: Kara Swisher, “(Almost) New Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg Speaks!” AllThingsD, March 10, 2008. 8. Federal Trade Commission issued self-regulatory principles: FTC, “FTC Staff Proposes Online Behavioral Advertising Principles,” press release, December 20, 2007. 9.

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Sandberg will face mounting pressure”: Vauhini Vara, “Facebook CEO Seeks Help as Site Grows,” Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2018. 11. in a winding Facebook post: Andrew Bosworth, Facebook post, December 1, 2007. 12. demeaning comments casually made about women: Katherine Losse, The Boy Kings (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), p. 24. 13. On Sandberg’s first day: Bianca Bosker, “Mark Zuckerberg Introduced Sheryl Sandberg to Facebook Staff by Saying They Should All ‘Have a Crush on’ Her,” Huffington Post, June 26, 2012, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mark-zuckerberg-sheryl-sandberg-facebook-staff-crush_n_1627641. 14. A month into her new job: David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), p. 257, and interviews. 15. In 1994, an engineer at Netscape had created the “cookie”: Janet Guyon, “The Cookie that Ate the World,” Techonomy, December 3, 2018. 16. ad business was essentially outsourced to Microsoft: Katharine Q.

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“We connect people”: Ryan Mac, Charlie Warzel and Alex Kantrowitz, “Growth at Any Cost: Top Facebook Executive Defended Data Collection in 2016 Memo—and Warned that Facebook Could Get People Killed,” Buzzfeed News, March 29, 2018. 11. When, in June 2012: Facebook, “Facebook Names Sheryl Sandberg to Its Board of Directors,” press release, June 25, 2012. 12. “Her name has become a job title”: Miguel Helft, “Sheryl Sandberg: The Real Story,” Fortune, October 10, 2013. 13. She was cultivating new ad tools: Keith Collins and Larry Buchanan, “How Facebook Lets Brands and Politicians Target You,” New York Times, April 11, 2018. 14. It was also working on a tool called “Lookalike Audiences”: David Cohen, “Facebook Officially Launches Lookalike Audiences,” Adweek, March 19, 2013. 15.

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

As a young lawyer, he clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and then worked on the recount that put Bush in the White House. His last job in the Bush administration was succeeding political Svengali Karl Rove as deputy chief of staff for policy. In 2011, he was an energy lobbyist when Sheryl Sandberg tapped him to be a VP of policy for Facebook. He was the ultimate Friend of Sheryl Sandberg—he had dated her at Harvard and had maintained ties to her despite their differing political affiliations. At the time Sandberg’s friend Marne Levine—a Democrat—had been running the office. She and Kaplan created a natural balance of party power.

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CHAPTER NINE: Sheryl World “Intimacy”: Sheryl Kara Sandberg, “Economic Factors & Intimate Violence,” Harvard/Radcliffe College, March 20, 1991. Sandberg’s rise: Excellent account of Sandberg’s background in Ken Auletta, “A Woman’s Place,” The New Yorker, July 4, 2011. wedding toast: Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (Knopf, 2013), 20. Not all: John Dorschner, “Sheryl Sandberg: From North Miami Beach High to Facebook’s No. 2,” Miami Herald, February 26, 2012. Florida Gators sweatshirt: Quote from Adam J. Freed, in Brandon J. Dixon, “Leaning In from Harvard Yard to Facebook: Sheryl K. Sandberg ’91,” Harvard Crimson, May 24, 2016.

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She discussed the loss and its consequences in interviews including Belinda Luscombe, “Life After Grief,” Time, April 13, 2017; Jessi Hempel, “Sheryl Sandberg’s Accidental Revolution,” Backchannel, April 24, 2017. prone to yelling at subordinates: This was described to me by multiple employees who worked with Sandberg. obsessed with her public image: Besides personal interviews, Sandberg’s image tending has been written about in the aftermath of Facebook’s problems. See Nick Bilton, “‘I Hope It Cracks Who She Is Wide Open’: In Silicon Valley, Many Have Long Known Sheryl Sandberg Is Not a Saint,” Vanity Fair, November 16, 2018. The aforementioned New York Times article, “Delay, Deny and Deflect,” which portrays Sandberg as culpable in the post-election saga, was a turning point in the press’s treatment of the COO.

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha

Airbnb, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, business intelligence, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, follow your passion, future of work, game design, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, late fees, lateral thinking, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, out of africa, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, recommendation engine, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the strength of weak ties, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2004), 35. 5. http://​www.​mhhe.​com/​business/​management/​thompson/​11e/​case/​starbucks.​html 6. http://​www.​jetblue.​com/​about/​ourcompany/​flightlog/​index.​html Chapter 3 1. Richard N. Bolles, What Color Is Your Parachute? 2011 Edition (New York: Ten Speed Press, 2011), 28. 2. Kevin Conley, “Sheryl Sandberg: What She Saw at the Revolution,” Vogue, May 2010, http://​www.​vogue.​com/​magazine/​article/​sheryl-​sandberg-​what-​she-​saw-​at-​the-​revolution/ 3. Ken Auletta, “A Woman’s Place: Can Sheryl Sandberg Upend Silicon Valley’s Male-Dominated Culture?” The New Yorker, July 11, 2011, http://​www.​newyorker.​com/​reporting/​2011/​07/​11/​110711fa_​fact_​auletta?​current​Page​=all 4. http://​www.​businessweek.​com/​bwdaily/​dnflash/​content/​mar2009/​db20090316_​630496.​htm 5.

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But more than just a Silicon Valley success story, the evolution of Flickr is a case study in smart adapting: its founders were in constant motion early on, tried many things to see what would work, and nimbly shifted their plans based on what they learned. These are the very same strategies that define some of the most inspiring careers. Take, for example, Sheryl Sandberg. Today, Sheryl is chief operating officer of Facebook, where she is in charge of the company’s business operations. She serves on the boards of Disney and Starbucks. Fortune named her one of the most powerful women in business. You might think someone so successful knew her goals and aspirations from day one, and followed a rigorous and ambitious career plan to achieve them.

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Sometimes you pivot because Plan A isn’t working; sometimes you pivot because you’ve discovered a new opportunity that’s just better than what you’re doing now. In either case, don’t write out an elaborate Plan B—things will change too much after the ink dries—but do give thought to your parameters of motion and alternatives. Once you pivot to a Plan B and stick with it, that becomes your new Plan A. Twenty years ago Sheryl Sandberg’s Plan A was the World Bank. Today, her Plan A is Facebook, because it’s where she is right now. Plan Z is the fallback position: your lifeboat. In business and life, you always want to keep playing the game. If failure means you end up on the street, that’s an unacceptable failure. So what’s your certain, reliable, stable plan if all your career plans go to hell or if you want to do a major life change?

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

“all things take care of themselves”: author interviews with Sheryl Sandberg, September 10, 2007, and September 18, 2008. 87 “Before Sheryl arrived”: author interview with Mary Meeker, January 23, 2009. 87 Advertising ... had not been viewed “as a priority”: author interview with Eric Schmidt, October 9, 2007. 87 offered five million dollars: author interview with Matt Cutts, August 20, 2007. 88 “Google was really trying”: author interview with Benjamin A. Schachter, February 15, 2008. 88 the effort at Sandberg was now working on: author interview with Sheryl Sandberg, October 11, 2007. 88 What Google was quietly exploring ... monitorthe results online: author interviews with Salar Kamangar, March 27, 2008; Marissa Mayer, March 25, 2008; Susan Wojcicki, April 16, 2008; Hal Varian, March 27, 2008; and Sheryl Sandberg, September 18, 2008. 90 Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Vardi : author interview with Sergey Brin, September 18, 2008; Brin interview, Haaretz.com, June 2, 2008. 90 “AdWords is brilliant”: author interview with Nathan Myhrvold, March 28, 2008. 91 The effort was led and architected by Susan Wojcicki: author interview with Susan Wojcicki, April 16, 2008. 91 “basically turned the Web into a giant Google billboard”: Danny Sullivan, quoted by Jefferson Graham, “The House That Helped Build Google,” USA Today, July 5, 2007. 9I “He and an engineer” ...

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“: author interview with Marissa Mayer, November 4, 2008. 108 The stock reached $108.31 ... to its employees: SEC Form S-1, August 2004. 109 Even Bonnie Brown: Stefanie Olsen, CNET News, January 23, 2008. 110 ”We began as a technology company“: Google IPO, SEC form 3-1, August 2004. 110 two hundred million dollars in 2003: author interview with Benjamin Schachter, February 15, 2008. 110 ”In a second“: author interview with Matt Cutts, March 26, 2008. 111 ”suggests that while Microsoft“: John Markoff, ”Why Google Is Peering Out, at Microsoft,“ New York Times, May 3, 2004. 111”we believe that our user focus“: Google IPO, August 2004. 112 ”Being less experienced“: author interview with Larry Page, March 25, 2008. 112. ”A lot of it is common sense“: author interview with Sergey Brin, September 18, 2008. 112 ”They wanted to replicate the Stanford culture“: author interview with Ram Shriram, June 12, 2008. 112 ”They predicted things that did not make sense to me“: author interview with Urs Hölzle, September 10, 2007. 112 ”Their clear, coherent point of view“: author interview with Terry Winograd, September 25, 2007. 112”The number of times they made me change my opinion“: author interview with Rajeev Motwani, October 12, 2007. 113 the construct framed by Eric Steven Raymond: Eric Steven Raymond, ”The Cathedral and the Bazaar,“ found at http:/wwwcatb.org/-esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/. 113 Page and Brin actually have more experience: author interview with Eric Schmidt, September 12, 2007. 113 ”quintessential Montessori kids“: author interview with Marissa Mayer, August 21, 2007. 114 ”question everything“: Larry Page speech at University of Michigan, 2005. 114 ”There’s kind of a strength in the duo“: author interview with Bill Campbell, October 8, 2007. 114 ”We agree eighty to ninety percent of the time“: author interview with Sergey Brin, March 26, 2008. 114 ”If we both feel the same way ... we’re probably right“: author interview with Larry Page, March 25, 2008. 114 strength ”to be different“: author interview with Susan Wojcicki, September 10, 2007. 114 ”having a mental sparring partner“: author interview with Jen Fitzpatrick, September 12, 2007. 114 ”Having the two of them being completely in sync“: author interview with Omid Kordestani, September 12, 2007. 114 ”to force a conversation“: author interview with Eric Schmidt, September 12, 2007. 115 ”Some companies would be worried“: author interview with Sheryl Sandberg, October 11, 2007. 115 ”people saw values we believed in“: author interview with Craig Newmark, January 11, 2008. 115 the reason the troika ”works is that whoever you go to“: author interview with Sheryl Sandberg, October 11, 2007. 116 ”Eric is the leader for the company“: author interview with Sergey Brin, October 11, 2007. 116 ”I can’t imagine“: author interview with Bill Campbell, October 8, 2007. 116 ”A balanced appreciation“: author interview with Dan Rosensweig, February 27, 2008. 116 ”It borders on insulting“: author interview with Elliot Schrage, October 12, 2007. 116 ”catcher“: author interviews with Eric Schmidt, September 12, 2007, and October 9, 2007. 116 At the press lunch: post-Zeitgeist lunch attended by author, October 11, 2007. 117 ”the best business partner“: annual Google shareholder meeting attended by author, May 10, 2007. 117 ”Eric is the person who said“: author interview with Sheryl Sandberg, October 11, 2007. 117 ”I’ve become a huge cheerleader“: author interview with Michael Moritz, March 31, 2009. 118 an incident at the 2005 World Economic Forum: author interview with Andrew Lack, October 4, 2007. 118 ”no recollection of the specific incident“: e-mail from Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., April 29, 2009. 118 ”Schmidt confirmed Lack’s account“: author interview with Eric Schmidt, April 1, 2009. 118 ”Here’s the part you don’t see“: author interview with Bill Campbell, April 1, 2009. 119 ”We’re smart guys“: author interview with Terry Winograd, September 25, 2007. 120 ”privacy concerns“: Google IPO, August 2004.

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When he’s not in the room, he’s still there because people ask, ‘What would Bill say?’” IN SCHMIDT AND CAMPBELL, Google had executives who could work with the founders and mentors the whole organization to work together. Now it needed to recruit senior executives. With an assist from Campbell, one of Schmidt’s initial targets was Sheryl Sandberg, who had just concluded her service as chief of staff to treasury secretary Lawrence Summers. The Clinton administration was winding down, and Sandberg, who was just thirty-one, was much in demand. Sandberg has short dark hair, an angular face that is softened by a bright smile, and an engaging manner that makes strangers feel comfortable.

The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse by Mohamed A. El-Erian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, currency peg, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, future of work, geopolitical risk, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, inflation targeting, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, oil shale / tar sands, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, yield curve, zero-sum game

Scott Page, “Making the Difference: Applying a Logic of Diversity,” Academy of Management Perspectives, November 2007. 5. Mohamed El-Erian, “Why CEOs Should Read Sheryl Sandberg’s Book,” Fortune, March 11, 2013, http://fortune.com/2013/03/11/why-ceos-should-read-sheryl-sandbergs-lean-in/. 6. Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (New York: Knopf, 2013). CHAPTER 32: TRANSLATING AWARENESS INTO OPTIONALITY, RESILIENCE, AND AGILITY 1. Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, How Google Works (New York: Grand Central, 2014). 2. Ibid. 3. Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (New York: Knopf, 2013). 4. Mohamed A. El-Erian, “Getting Real About Diversity,” American Banker, September 18, 2013, http://www.americanbanker.com/magazine/123_10/pimcos-mohamed-el-erian-on-getting-real-about-diversity-1062068-1.html.

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There are many anecdotal examples of biases repressing constructive dialogue within companies and the subsequent decision-making process. Writing in a New York Times series on “Women and Work,” Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant discussed something that I suspect quite a few of us have witnessed in Anglo-Saxon corporate cultures—that is, often inadvertent (but sometimes quite advertent) group behaviors that inhibit women from freely expressing their views in meetings even though they have consequential things to say. Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant note, “We’ve seen it happen again and again. When a woman speaks in a professional setting, she walks a tightrope. Either she’s barely heard or she’s judged as too aggressive.

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When a woman speaks in a professional setting, she walks a tightrope. Either she’s barely heard or she’s judged as too aggressive. When a man says virtually the same thing, heads nod in appreciation for his fine idea. As a result, women often decide that saying less is more.”4 Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant observe that this phenomenon is not limited to the corporate world. They point to research by Victoria Brescoll, a Yale psychologist who documented similar behaviors and outcomes in the U.S. Senate. In both cases, remedial action includes two minimum steps: first, recognizing that this is an issue that needs to be addressed lest it continue to undermine the effectiveness of the collective; and second, making sure that very deliberate steps are taken (repeatedly) to that effect.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, double helix, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fear of failure, Firefox, George Santayana, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, women in the workforce

New Yorker, August 24, 2009, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/24/plugged-in. Peter Thiel . . . Lord of the Rings: Julian Guthrie, “Entrepreneur Peter Thiel Talks ‘Zero to One,’” SFGate, September 21, 2014, www.sfgate.com/living/article/Entrepreneur-Peter-Thiel-talks-Zero-to-One-5771228.php. Sheryl Sandberg . . . A Wrinkle in Time: “Sheryl Sandberg: By the Book,” New York Times, March 14, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/books/review/sheryl-sandberg-by-the-book.html. Jeff Bezos . . . A Wrinkle in Time: “Jeffrey P. Bezos Recommended Reading”: www.achievement.org/autodoc/bibliography/WrinkleinT_1. Mark Zuckerberg . . . Ender’s Game: Alyson Shontell, “The Books That Inspired Tech’s Most Influential People,” Business Insider, June 26, 2013, www.businessinsider.com/the-books-that-influenced-techs-most-influencial-ceos-2013-6?

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strong gender-role stereotypes: Anne M. Koenig, Alice H. Eagly, Abigail A. Mitchell, and Tiina Ristikari, “Are Leader Stereotypes Masculine? A Meta-Analysis of Three Research Paradigms,” Psychological Bulletin 127 (2011): 616–42. “labeled bossy”: Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (New York: Knopf, 2013). voicing new revenue-generating ideas: Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant, “Speaking While Female,” New York Times, January 12, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/opinion/sunday/speaking-while-female.html; Adam M. Grant, “Rocking the Boat But Keeping It Steady: The Role of Emotion Regulation in Employee Voice,” Academy of Management Journal 56 (2013): 1703–23.

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Also by Adam Grant Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success VIKING An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 penguin.com Copyright © 2016 by Adam Grant Foreword copyright © 2016 by Sheryl Sandberg Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

Fortunately, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made two important moves: he personally led a shift from desktop-first to mobile-first, and he hired Sheryl Sandberg as the company’s COO, who in turn built Facebook into an advertising sales juggernaut. Growth rose back into the triple-digit range, and, by 2010, these moves had pushed Facebook’s revenues to over $2 billion. We’ll examine both of these key moves in greater detail later in the book, with Facebook’s shift to mobile featured in our analysis of Facebook’s business model, and Facebook’s hiring of Sheryl Sandberg in the section on the key transition from contributors to managers to executives. Apple illustrates how this overlap looks over multiple decades.

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Brian Chesky at Airbnb, another amazing learning machine, does something similar, seeking advice from mentors like Sheryl Sandberg and Warren Buffett. Brian told our class at Stanford, “If you find the right source, you don’t have to read everything. I’ve had to learn to seek out the experts. I wanted to learn about safety, so I went to George Tenet, the ex-head of the CIA. Even if you can’t meet the best, you can read about the best.” Brian lives this advice; he got many of his ideas by assiduously poring over biographies of great entrepreneurs like Walt Disney. Another helpful approach to seeking mentorship is to get help from experts who might be less famous than the Sheryl Sandbergs of the world, but who have faced (and solved) similar issues in the recent past.

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Yet even if you can’t land an ideal candidate, second best is to hire a manager who has previously worked with successful executives in a very rapidly growing company, or an executive who earned her executive experience at a larger or more traditional business but who also worked at a blitzscaling start-up at another time in her career. Consider the case of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg hired Sheryl Sandberg in part because she had experience blitzscaling as an executive, having helped her group within Google grow from a handful of people to over four thousand employees. And one of the key things Sheryl did that helped Facebook scale up to the Village, City, and Nation stages was to fill critical leadership positions with other experienced scale executives, such as Mike “Schrep” Schroepfer as VP of engineering and David Ebersman as CFO.

I Hate the Internet: A Novel by Jarett Kobek

Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, Blue Ocean Strategy, Burning Man, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, liberation theology, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, packet switching, PageRank, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, V2 rocket, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, wage slave, Whole Earth Catalog

Women’s lack of upper body strength was only one explanation of the social ordering. There were hundreds of ideas for why women were treated like crap but very few practical solutions. A little bit before Adeline made her unforgivable mistake, a billionaire named Sheryl Sandberg wrote a book called Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. Sheryl Sandberg didn’t have much eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis. In her book, Sheryl Sandberg proposed that women who weren’t billionaires could stop being treated like crap by men in the workplace if only they smiled more and worked harder and acted more like the men who treated them like crap. Billionaires were always giving advice to people who weren’t billionaires about how to become billionaires.

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Nothing says individuality like 500 million consumer electronics built by slaves. Welcome to Hell. Then there were the minor divinities. Like Sheryl Sandberg, the billionaire who worked for Facebook and thought that the way women who weren’t billionaires could get respect in the workplace was to act more like the men that disrespected them in the workplace. Before she was at Facebook, she was at Google, and Christine decided that Sheryl Sandberg was like Iris, the messenger of the Gods. It seemed like Sheryl Sandberg had spent her whole professional life doing nothing but delivering messages. Like Ray Kurzweil, who Christine identified with Dolos, the Greek spirit of trickery and guile.

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Zadie Smith’s essay pointed out that the questions Facebook asked of its users appeared to have been written by a twelve year old. But these questions weren’t written by a twelve year old. They were written by Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg was a billionaire. Mark Zuckerberg was such a billionaire that he was the boss of other billionaires. He was Sheryl Sandberg’s boss. J. Karacehennem thought that he knew something about Facebook that Zadie Smith, in her decency, hadn’t imagined. “The thing is,” said J. Karacehennem, whose last name was Turkish for Black Hell, “that we’ve spent like, what, two or three hundred years wrestling with existentialism, which really is just a way of asking, Why are we on this planet?

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin

affirmative action, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, edge city, facts on the ground, financial independence, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, post-work, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Results Only Work Environment, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, union organizing, upwardly mobile, white picket fence, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

But this again is a narrow reading of the situation. If Sandberg is watching over Facebook’s maternity leave policy, the receptionist has as much to gain from that as Sheryl does. If women want the future to contain fewer energy-draining meetings and a more family-friendly workplace, you need more women to make it to Sheryl Sandberg’s level. Not just for Sheryl Sandberg’s benefit, but for the millions of women who have a lot less power to make demands. You need women at the top to remake the workplace in their own image. THE GOLD MISSES ASIAN WOMEN TAKE OVER THE WORLD One of the propositions considered by the Asian Debate Institute held in Seoul in the winter of 2012 is whether quotas are necessary for women to advance in Asian society.

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a massive Department of Education study, a child’s grades: “Fathers’ Involvement in Their Children’s Schools,” National Center for Education Statistics 98-091, September 1997, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs98/fathers/. memorable phrase “Don’t leave before you leave”: Sheryl Sandberg, “Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders,” TED Talk, December 2010. http://www.ted.com/talks/sheryl_sandberg_why_we_have_too_few_women_leaders.html. “There was no having it all”: Barbara Walters, interview with Jane Pauley in 2003, quoted in Pamela Paul, “For Anchorwomen, Family Is Part of the Job,” The New York Times, December 9, 2011. as Fox’s Megyn Kelly did: Back from maternity leave on August 8, 2011, Megyn Kelly showed a photograph of her baby daughter, Yardley Evans, to viewers of America Live.

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“We are not producing enough men or women who know how to program.” The women of Silicon Valley do not live in such a shiny detached bubble that they don’t recognize sexism. You would have to be blind to walk through the offices of Facebook or Google every day and not notice the sea of mostly male programmers, or the “frat house,” as Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, calls it. It’s more that they think of sexism in the same way people in London must think about bad weather: It’s an omnipresent and unpleasant fact of life, but it shouldn’t keep you from going about your business. The women don’t deny sexism, but rather will themselves to ignore it so they can get their work done.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

I think the day will come, sooner than I could have imagined just two years ago, when the world will recognize that the value users receive from the Facebook-dominated social media/attention economy revolution masked an unmitigated disaster for our democracy, for public health, for personal privacy, and for the economy. It did not have to be that way. It will take a concerted effort to fix it. When historians finish with this corner of history, I suspect that they will cut Facebook some slack about the poor choices that Zuck, Sheryl Sandberg, and their team made as the company grew. I do. Making mistakes is part of life, and growing a startup to global scale is immensely challenging. Where I fault Facebook—and where I believe history will, as well—is for the company’s response to criticism and evidence. They had an opportunity to be the hero in their own story by taking responsibility for their choices and the catastrophic outcomes those choices produced.

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The most likely case is that the technology and business model of Facebook and others will continue to undermine democracy, public health, privacy, and innovation until a countervailing power, in the form of government intervention or user protest, forces change. * * * — TEN DAYS BEFORE the November 2016 election, I had reached out formally to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, two people I considered friends, to share my fear that bad actors were exploiting Facebook’s architecture and business model to inflict harm on innocent people, and that the company was not living up to its potential as a force for good in society. In a two-page memo, I had cited a number of instances of harm, none actually committed by Facebook employees but all enabled by the company’s algorithms, advertising model, automation, culture, and value system.

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Unfortunately, the technology was out of date, but there was an opportunity to upgrade the site, federate it to other bands, and prosper as never before. One of the bands that showed an interest was U2. They found me through a friend of Bono’s at the Department of the Treasury, a woman named Sheryl Sandberg. I met Bono and the Edge at Morgan Stanley’s offices in Los Angeles on the morning after the band had won a Grammy for the song “Beautiful Day.” I could not have named a U2 song, but I was blown away by the intelligence and business sophistication of the two Irishmen. They invited me to Dublin to meet their management.

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional

John Darne and Jeffrey Gedmin, “Six Principles for Developing Humility as a Leader,” Harvard Business Review Blog Network, September 9, 2013, http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/09/six-principles-for-developing. 20. Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2013), 17, Kindle edition. 21. Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg, “Madam C.E.O., Get Me a Coffee: Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant on Women Doing ‘Office Housework,’” New York Times, February 6, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/opinion/sunday/sheryl-sandberg-and-adam-grant-on-women-doing-office-housework.xhtml. 22. Victoria L. Brescoll, “Who Takes the Floor and Why: Gender, Power, and Volubility in Organizations,” Harvard Kennedy School, Women and Public Policy Program, 2011, http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/who-takes-floor-and-why-gender-power-and-volubility-organizations. 23.

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Danielle Paquette, “Why Women Are Judged Far More Harshly Than Men for Leaving Work Early,” The Washington Post, June 10, 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/06/10/why-women-are-judged-far-more-harshly-than-men-for-leaving-work-early. 43. Abby W. Schachter, “A More Dire Assessment of Work-Life Balance: Erin Callan vs. Sheryl Sandberg,” Acculturated, March 15, 2014, http://acculturated.com/a-more-dire-assessment-of-work-life-balance-erin-callan-vs-sheryl-sandberg. 44. Erin Callan, “Is There Life after Work?” New York Times, March 9, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/opinion/sunday/is-there-life-after-work.xhtml. 45. Erin Callan Montella, Full Circle: A Memoir of Leaning In Too Far and the Journey Back (Triple M Press, 2016), Kindle locations 2216-20, Kindle edition. 46.

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Whereas men have been conditioned to promote themselves, women are reluctant to negotiate; when they do, they often get penalized, making them even less likely to try again. The enduring societal stereotype is still that women should be kind, considerate, and caring. When they violate that norm by speaking out for themselves, they are perceived as aggressive. Sheryl Sandberg has appealed to women’s personal responsibility to “lean in,” and while she certainly has a point, public policy and institutions must also fundamentally change before the system can be remedied. The ask gap is deeply ingrained, even on the CEO level: Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said in 2014 that women who do not ask for raises create “good karma” for themselves.24 Those are the women he would trust and to whom he would give more responsibility.

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, cloud computing, El Camino Real, Erik Brynjolfsson, fear of failure, Jeff Bezos, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PalmPilot, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple

The teams had clear goals, each role was meaningful, and members were reliable and confident that the team’s mission would make a difference. You’ll see that Bill was a master at establishing those conditions: he went to extraordinary lengths to build safety, clarity, meaning, dependability, and impact into each team he coached. Sheryl Sandberg and I have often lamented that every bookstore has a self-help section, but there isn’t a help-others section. Trillion Dollar Coach belongs in the help-others section: it’s a guide for bringing out the best in others, for being simultaneously supportive and challenging, and for giving more than lip service to the notion of putting people first.

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Bill had been a transcendent figure in the technology business since moving west in 1983, playing a critical role in the success of Apple, Google, Intuit, and numerous other companies. To say he was tremendously respected would be a gross understatement—loved is more like it. Among the audience that day were dozens of technology leaders—Larry Page. Sergey Brin. Mark Zuckerberg. Sheryl Sandberg. Tim Cook. Jeff Bezos. Mary Meeker. John Doerr. Ruth Porat. Scott Cook. Brad Smith. Ben Horowitz. Marc Andreessen. Such a concentration of industry pioneers and power is rarely seen, at least not in Silicon Valley. We—Jonathan Rosenberg and Eric Schmidt—sat among the audience, making subdued small talk, soft sunshine contrasting with the somber mood.

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He coached Dan Rosensweig, CEO of Chegg. He coached Charlie Batch, fellow Homestead native and former quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers. He coached Jesse Rogers, managing director of Altamont Capital Partners. He coached John Hennessy, former president of Stanford University. He coached Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook. BALLSY AND BRUNO And when it came time to eulogize Bill at his memorial, none of those people took the podium. In fact, the first person who stepped to the microphone that day was Bill’s college football teammate Lee Black. Lee started talking about his friend “Ballsy,” who we quickly figured out was none other than Bill.

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs by John Doerr

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Bob Noyce, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, intentional community, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, web application, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

As our business grows, and YouTube’s role in society evolves, we will continue to hunt for the right metrics for our services—and with them, the right OKRs. PART TWO The New World of Work 15 Continuous Performance Management: OKRs and CFRs Talking can transform minds, which can transform behaviors, which can transform institutions. —Sheryl Sandberg Annual performance reviews are costly, exhausting, and mostly futile. On average, they swallow 7.5 hours of manager time for each direct report. Yet only 12 percent of HR leaders deem the process “highly effective” in driving business value. Only 6 percent think it’s worth the time it takes.

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What if you laid out the two best options but made your own preference clear? Do you think you could do that?” If the product head agrees, there is a plan. Unlike negative criticism, coaching trains its sights on future improvement. Feedback In her instant classic, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead , Sheryl Sandberg notes: “ Feedback is an opinion, grounded in observations and experiences, which allows us to know what impression we make on others.” To reap the full benefits of OKRs, feedback must be integral to the process. If you don’t know how well you’re performing, how can you possibly get better? Today’s workers “ want to be ‘empowered’ and ‘inspired,’ not told what to do.

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But in less than a year, Eric’s self-review showed how far he’d come around: “ Bill Campbell has been very helpful in coaching all of us. In hindsight, his role was needed from the beginning. I should have encouraged this structure sooner, ideally the moment I started at Google.” Bill considered his Google mandate open-ended. He coached Larry Page and Sergey Brin—and Susan Wojcicki and Sheryl Sandberg and Jonathan Rosenberg and Google’s whole executive team. He did it in his characteristic style, one part Zen and one part Bud Light. Bill gave little direction. He’d ask a very few questions, invariably the right ones. But mostly he listened. He knew that most times in business there were several right answers, and the leader’s job was to pick one.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

He decided to do something about it. In October 2016, several days before the presidential election, McNamee reached out to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. These were people that he counted as friends, and he had every reason to believe they would listen to his concerns. He was, after all, the one who had advised Mark Zuckerberg to turn down Yahoo’s $1 billion offer to buy the company early on (a smart move given its current value); he’d also been the one to suggest that Zuck hire Google ad whiz Sheryl Sandberg to be COO of the company. It turned out that McNamee had been overly optimistic about his relationship with Zuck and Sandberg.

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Things Fall Apart: The Political Impact of Big Tech After it was revealed that the largest technology platforms in the world were exploited by Russian state actors and their private proxies to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election, it was Facebook, not Google, who took most of the heat. CEO Mark Zuckerberg insistently denied the possibility that nefarious foreign actors could have hacked the platform, which, of course, is exactly what was revealed to have happened. As The New York Times later reported, both he and COO Sheryl Sandberg had enlisted a shadowy right-wing PR firm that used underhanded techniques to discredit the Big Tech critic and financier George Soros. But Google was only marginally more responsive to those first signs of election manipulation in the wake of 2016, and it turned out to have played a major role as well.

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Schmidt was also a key adviser in digital efforts for both the Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns, using Google’s might to help the former get elected, and exerting policy influence afterward that is worrisome, to say the least.25 While this obviously isn’t problematic in the same way that allowing the Trump campaign to spread racist dog whistles and fake news during the 2016 elections was, it underscores the point that these companies hold undue influence over our political system as a whole, in ways that undermine public trust.26 Schmidt is certainly not alone in playing both sides of the political fence. Take a look at the first meeting of Silicon Valley’s tech titans with Donald Trump in 2017, and you’ll see Sheryl Sandberg, Tim Cook, and many other avowed Democrats leaning in to the president, literally. Despite Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s ownership of The Washington Post, which is often critical of the president, Amazon pushed its facial recognition technology to ICE, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement division—the very one that was keeping children in cages at the Mexican border.27 Most Democrats and an increasing number of Republicans have been bought out by Big Tech’s extensive lobbying.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product

Melissa Gira Grant first wrote about Lean In for The Washington Post (“Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’ Campaign Holds Little for Most Women,” February 25, 2013). Anna Holmes confirmed the dinner party in a defense of Sheryl Sandberg for The New Yorker, arguing that “many of the most full-throated defenses of Sandberg came from women who had actually met her. Last autumn, Sandberg’s P.R. team invited a group of about twenty writers—including this one—to a dinner at Estancia 460, a restaurant in lower Manhattan” (“Maybe You Should Read the Book: The Sheryl Sandberg Backlash,” June 18, 2017). Other comments about the dinner party appeared on Twitter.

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Other comments about the dinner party appeared on Twitter. Responses to Grant include Michelle Goldberg (“The Absurd Backlash Against Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean In,’” Daily Beast, March 1, 2013), Jessica Valenti (“Sheryl Sandberg Isn’t the Perfect Feminist. So What?,” The Washington Post, March 1, 2013), and Katha Pollitt (“Who’s Afraid of Sheryl Sandberg?,” The Nation, June 29, 2015). The Harvard Business Review report “Research: Women Ask for Raises as Often as Men, but Are Less Likely to Get Them” was authored by Benjamin Artz, Amanda Goodall, and Andrew J. Oswald (June 25, 2018). Michelle Goldberg updated her views in the book review “Ivanka Trump’s Book Celebrates the Unlimited Possibilities Open to Women with Full-Time Help” (Slate, May 2, 2017).

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The many grades and variations of power were brushed aside to condemn internet outrage as an oversize threat. As a classic example of this conflation, Jon Ronson, while promoting his 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, routinely stated that internet users are collectively “worse than the NSA.” Another tipping domino, in 2013, was Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. However, it was the criticism it garnered, rather than the actual text, that made a lasting impact. Facebook’s chief operating officer had big plans for her first book. It was going to be a movement with “Lean In circles,” and networking and mentorship events for women in business.

The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Benchmark Capital, billion-dollar mistake, Burning Man, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, global village, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Network effects, Peter Thiel, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, SoftBank, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, UUNET, Whole Earth Review, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

“Our mission since day one has been to make society more open,” says marketer Dave Morin, a member of Zuckerberg’s inner circle. “That’s what it’s all about, right? We help people be more open across more contexts. I think they have to worry less all the time about being who they actually are.” But Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, thirty-nine, looks at it slightly differently. “Mark really does believe very much in transparency and the vision of an open society and open world, and so he wants to push people that way,” she says. “I think he also understands that the way to get there is to give people granular control and comfort.

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“Mark’s view is that Facebook had better not resist the trends of the world or else it’ll become obsolete,” says the soft-spoken but passionate Adam D’Angelo, who shares this view and with whom Zuckerberg has discussed such issues since they were at Exeter in 2001. “Information is moving faster,” he continues. “That’s just how the world is going to work in the future as a consequence of technology regardless of what Facebook does.” Even Sheryl Sandberg takes evident pride when she says, “You can’t be on Facebook without being your authentic self.” Members of Facebook’s radical transparency camp, Zuckerberg included, believe more visibility makes us better people. Some claim, for example, that because of Facebook, young people today have a harder time cheating on their boyfriends or girlfriends.

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And the company also needed someone well-versed in the complexities of the online advertising business. Zuckerberg took a couple of weeks to think about it, then told Breyer he agreed. He would tell Van Natta of their decision in early January and begin a search. At a Christmas party in mid-December, Zuckerberg got into a conversation with Sheryl Sandberg. She was a senior executive at Google who had built the search company’s self-service ad business into one of the economic powerhouses of the Web. The two of them ended up standing in a corner for over an hour as Zuckerberg queried her about how to manage a growing tech organization. They agreed to get together sometime for dinner.

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Blue Bottle Coffee, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Frank Gehry, growth hacking, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Zipcar

But it would take some serious negotiating: that Thursday night, at Zuckerberg’s new home in the tree-lined Crescent Park neighborhood of Palo Alto, Systrom started out by asking for $2 billion. * * * Zuckerberg was whittling down the number with Systrom when he decided to loop in others. He invited Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and CFO David Ebersman over for a serious meeting. They told him they trusted his instincts, but first they would need to alert deals director Amin Zoufonoun, who could make everything happen. “Mark would like to buy Instagram,” Sandberg explained on their conference call, getting straight to the point.

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First, that Instagram indeed had a very different brand, one that its users cared about deeply. And second, that Facebook would have to be much more careful. Maybe they needed a liaison between the two companies, keeping a closer eye on the differences and figuring out how to deploy resources, translating Instagram’s needs into Facebookese. At the advice of chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, Rose called up one of her protégées, Emily White, a rising star in charge of mobile partnerships who had just come back from maternity leave. “We’re really screwing this up,” he said, appealing to White. “You need to talk to Systrom.” Over the next few weeks, the more White discussed Instagram’s future with Systrom, the more she realized that she wanted to work with him.

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Instagram modeled the look off Vogue magazine’s: high-end brand advertising showcasing products in a subtle manner, as just one element of the lives of beautiful, happy people. That September, Emily White was featured in the Wall Street Journal, with the headline “Instagram Pictures Itself Making Money.” The writer, Evelyn Rusli, compared White’s role at Instagram to Sheryl Sandberg’s at Facebook. Rusli reported that White was spending her weeks meeting big-name advertisers like Coca-Cola and Ford Motor Co. and “wanted to avoid repeating some of Facebook’s earlier missteps with advertisers,” a line that ruffled feathers internally. But Facebook ads and Instagram’s ad plan stood in sharp contrast.

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

Veach knew in his heart this was the right way to go, but he had to do a lot of explaining. “Larry and Sergey kept asking me if it wasn’t simpler to have an auction where we just have people pay what they bid,” he says. “And I kept saying, ‘No,’ because then people have this incentive to keep lowering their bids.” To run its ad operation, Google had hired Sheryl Sandberg, former chief of staff to the secretary of the treasury in the Clinton administration. She’d gotten to know Eric Schmidt when he visited D.C. to argue against Internet taxes. Though she’d never been involved in high tech—besides her Treasury post, her résumé included McKinsey & Company and the World Bank—she’d spent the past few years observing what was happening in Silicon Valley.

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People looking for hand lotion are unlikely to click on a travel ad. His bid would be downgraded even more. (He may even be required to pay a prohibitively high “minimum bid”—a practice that ultimately engendered a lot of grumbling among certain advertisers.) The beauty of the ad quality formula, says Sheryl Sandberg, is that “it made the advertiser do the work to be relevant. You paid less if your ads were more relevant. So you had a reason to work on your keyword, your text, your landing page, and generally improve your campaign.” There were some downsides, though. Chief among them was that the system was fairly complicated and risked befuddling an advertiser.

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Semel was amused. “Are you going to bomb us?” he asked. Semel knew that there were profits to be made even as a runner-up to Google. But Yahoo never figured out how to innovate with Overture. “We used to benchmark ourselves against Overture,” says David Fischer, a former Google ad executive who worked under Sheryl Sandberg. “But at some point Sergey just said, ‘Why are we paying attention to them?’ That’s the Google way—we don’t confine ourselves to catching other people.” Years later, Gary Flake, the chief science officer at Overture and leader of Yahoo’s search efforts in the mid-2000s, would amuse audiences with a slide show that documented Overture’s failures to respond to Google’s advances.

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, book scanning, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, commoditize, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Googley, gravity well, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John Markoff, Kickstarter, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, microcredit, music of the spheres, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, performance metric, pets.com, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, second-price auction, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, stem cell, Superbowl ad, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, The Turner Diaries, Y2K

AdWords Select was a MiG fighter, loaded with technical terms, incomprehensible gauges and dials, and a long checklist before your ads actually took off. I wanted us to have a shortcut with preset options, but Salar felt the granularity of the system made it powerful and that was its selling point. Sheryl Sandberg, an economics wunderkind and former chief of staff at the Treasury Department, joined Google the week the new prototype went live. She was immediately handed responsibility for advertising customer support and the team of five people who managed that for Omid. One quit that day. Sheryl also wanted things simplified, but there was no working around Salar, who had developed a deep attachment to the product.

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Reduced search volume or quality issues that hurt ad clickthrough rates could spark an explosive expansion of Google's debt and obliterate the company. Even with Larry and Sergey's high tolerance for risk, no one wanted the company to die under a load of corporate IOUs, especially the new CEO, Eric Schmidt. "Don't make me bankrupt," Sheryl Sandberg recalls Eric telling Salar. "Don't run out of cash." The guarantees would become a weapon in the battle for syndication market share, as each search superpower tried to bluff the others into spending themselves into economic oblivion. On February 5, 2002, CNET broke the news that Google had been quietly providing Earthlink with search results and advertising for weeks.

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Those accomplishments could easily have absorbed the full focus of a competent tech company for years. It was becoming clear that Google was more than just a competent tech company. At the tail end of 2001, I had convened a group at Cindy's request to begin thinking about Google's evolving position in the marketplace. Since then, Susan, Sheryl Sandberg, Cindy, and a couple of other marketeers had gathered every few weeks to try and pin down Google's protean essence. We called our initiative "Baby Beagle," in homage to Darwin. Our corporate identity had morphed with our entry into ads syndication—but into what? We didn't want to be pegged as a portal, but we had outgrown the notion of being only a search engine.

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

individual effort in success: In a similar vein, Ivanka Trump’s “motivational quotes” during her father’s presidential tenure included “If you are content, that’s probably not good enough,” faulting women for not being able to surmount obstacles, as if they were ne’er-do-wells creating roadblocks for themselves, the glass ceiling all in their heads. feminist Sheryl Sandberg puts it in her 2013 bestseller Lean In: Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (New York: Knopf, 2013). a cute neologism coined by the founder of the online women’s retailer Nasty Gal, Sophia Amoruso: Sophia Amoruso, #GIRLBOSS (New York: Portfolio, 2014). She poses on the cover of one edition in a tight black dress with a plunging neckline and her hair so perfectly straight it might well be a Lulu-Brooks-goes-Instagram wig.

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Her contemporary followers are legion and include the King-of-the-NASDAQ-by-way-of-Burning Man Travis Kalanick, cofounder of Uber, who had the cover of a Rand book as his Twitter avatar, as well as the founder of Snapchat, Evan Spiegel, and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey. Lisa Duggan, in her account of Rand entitled Mean Girl, writes that the most “influential figure in the industry, after all, isn’t Steve Jobs or Sheryl Sandberg, but rather Ayn Rand.” Apple’s cofounder Steve Wozniak even called Rand’s Atlas Shrugged one of Jobs’s “guides in life.” Rand’s version of self-made absolutism is particularly attractive to these people, because they tend to be more absolutist: no one may contradict their point of view. As Adrian Daub wrote scathingly of her allure, “Who is teaching them [bro-grammers] that when they press a button on their keyboard, millions, or even billions, of people can be affected, sometimes in terrifying ways?

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The 2019 edition of the Forbes 400 list showed that most of these affluent women were heiresses, emerging from American dynasties like the Waltons of Walmart. In fact, only eleven self-made women made the list at all. Nevertheless, rich fictions tend to animate and suffuse how these women talk publicly about the role of individual effort in success. As billionaire “power feminist” Sheryl Sandberg puts it in her 2013 bestseller Lean In, turning what should be self-help into a text that foments ordinary readers’ self-doubt: “I continue to be alarmed not just at how we as women fail to put ourselves forward, but also at how we fail to notice and correct for this gap.” There was little systemic critique in Sandberg’s books or most of the girlboss books.

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blue Bottle Coffee, call centre, Carl Icahn, clean tech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, Dunning–Kruger effect, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, growth hacking, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise

It starts when Trotsky writes a Facebook post about the Ban Bossy campaign that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is promoting. Sandberg wants everyone to stop using the word bossy to describe girls. Trotsky says that instead of using her bully pulpit to pursue something as trivial as the word bossy, Sandberg should dedicate herself to more important issues, like the plight of the African elephant, which is on the verge of extinction. Trotsky loves elephants. He’s always ranting about the awful poachers who kill them for their ivory. I have no idea how elephants became so dear to him, or how his mind makes the illogical leap from Sheryl Sandberg’s feminist crusade to the issue of elephant poaching.

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If we need more blog posts, why can’t we just write a few extra posts over the next few weeks and bank them up?” She pauses. She really is a very nice young woman, and I like her a lot. “There’s food,” she says. I go home. The greatest of all bozo events is Fearless Friday. This is organized by Jordan, the twenty-something manager who has read Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In and been inspired by Sandberg’s admonition that women should “do what you would do if you weren’t afraid.” Jordan seems to believe that Sandberg’s admonition can be used as the basis of a one-day exercise, which she dubs Fearless Friday. She sends us this email: We’ve got a brilliant team and, at times, it can be hard to innovate due to fear of failure and the pressure of our day-to-day goals.

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Hoffman’s line about a company not being a family traces its roots to a “culture code” that Netflix, the Silicon Valley video-subscription company, published in 2009, and which famously declared, “We’re a team, not a family.” The Netflix code inspired a generation of tech start-ups and “may well be the most important document ever to come out of the Valley,” Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg once said. Shah used the Netflix code as the model for his HubSpot culture code and lifted the original Netflix line: “We’re a team, not a family.” Netflix justified the “not a family” idea by arguing that like a pro sports team, tech companies need “stars in every position.” That deal makes sense if you’re a professional athlete who can earn millions of dollars a year and retire at age thirty or thirty-five, but seems a bit ruthless when applied to the rank-and-file worker.

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

Photo courtesy of Magdalena Yeşil Magdalena at a Salesforce Christmas party, Roy’s Restaurant in San Francisco, ca. 2001. Photo courtesy of Magdalena Yeşil Magdalena with husband, Jim, and their sons Troy (left), sixteen, and Justin, eighteen, 2006. Photo by Joe Murray Theresia as a partner at Accel, with Washington Post CEO Don Graham and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, at an Accel CEO event at Stanford, 2011. Photo courtesy of Theresia Gouw Women of venture capital on a getaway in Hawaii, organized by Silvia Fernandez of Silicon Valley Bank. Silvia is in the black bathing suit and sun hat (far left), Magdalena is in sunglasses (front row, third from left), Jennifer Fonstad is seated next to Magdalena, and Sonja (front row right).

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., she announced that Sonja was a Norwegian superhero and gave Sonja a superhero name: White Sonja. Sonja smiled thinking of this now. She would need all the superhero powers she could muster to fight off the cancer cells invading her body. THERESIA Theresia was having a late breakfast with Sheryl Sandberg at Hobee’s Restaurant in Palo Alto. Compared with Buck’s see-and-be-seen restaurant in Woodside or Il Fornaio in Palo Alto, Hobee’s was a low-key meeting choice near the Stanford campus. It was where Theresia had come as a grad student to study and indulge in Hobee’s “world famous” blueberry coffee cake, or an early-morning or late-night super veggie scramble.

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Shortly afterward Theresia was off to Fortune magazine’s Most Powerful Women Summit, where the conference theme was “Extraordinary Talent.” Toward the end of the summit, the Fortune team unveiled to great fanfare the year’s Most Powerful Women issue. Copies were distributed to attendees and the press. The cover featured Sheryl Sandberg, Gina Bianchini, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, and Theresia, against a simple gray background, looking fashionable and formidable in beautifully tailored black suits. The title of the issue was “The New Valley Girls.” The article included vignettes about each of the four women. Theresia talked about her partners’ meetings at Accel: “You can imagine Monday morning meetings.

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell

Bernie Sanders, complexity theory, crowdsourcing, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, emotional labour, fake news, feminist movement, Mahatma Gandhi, pink-collar, pre–internet, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, white picket fence

According to a small poll I took among my social media followers, Senator Kamala Harris, Oprah Winfrey, TV broadcasters Diane Sawyer and Robin Roberts, and Sheryl Sandberg have all done a pretty bang-up job of striking a nice equilibrium, alongside Michelle Obama and Angela Merkel. Even if every woman in power were to modulate her voice to perfection, managing to come across as balanced and worthy as the Winfreys of the world, it still wouldn’t solve everything. After all, our bias against how women leaders sound is structural, not individual. The real solution is a long-term one. In one of her 2015 columns for the New York Times, Sheryl Sandberg wrote that “the long-term solution to the double bind of speaking while female” is simple: we need to pick more women to be the boss.

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It has to be okay—encouraged, really—for men to empathize and align with women and to stick up for them when they see other men try to take them down, linguistically and otherwise. “To put their principles above their fraternal loyalties,” as Deborah Cameron once put it. And it has to be not okay to treat anyone who isn’t a man like an intruder in their world. In 2015 Sheryl Sandberg told a story to the New York Times about a guy named Glen Mazzara, who ran a hit TV series called The Shield. Mazzara noticed that in pitch meetings, the show’s two women writers never spoke up. So he pulled them aside and encouraged them not to be so shy. It wasn’t a matter of “shy,” they promised.

…

Take a cue from one of the most powerful men in US history: at the end of a 2014 press conference, President Barack Obama called on eight reporters for questions—all women. The act made international headlines. “Had a politician given only men a chance to ask questions, it would not have been news; it would have been a regular day,” Sheryl Sandberg commented. “We wonder what would happen if we all held Obama-style meetings, offering women the floor whenever possible.” That’s not to say that while men sort this whole thing out, women should all go on a big Carnival Cruise and bide their time slurping piña coladas out of sippy cups shaped like vaginas until the matrilineal revolution takes hold.

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, p. 344; International Trade Administration, “The State of Manufacturing in the United States.” 21. Alex Morrell, “Billionaires 2014: Record Number of Newcomers Includes Sheryl Sandberg, Jan Koum, Michael Kors,” Forbes, March 3, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexmorrell/2014/03/03/billionaires-2014-record-number-of-newcomers-includes-sheryl-sandberg-jan-koum-michael-kors. 22. “A Wealth of Influence,” Financial Times, October 8, 2005; “Bloomberg Billionaires: Today’s Ranking of the World’s Richest People,” Bloomberg, http://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/2014-01-02/cya/aaaac. 23.

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The MetLife Mature Market Institute, “The MetLife Study of Inheritance and Wealth Transfer to Baby Boomers,” December 2010, http://www.metlife.com/assets/cao/mmi/publications/studies/2010/mmi-inheritance-wealth-transfer-baby-boomers.pdf; Robert Frank, “The 1% Captures Most Growth From Recovery,” Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2012; Callahan, Fortunes of Change, p. 257; Ryan Mac, “The World’s Youngest Billionaires 2014: 31 Under 40,” Forbes, March 3, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/03/03/the-worlds-youngest-billionaires-2014-31-under-40; Alex Morrell, “Billionaires 2014: Record Number of Newcomers Includes Sheryl Sandberg, Jan Koum, Michael Kors,” Forbes, March 3, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexmorrell/2014/03/03/billionaires-2014-record-number-of-newcomers-includes-sheryl-sandberg-jan-koum-michael-kors. 70. John J. Havens and Paul G. Schervish, “Why the $41 Trillion Wealth Transfer Estimate Is Still Valid: A Review of Challenges and Comments,” Journal of Gift Planning, vol. 7, no. 1 (January 2003): 11–15, 47–50. 71.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

That it’s only the latest hyped product to come down the pipe—that the inventors of the telegraph and the telephone and the Internet itself shared similar naïve fantasies—doesn’t seem to matter. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest have the capacity—if we are to believe the companies marketing these products to us—to remake our world for the better. As Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, promised, “People will share more and more of their lives online, transforming relationships on every level—personal, commercial and institutional.” It’s not just that the executives of social-media firms—along with their enablers in the media, the consulting circuit, and certain sectors of government—believe in this deliriously optimistic, social media–enabled future.

…

For the true believers of Facebook, everything—dating, listening to music, browsing photos, playing games—is better with other people watching. Who wouldn’t want to be a member? Who wouldn’t want to be sharing as much of their lives as possible? The accompanying belief is that before social media, life was lacking, and so Facebook is here to help us become more “authentic.” As we continue to share our lives online, Sheryl Sandberg wrote in the Economist, we will produce “one voice,” which is to say “the convergence of our real and virtual selves.” This is our “authentic identity,” one that has “a name and a face”—in other words, it’s an identity that makes us no longer anonymous, an identity whose online habits and expressions can all be pegged to a single account, about which a profitable data profile can be developed.

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If only someone could tell Eric Schmidt this! He might actually do something about it. Demonstrating a shift in rhetoric, if not in practice, Facebook has been far more paternalistic in telling us why we must always be identifiable online. It is apparently for our own good. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s COO, said, “The social Web can’t exist until you are your real self online. I have to be me, you have to be Charlie Rose.” Here is the airy rhetoric of authenticity, though what represents a “real self”? If I use the Tor software—favored by activists, hackers, and cyber-criminals alike to anonymize their Web browsing—am I being inauthentic?

Unleashed by Anne Morriss, Frances Frei

"Susan Fowler" uber, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Black Lives Matter, book value, Donald Trump, future of work, gamification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Jeff Bezos, Netflix Prize, Network effects, performance metric, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

When Stacy Brown-Philpot, now the CEO of TaskRabbit (more to come on Brown-Philpot) went from managing a fourteen-person team to ultimately more than a thousand, she realized she had to rethink her approach to leadership.2 For context, Brown-Philpot was working at Google at the time, where she was already well known as a strategic, results-oriented leader. She was in the process of rocketing to the top of Sheryl Sandberg’s operations organization, pausing to launch the Black Googlers Network along the way. Brown-Philpot had gone to Sandberg with the observation that black professionals were underrepresented at Google—and the conviction that a dedicated effort to recruit, retain, and connect them to each other would make a difference.

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Black working moms When we began this work, the shorthand we offered people who wanted to get belonging right was that if you made your organization better for women, then you were likely to make it better for everyone. Over time, we evolved that advice to, “Make it better for black women,” to reflect the complexity of carrying around more than one marginalized identity. Sheryl Sandberg recently offered us this variation: “Make it better for black working moms.” If a black working mom has as good a chance of thriving in your organization as anyone else, then you’re getting a whole bunch of things right. If you discover you have a long way to go before she feels cherished, don’t despair.

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As she helped to build Netflix into a media giant, McCord articulated the behaviors the company prized most—there are nine—and then used them to drive all hiring, compensation, and exit decisions. She socialized new recruits on these behaviors in a famous hundred-slide presentation on Netflix’s unique culture, and then reinforced them constantly, for example, invoking “honesty” (number eight) if colleagues withheld feedback from each other. (Sheryl Sandberg described McCord’s presentation, known as the Netflix Culture Deck, as “the most important document ever to come out of [Silicon] Valley.”5) McCord also challenged employees to question each other’s actions if they were inconsistent with Netflix culture, an act she explicitly labeled an expression of “courage” (number six).

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again by Brittany Kaiser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, dark pattern, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, haute couture, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Russian election interference, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, the High Line, the scientific method, WeWork, WikiLeaks, you are the product, young professional

With the Federal Trade Commission admonishment of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook in 2010 regarding use of the Friends API and “deceptive practices,” the company was “now expected to plug the gaps,” but it struggled to find a way to make that work in tandem with its growth strategy.5 Would it be possible to care about both data protection and exponential profits? The two aims were at odds with each other, and Facebook began to get more daring with its murky data collection and usage. Why the FTC failed to pay attention in 2012 is anyone’s guess. It would have been hard not to notice Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s announcement four to five months before the social media company’s IPO about its lucrative relationship with data brokerage companies, or how it was acquiring more data to add to its in-house collection, and building better and more accurate targeting tools for paid advertisers: a clear message that Facebook was more than able to monetize its database.6 Indeed, Facebook didn’t change its policy for developers using Friends API until 2015, and the FTC never followed up.7 This was great news for the Democrats in 2012, when Obama won his second term and had the use of Facebook’s massive platform to do it.

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The company had endeavored as early as 2014, Zuckerberg wrote, “to prevent abusive apps,” and had changed its platform so that “apps like Kogan’s,” created in 2013, “could no longer harvest friends’ data without their friends’ permission.” But even though Facebook had “made mistakes,” Zuckerberg assured users that they could rely on him, his ingenuity, and his company’s ability to protect its customers from all threats foreign and domestic. “There’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it.” Both Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg posted that when it came to inventing new ways to safeguard users’ privacy, the company’s ingenuity knew no bounds: it would seek out information about which app developers still had what the two called “identifiable information.” It would ban them from the kingdom and let people know that they’d been at risk, but Facebook would also cut back on what users’ data they were selling to third-party apps, and to make everyone more comfortable, they were going to give users an easier way to determine whom Facebook had sold access to.

…

Not only had it allowed all my data to be taken by any company around the world willing to pay for access, but it had also opened up its platform for interference in elections by powers foreign and domestic. Cyberwar crimes had been committed against the American people, and Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg were financially benefiting from them. Remorse was nowhere to be seen. Theirs was a modern-day dictatorship like the ones I used to lobby against in the European Parliament and the United Nations. How had it taken so long for me to see it? Alexander had issued a statement: “I am aware how this looks,” he said.

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, gamification, gentrification, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, Oculus Rift, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, QR code, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, too big to fail, value engineering, Y Combinator, young professional

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN EVAN’S EMPIRE MARCH 2015 VENICE, CA In March 2015, Evan gathered the company in the cafeteria for a rare all-hands meeting. He tersely told the assembled staffers that Chief Operating Officer Emily White—Snapchat’s putative Sheryl Sandberg—and VP of Business and Marketing Partnerships Mike Randall—effectively the company’s revenue chief—had left the company. White had turned out not to be Snapchat’s Sheryl Sandberg, but rather its Owen Van Natta. Van Natta, a former Amazon executive, joined Facebook as COO in 2005, served stints as chief revenue officer and a vice president of operations, and eventually left the company right before Sandberg joined.

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AdWords had just launched at the time, and White had been charged with figuring out an advertising and sales strategy for it; she moved on to run ad sales for the Asia, Pacific, and Latin America regions, and became director of emerging business. In late 2010, she left Google to join Facebook, following her former boss, Sheryl Sandberg. She began as director of local at Facebook then became director of business operations at Instagram after they sold to Facebook. She also served on the board of the yoga pants company Lululemon. White was easily the most high-profile employee to join Snapchat. Netflix CEO and Facebook board member Reed Hastings emailed Michael Lynton to congratulate him on the big signing, noting, “She is a rock star.

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Live video was great for celebrities and interesting events, but, as we saw with Justin Kan’s Justin.tv experiment, most people rarely have interesting enough lives to broadcast live video. Neither Facebook nor Snapchat had fully figured out their content strategy yet. Both tried to win over media companies and experimented with producing original content. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg personally visited talent agencies in Los Angeles to pitch them on Facebook Live. Facebook signed deals with 140 media companies and celebrities, paying them more than $50 million total to post Facebook Live videos for a year. Like those who signed with Discover, the list of media companies ran from well-established outfits like CNN and The New York Times to smaller upstarts, and the two companies shared many of the same publishers.

The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value by John Sviokla, Mitch Cohen

Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Colonization of Mars, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, driverless car, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, global supply chain, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Jony Ive, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megaproject, old-boy network, paper trading, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Virgin Galactic, young professional

Some of Ross’s best-known projects to date include the Time Warner Center in New York City, and the current Hudson Yards Project under way on the far West Side of Manhattan. Stephen Ross also owns the Miami Dolphins football team, as well as the Sun Life Stadium in which the team plays. Sheryl Sandberg b. 1969, United States Facebook After earning her undergraduate and business school degrees at Harvard University, Sheryl Sandberg worked for Larry Summers at the World Bank, and then at the Treasury Department, where she was his chief of staff. When the Democratic Party lost the 2000 election, Sandberg moved to Silicon Valley to get in on the Internet boom.

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Two years after starting Spanx, founder and Producer Sara Blakely handed the operations of the business over to Performer CEO Laurie Ann Goldman, who ran the company for twelve years. Bloomberg’s Producer Michael Bloomberg started the financial data giant with the technology Performer Tom Secunda at his side. In the technology world, these pairings are more public than elsewhere: there is Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (Producer) and Sheryl Sandberg (Performer), eBay’s Pierre Omidyar (Producer) and Meg Whitman (Performer), Microsoft’s Bill Gates (Producer) and Paul Allen (Performer), just to name a few. Sometimes these pairs seem destined to work together. The serial Producer Mark Cuban—cofounder of Broadcast.com and the current owner of the Dallas Mavericks—wrote about the Performer Martin Woodall, who was Cuban’s partner in MicroSolutions, his first multimillion-dollar business: “While I covered my mistakes by throwing time and effort at the problem, Martin was so detail-oriented, he had to make sure things were perfect so there would never be any problems.

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

By studying user behavior, engineers could identify gaps and glitches in the software, and remake the ranking algorithm to respond to a range of new signals. Then, in the early 2000s, the company started using the data for another purpose: to sell ads. Google had been selling ads since 1999, though not very well. Sheryl Sandberg, a former Clinton administration staffer hired to lead the ads team, would later remember then-CEO Eric Schmidt walking by her desk multiple times a day to ask how many advertisers they had. Her answer was always the same: “Not many.” The wounds were largely self- inflicted. Page and Brin hated online advertising, sharing Pierre Omidyar’s distaste for the tacky commercialization of the dot-com era.

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These enclosures would be particularly well suited to the business model popularized by Google, because their social nature encouraged users to offer up more data about themselves—data that could in turn be applied to the task of ad targeting. In the case of Facebook, the line of transmission was direct: in 2008, Zuckerberg hired Sheryl Sandberg, who had over-seen Google’s transformation into an advertising company, as his chief operating officer. Sandberg thus became, in Shoshana Zuboff’s memorable phrase, “the ‘Typhoid Mary’ of surveillance capitalism.” The online mall of social media would look a bit different than the online mall of search.

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See also New Brandeisians Brin, Sergey, 88, 89, 91 Brown, Chris, 105 Bush, George, 27 capitalism and accumulation, 35–36, 147, 154, 177 and coal as fuel, 87 competitive markets under, 63, 103, 176 Karl Marx on, 78 and Luddite movement, 174, 175 and subsumption of labor, 78, 84 and surveillance capitalism, 92, 94, 96 in the US, 125 and venture capital, 119–22 See also The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, (Zuboff); Bezos, Jeff CenturyLink, 59–60 Cerf, Vinton, 11, 19–20, 113, 114 Chattanooga, TN, 38–39, 46, 49, 55 Clinton, Bill, 18, 20, 21, 22 Comcast and broadband internet, 25, 29, 53 and digital divide, 59 and end of net neutrality, 28 and enrichment of CEO and shareholders, 31 lawsuits of, 46 and the profit motive, 127–28 proposed taxes on, 61 and US government, 52 and Washington, DC’s neighborhoods, 49 worth of, 67 common carriage regulations, 26, 27, 28 Communications Act of 1934, 26 Communications Decency Act of 1996, 95–6 community networks, 42–56, 61–63, 154–55, 169, 170, 176 Computer Science Research Network (CSNET), 21–22 Cottom, Tressie McMillan, 132 Danton’s Death (Bűchner), 57 Davis, Angela, 156, 157 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) ARPANET network of, 8–9, 10, 12, 13, 114 email study of, 79 and internet’s mobility, 113, 114–15 and investment in computing, 7–8, 89 and linking of networks, 11, 114 technical expertise of, 15 democracy and Clintonian neoliberalism, 26 and collective ownership of economy, 52 and Homo politicus, 64 importance of resources to, 34–35, 36 and inclusive government, 66–67 and the internet, 158 monopolies as a threat to, 150 and self-rule, 33–35, 36 Dewey, John, 33–34, 35 Donovan, Joan, 143, 161 Duke, David, 134, 139–40 eBay as AuctionWeb, 73–74, 80, 81–82 CEO Meg Whitman of, 99 and community as market, 80–84 and e-commerce, 75, 76, 80–84, 86, 98, 99, 100, 103 on the Nasdaq, 88 network effects on, 82, 83 user participation on, 79, 82, 83, 94 Electric Power Board (EPB), 38–39, 40 Equitable Internet Initiative (EII), 43–46 Facebook antitrust suit against, 151 and content moderation, 152–54 data of, ix, 29–30, 96, 101, 116, 165, 173 and e-commerce, 98 and election of 2016, 148–49 Fox News on, 142 and Instagram, 150, 159 and interoperability scenarios, 170 investigation into, 150–51 Joel Kaplan of, 146 and library funding, 160 and MAREA, x market capitalization of, 97 and Mark Zuckerberg, 94, 96–97, 146, 154, 166 online advertising of, 60–61, 94, 112, 124, 137–38, 146, 150, 165, 170, 173 and online malls, 115, 119, 129, 147, 155, 158 and politics, 141, 143–49, 150 and the profit motive, 127, 147 and purchase of startup companies, 124 QAnon movement on, 145–46 Schifter’s post on, 126–27, 131 and Sheryl Sandberg, 94 WhatsApp of, 150 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 26, 27–28, 41, 48, 59, 60 Fourcade, Marion, 109 Fox News, 142, 161 Friere, Paulo, 44 Gates, Bill, 71–72, 81 Google and capitalism, 92 and data generation, 89–90, 92–93, 112, 124 and e-commerce, 98, 124 founding of, 88 and Google Fiber, 29 investigation into, 150–51 and large amounts of data, 91–93, 96, 101, 116 and library funding, 160 online advertising of, 60–61, 90–93, 94, 112, 124, 136, 173 as an online mall, 93, 115, 119, 129, 138 and parent company Alphabet, 97, 124 and platforms, xv, 75 and purchase of startup companies, 94, 124 and radicalization by Council of Conservative Citizens, 138–39 search technology of, 90, 133–39, 144 software of, 173 and submarine fiber-optic cables, 29–30 worth of, 67, 124 Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station, 4 Gore, Al, 19–20 Gruen, Victor, 85, 86 Grundner, Tom, 23 Guattari, Felix, 145 Hanna, Thomas M., 50, 66 Healy, Kieran, 109 High-Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991, 20 Inouye, Daniel, 21, 22 internet access to, xv, 10, 13, 21, 23, 25, 28, 30, 31–35, 40–41, 44, 46, 50, 51, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 77, 127, 163, 76 and algorithmic management, 114–15, 116, 118, 119, 121 ARPANET network of, 12, 18, 24, 79, 104, 114 and broadband internet, xv, 27–29, 31, 32–33, 35, 39, 40, 41, 43, 46, 48–49, 50, 53, 55–56, 59–61, 176 buying and selling on, 71, 73–74, 81–82, 124 and the cloud, 103–9, 110, 111, 112, 115, 116, 118, 119, 121, 123, 128, 131, 163 common language of, 9, 10–11, 14, 79, 110, 113, 177 and communications networks, x–xi, 5, 8, 27, 123, 128, 148, 170 and competition among providers, 61–64 and connectivity, xi, xii, 29, 30, 33, 35, 41, 43, 44, 59, 60, 127 and consumer costs, 23, 30–31, 40, 43, 44–45, 49, 50, 52, 60, 61–64 and content, xvii, 29, 152–54 creation of, xiii, 6–12, 13, 88, 104, 113 and data generation, 88–89, 92–93, 101, 108–9, 121, 123, 129, 149–50, 158, 165–66 and data’s value, 86–87, 92, 109, 121, 122, 165 and data transmission, 3–6, 8, 10, 14–15, 25, 28–29, 39, 55, 103–4, 159 and data trusts, 165–66 and democratic internet, xvi, 37, 42–43, 47–48, 50, 55, 56–57, 58, 66–67, 155, 175–76 and deprivatization, xvi, 51, 56, 59, 153, 154–55, 157, 169–70, 175, 176 and dial-up modems, 23, 27, 28 different scales of, 54–55, 168 and dot.com bubble, 72, 76–79, 80, 83, 90, 93, 94, 98, 102, 106, 109, 123, 124 and email, xiv, 12, 15–16, 79–80, 159 and fiber to the home (FTTH) networks, 39, 40, 41, 51 and founding of startups, 76, 119–20, 123–24 and infrastructure, xiii, xiv, 7, 15, 17, 24, 27, 28, 30, 31, 41, 43, 44, 45, 48, 49, 51, 56, 61–62, 65, 85, 106–9, 127, 160, 164, 176 and internet service providers, 15, 17, 24–26, 27–31, 38, 39–41, 46, 49, 51–53, 59–63, 65, 72, 77, 95, 127–8 and market-dominated internet, 22, 35, 42, 46–47, 119, 122, 152–54 and the military, 9–10, 11, 12, 79, 113–15, 177, xiii and online classes, 32, 34, 132–33 and online malls, 86–87, 93, 103, 108, 109, 112, 115, 121, 123, 128, 129, 131–33, 135, 137–40, 147, 148, 149, 151, 153, 154–58, 160, 163, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170–73, 176 and organizing, xv, 37, 43–46, 50, 58 and Pets.com, 77, 82 and platforms, xiv–xv, 67, 75, 84, 98, 127, 158, 164, 166, 176 and politics, xi, xii, 18, 28, 46, 47–49, 54, 80, 139–49, 171, 174, 177 privatization of, xiii, xiv–xv, 14, 16–20, 23–25, 27–30, 36–37, 44, 45, 47, 56, 58, 65, 67, 72, 76–79, 84, 93, 98, 109, 119, 120, 123–25, 127, 135, 147, 148, 154, 159, 172, 174–75 and profit motive, xi, xii, xiii, xv, xvi, xvii, 9, 26, 31, 33, 35–36, 37, 45, 47, 52–53, 55, 87, 127–28, 147, 152, 174–75, 176 public funding for, 6–8, 14, 15, 16, 18, 21, 22, 23, 41–42, 48–51, 59, 60, 160, 164–65, 176 public or cooperative ownership of, xvi, 8, 40–46, 48–49, 51–52, 60, 62, 65, 71, 155, 163–65, 168, 169, 176 and racism, xvii, 31, 43, 134, 137–40, 153 regulation of, xii, 17, 22, 28, 147, 149–53 and rise of search engines, 72, 136–37 and selling ads, 93–94, 96–97, 146 and shopping malls, 84–86 and “smartness,” 110–13, 118 and smartphones, 6, 31–32, 110, 112, 115, 119, 123, 128 social aspect of, 79–80, 81, 86, 94–95 state surveillance of, 64–65, 66 and submarine fiber-optic cables, ix–x, xii, xiv, 29–30, 56, 65, 113 and the techlash, 149, 152, xii, xiii, xv universal protocol for, 9, 11–12, 19, 88, 110, 113, 159, 172 and universities, 52, 88, 109, 169 and US government, xiii, xiv, 7, 13–14, 17–20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 48–49, 59–60, 64–67, 113–15, 170 and web applications, 103, 170, 171, 176 wide area networks (WANs) of, 117–19 and the World Wide Web, 15–16, 72, 76, 80, 89 and Yahoo!

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

After Everson received the offer, she turned to Kassan for advice. “Michael told me not to move to Seattle,” she says. He wanted her to take the job, but persuaded her that the ad community she needed to work with was located in New York. Microsoft relented. Only four months later a headhunter called and asked if she would meet with Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook. At first she said no. “Carolyn was really torn,” Kassan recalls. “She’s a very ethical and loyal person. But this was an opportunity of a lifetime.” Eventually she weakened, and on the way to Australia for Microsoft she stopped in the Valley on a Sunday to meet with Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg.

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Eventually she weakened, and on the way to Australia for Microsoft she stopped in the Valley on a Sunday to meet with Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg. She spent a full day at Facebook. “I knew in my heart that’s where I wanted to be,” she says. “It was so much more entrepreneurial. Advertising was the entire business of Facebook, whereas at Microsoft it was a tiny piece.” Everson was the same age as Sheryl Sandberg, forty, and like her was a former Baker Scholar at the Harvard Business School and extremely well connected. She consulted what she refers to as “my board of directors” for advice. They include Kassan and Wenda Millard, Irwin Gotlieb of GroupM, Bill Koenigsberg of Horizon Media, Andrew Robertson of BBDO, Nick Brien, now the CEO of Dentsu Aegus in the U.S., Jack Myers, chairman of MyersBizNet and a prominent marketing consultant, and Terry Kawaja, CEO of Luma Partners, an investment banker.

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From its launch in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg had what David Kirkpatrick, whose book The Facebook Effect offered the first definitive account of the company, described as “ambivalence toward advertising.” He accepted ads on Facebook “only so he could pay the bills.” Zuckerberg’s priorities—user growth and a better customer experience—“were more important than monetizing.” It wasn’t until he recruited Sheryl Sandberg away from Google to serve as his number two in 2008 that Facebook woke up. At Google, Sandberg oversaw its primary revenue source, online advertising sales. With Zuckerberg off on a monthlong round-the-world trip, deliberately allowing Sandberg to establish her authority, she organized daylong executive meetings to figure out how to monetize Facebook’s proliferating user base.

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture by Scott Belsky

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, blockchain, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, data science, delayed gratification, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fake it until you make it, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, private spaceflight, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, sugar pill, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the medium is the message, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional

Taflinger, “Taking ADvantage: Social Basis of Human Behavior,” Social Basis of Human Behavior, May 28, 1996, https://public.wsu.edu/~taflinge/socself.html. “In ancient history”: E. O. Wilson, “Why Humans Hate,” Newsweek, April 02, 2012, www.newsweek.com/biologist-eo-wilson-why-humans-ants-need-tribe-64005. “it actually paid”: Sarah Green Carmichael, “Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant on Resilience,” Harvard Business Review, April 27, 2017, https://hbr.org/ideacast/2017/04/sheryl-sandberg-and-adam-grant-on-resilience.html. “I never would have gotten”: Ibid. “The impediment to action”: Eric Ravenscraft, “The Impediment to Action Advances Action,” LifeHacker, October 9, 2016, https://lifehacker.com/the-impediment-to-action-advances-action-1788748064.

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However complex these societal groups become, our psychology remains wired on the principle that groups equal safety. So instead of facing adversity solo, we instinctively look for groups, for comfort and restoration. Speaking on Harvard Business Review’s IdeaCast about a book he coauthored with Sheryl Sandberg—Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy—Adam Grant, a renowned organizational psychologist and Wharton professor, describes the business incentives of group support. Studies show that when companies provided assistance programs that offer financial support and time off when employees faced unexpected adversity (such as if their home was damaged by a natural disaster or a relative fell sick), “it actually paid dividends in that people felt like they belong now to a more caring company,” Grant says.

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Studies show that when companies provided assistance programs that offer financial support and time off when employees faced unexpected adversity (such as if their home was damaged by a natural disaster or a relative fell sick), “it actually paid dividends in that people felt like they belong now to a more caring company,” Grant says. “They took pride in their employer as a really human place to work. And they were more committed as a result.” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO and whose personal experience of her husband Dave Goldberg dying suddenly was the inspiration for Option B, recalls, “I never would have gotten through this without Mark [Zuckerberg]. Mark was at my house the day I came home from Mexico and told my children. Mark literally planned Dave’s funeral.

Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone by Brené Brown

Black Lives Matter, desegregation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, false flag, meta-analysis, pattern recognition, place-making, Sheryl Sandberg, TED Talk

Danny led us in prayer, we told funny stories, and Nathan played the guitar while Diana sang the “Ave Maria.” It was 90 degrees in the Texas Hill Country and you could barely hear the stories and music over the shrilling of the cicadas. I kept thinking, This is exactly what it means to be human. This humanity transcends all of those differences that keep up us apart. In Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant’s beautiful 2017 book about grief and courage, Option B, Sandberg tells a wrenching and wholehearted story about collective pain. Her husband, Dave, died suddenly while they were on vacation. Their children were in second and fourth grade. She writes, “When we arrived at the cemetery, my children got out of the car and fell to the ground, unable to take another step.

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“How Great Thou Art”: Carl Gustav Boberg, “How Great Thou Art,” Stuart K. Hine, Trans. Christian hymn, 1885. “Music, uniquely among the arts”: Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, revised and expanded edition (New York: Random House, 2007), p. 329. “When we arrived at the cemetery” and following quotes: Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), pp. 6, 12, 13. “If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit next to me”: This quotation, in various forms, is generally attributed to Alice Roosevelt Longworth; see e.g. quoteinvestigator.com/category/alice-roosevelt-longworth/.

Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, AirBnB, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail by Robert Bruce Shaw, James Foster, Brilliance Audio

Airbnb, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, call centre, cloud computing, data science, deliberate practice, Elon Musk, emotional labour, financial engineering, future of work, holacracy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Jony Ive, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, loose coupling, meta-analysis, nuclear winter, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, work culture

Netflix, with a track record of taking big risks in the pursuit of growth, will likely become the dominant media company in the world. Netflix is equally bold in its approach to people management. More than 8 million people have downloaded a presentation of the firm’s operating principles.8 Sheryl Sandberg, CFO of Facebook and author of Lean In, suggests that the Netflix “culture deck” may be the most important document ever produced in Silicon Valley.9 In it, the company describes how it operates and, in particular, its freedom and responsibility culture. Netflix believes in giving its employees a great deal of autonomy but also holding them to high standards of performance.

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The downside for women is that they may be expected to do relationship work that is time consuming and often unrecognized.61 In one study, for example, scholars Madeline E. Heilman and Julie Chen found that women were rated more harshly if they didn’t help another, in contrast to their male counterparts. They also received less “credit” when they did help a colleague—in part because they were expected to do so. Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg, commenting on this study, note, “Over and over, after giving identical help, a man was significantly more likely to be recommended for promotions, important projects, raises and bonuses. A woman had to help just to get the same rating as a man who didn’t help.”62 The Logic and Limits of Results and Relationships The Need for Results The Need for Relationships •Team meets the current expectations of the organization and customers •Team builds the capabilities needed to deliver results in the future •Cohesion among team members •Collaboration with other teams •Belief in the company and its leaders The Risks of Excessive Results The Risks of Excessive Relationships Increased potential for . . .

…

Muros, “Gender Differences in Burnout: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Vocational Behavior 77 (2010), 168–85. Madeline E. Heilman and Julie J. Chen, “Same Behavior, Different Consequences: Reactions to Men’s and Women’s Altruistic Citizenship Behavior,” Journal of Applied Psychology 90 (2005), 431–41. 62The quote is from Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg, “Madam C.E.O., Get Me a Coffee,” New York Times, February 16, 2016. 63Barry Johnson, Polarity Management, HRD PRess; 2014. 64Robert Bruce Shaw interview. 65Ed Catmull, CEO of Pixar, notes the downside of moving too quickly on underperformers on those who remain: “It makes them think, ‘oh, if I screw up, they’re going to remove me.’

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Cambridge Analytica, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, lifelogging, low skilled workers, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, phenotype, post-industrial society, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, tech bro, the built environment, urban planning, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

One tech company made managers truly accountable for their decisions on salary increases by collecting data on all their decisions and, crucially, appointing a committee to monitor this data.77 Five years after adopting this system, the pay gap had all but disappeared. CHAPTER 5 The Henry Higgins Effect When Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg got pregnant for the first time she was working at Google. ‘My pregnancy was not easy,’ she wrote in her bestselling book Lean In. She had morning sickness for the whole nine months. She didn’t just develop a bump, her whole body was swollen. Her feet went up two sizes ‘turning into odd-shaped lumps I could see only when they were propped up on a coffee table’.

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And, of course, it is. It is a matter of justice that women have an equal chance of success as their equally qualified male colleagues. But female representation is about more than a specific woman who does or doesn’t get a job, because female representation is also about the gender data gap. As we saw with Sheryl Sandberg’s story about pregnancy parking, there will be certain female needs men won’t think to cater for because they relate to experiences that men simply won’t have. And it’s not always easy to convince someone a need exists if they don’t have that need themselves. Dr Tania Boler, founder of women’s health tech company Chiaro, thinks that the reluctance to back female-led companies is partly a result of the ‘stereotype that men like great design and great tech and women don’t’.

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More than 75% of British women on a programme for aspiring female leaders said that sexist abuse of female politicians online ‘was a point of concern when considering whether to pursue a role in public life’.70 In Australia, 60% of women aged eighteen to twenty-one and 80% of women over thirty-one said the way female politicians were treated by the media made them less likely to run for office.71 Nigeria experienced a ‘marked decline’ in the number of female politicians elected to the country’s congress between 2011 and 2015; a study by the US NGO the National Democratic Institute found that this could be ‘attributed to the violence and harassment that women in office face’.72 And, as we have seen, this decline in female representation will give rise to a gender data gap that in turn will result in the passing of less legislation that addresses women’s needs. The evidence is clear: politics as it is practised today is not a female-friendly environment. This means that while technically the playing field is level, in reality women operate at a disadvantage compared to men. This is what comes of devising systems without accounting for gender. Sheryl Sandberg’s approach for navigating hostile work environments, outlined in her book Lean In, is for women to buckle up and push through. And of course that is part of the solution. I am not a female politician, but as a woman with a public profile I get my own share of threats and abuse. And, unpopular as this opinion may be, I believe that the onus is on those of us who feel able to weather the storm, to do so.

How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time by George Berkowski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business intelligence, call centre, crowdsourcing, deal flow, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, Paul Graham, QR code, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, ubercab, Y Combinator

It’s not just a theory My bookshelves are piled high with books brimming with great advice about how to build a great business, about how to cross chasms and be an effective executive. Biographies of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, investor Warren Buffett, Google cofounder Larry Page, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and businesswoman and Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg peer down over my desk. But, as I reread these books, I keep finding business strategies that no longer work, or principles that, although only a few years old, seem to be already outdated in the fast-moving world of mobile technology. Today, the most successful new technology businesses are rewriting the rules in real time.

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Or is this person a fair-weather entrepreneur? Talk about the hardest things you’ve worked on before. Talk about perseverance and stamina. If at this stage your visions are not 100 per cent aligned, there is very little chance it will work. A great example of this approach was when Mark Zuckerberg was ‘interview-dating’ Sheryl Sandberg for the number-two position at Facebook. While other people were involved in the founding of Facebook, Zuckerberg was without any doubt the one driving the bus for the first few years. It was clear he needed the equivalent of a cofounder – a leader and manager (and adult) – to help him take the company to the next level.

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On many levels, scaling an organisation is not tied to a specific industry experience – but is more related to the type of organisation required to deliver a certain type of business model. Everyone’s Doing It The addition of an experienced COO is a strategy repeated often by great technology startups. One of the most well-known success stories is that of Sheryl Sandberg, COO at Facebook. I talked about her earlier in the book and the ‘cofounder dating’ she engaged in with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Before Facebook she spent seven years at Google, building up a huge team as vice president of global online sales and operations. She was also involved in launching Google’s philanthropic arm Google.org.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Peter Thiel, the first private investor in Facebook, contrasts the authenticity offered by Facebook—where no pseudonyms are allowed—with that of its former rival, MySpace, where everything goes. “MySpace is about being someone fake on the internet; everyone could be a movie star. [It is] very healthy that the real people have won out over the fake people,” he notes. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook board member and chief operating officer, goes even further in emphasizing how central the idea of authenticity is to the company’s activities. “Expressing our authentic identity will become even more pervasive in the coming year,” she notes in an essay she wrote for the Economist about 2012.

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As philosopher Charles Guignon puts it, “What is crucial about authenticity is not just the intensity of the commitment and fervor of the expression it carries with it, but the nature of the content of the commitment as well.” Furthermore, in the hands of Facebook, authenticity becomes just a rhetorical weapon that fuels user anxieties and results in even more data being uploaded to the site. When Sheryl Sandberg writes that Facebook profiles are now “detailed self-portraits” that “express our authenticity identity,” she is also stating the obvious: the only way to make such portraits even more authentic is by uploading and sharing even more details. But Facebook wouldn’t be Facebook if it didn’t stack the cards against users.

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Is it naïve to suppose that there’s more to life than tracking the efficiency of nutritional supplements and testing the performance of gaming apps? On Frictionless Traps Solutionism will rule supreme until designers, architects, and engineers (of both social and technological varieties) abandon simplistic models of what it’s like to be human. Despite what Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg believes, we do not bring our stable, authentic self to technologies we use, only to recover it in the same mint condition ten years later. Technologies actively shape our notion of the self; they even define how and what we think about it. They shape the contours of what we believe to be negotiable and nonnegotiable; they define the structure and tempo of our self-experimentation.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

The scoop was modest—Trending Topics had nothing to do with the regular news feed, which was curated by algorithm and was full of right-wing content—but it enraged conservatives, who saw it as proof that Facebook was biased in a broader way. The Drudge Report, which had been among the banned outlets, led with a giant and unflattering picture of Zuckerberg’s deputy Sheryl Sandberg, the author of the book Lean In. not leaning in . . . leaning left! the headline screamed. facebook under fire was the Fox News chyron. Facebook denied the allegations, but Zuckerberg sensed that this was a crisis to be managed, and he turned to Thiel to help him. On Wednesday, May 18, a group of sixteen prominent right-wing media personalities were summoned to Menlo Park for a meeting.

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But the real stars were the CEOs of the United States’ largest and most important tech companies, and their shepherd in all things Trump, Peter Thiel. He sat at Trump’s left elbow, with Pence on the other side. To his left was Apple’s Tim Cook. Arrayed around the table, interspersed between Trump’s advisers and children, was a group that included Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, as well as the CEOs of Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Intel, and IBM. “These are monster companies,” Trump said, beaming before lavishing praise on Thiel. He credited the Silicon Valley investor for having seen “something very early—maybe even before we saw it.” Thiel had tucked his arms under the table to make room for Trump’s broad shoulders and seemed to shrink away from the president-elect, who was having none of it.

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It was much harder to show people a lot of ads on small screens. “Without an earth-changing idea,” MIT Technology Review predicted not long after the IPO, “it will collapse.” Two pension funds, including a group of Arkansas teachers, filed a class action lawsuit, claiming that Zuckerberg, Thiel, Sheryl Sandberg, and Facebook’s bankers had underplayed Facebook’s difficulties on smartphones when they’d sold the stock during the IPO. Facebook eventually paid $35 million to settle the suit. “That was a terrible summer,” said one former Facebook staffer. “People were talking about us like we were going to be a penny stock.”

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

Madhumita Murgia and David Bond, “Google Apologises to Advertisers for Extremist Content on YouTube,” Financial Times, March 20, 2017; Sam Levin, “Mark Zuckerberg: I Regret Ridiculing Fears Over Facebook’s Effect on Election,” Guardian, September 27, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/27/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-2016-election-fake-news; Robert Booth and Alex Hern, “Facebook Admits Industry Could Do More to Combat Online Extremism,” Guardian, September 20, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/20/facebook-admits-industry-could-do-more-to-combat-online-extremism; Scott Shane and Mike Isaac, “Facebook to Turn Over Russian-Linked Ads to Congress,” New York Times, September 21, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/21/technology/face book-russian-ads.html; David Cohen, “Mark Zuckerberg Seeks Forgiveness in Yom Kippur Facebook Post,” Adweek, October 2, 2017, http://www.adweek.com/digital/mark-zuckerberg-yom-kippur-facebook-post; “Exclusive Interview with Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg,” Axios, October 12, 2017, https://www.axios.com/exclusive-interview-facebook-sheryl-sandberg-2495538841.html; Kevin Roose, “Facebook’s Frankenstein Moment,” New York Times, September 21, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/21/technology/face book-frankenstein-sandberg-ads.html. 45. David Cohen, “Mark Zuckerberg Seeks Forgiveness in Yom Kippur Facebook Post.” 46.

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The twenty-three-year-old CEO understood the potential of surveillance capitalism, but he had not yet mastered Google’s facility in obscuring its operations and intent. The pressing question in Facebook’s headquarters—“How do we turn all those Facebook users into money?”—still required an answer.85 In March 2008, just three months after having to kill his first attempt at emulating Google’s logic of accumulation, Zuckerberg hired Google executive Sheryl Sandberg to be Facebook’s chief operating officer. The onetime chief of staff to US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, Sandberg had joined Google in 2001, ultimately rising to be its vice president of global online sales and operations. At Google she led the development of surveillance capitalism through the expansion of AdWords and other aspects of online sales operations.86 One investor who had observed the company’s growth during that period concluded, “Sheryl created AdWords.”87 In signing on with Facebook, the talented Sandberg became the “Typhoid Mary” of surveillance capitalism as she led Facebook’s transformation from a social networking site to an advertising behemoth.

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A coalition of privacy groups presented a new complaint to the FTC, implicitly recognizing the logic of the dispossession cycle: “Google has done incrementally and furtively what would plainly be illegal if done all at once.”98 Facebook’s IPO in 2012 was notoriously botched when last-minute downward revisions of its sales projections, precipitated by the rapid shift to mobile devices, led to some unsavory dealings among its investment bankers and their clients. But Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and their team quickly mastered the nuances of the dispossession cycle, this time to steer the company toward mobile ads. They learned to be skilled and ruthless hunters of behavioral surplus, capturing supplies at scale, evading and resisting law, and upgrading the means of production to improve prediction products.

WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World by Craig Kielburger, Holly Branson, Marc Kielburger, Sir Richard Branson, Sheryl Sandberg

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, blood diamond, Boeing 747, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, Colonization of Mars, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, energy transition, family office, food desert, future of work, global village, impact investing, inventory management, James Dyson, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, market design, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, pre–internet, retail therapy, Salesforce, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Virgin Galactic, working poor, Y Combinator

. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017051206 (print) | LCCN 2017056888 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119447832 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119447818 (epub) | ISBN 9781119447795 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Social responsibility of business. | Social entrepreneurship. Classification: LCC HD60 (ebook) | LCC HD60 .K4845 2018 (print) | DDC 658.4/08–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017051206 WECONOMY Foreword By Sheryl Sandberg It was my first day on the ground in India. The year was 1992 and I had graduated from college a few months before. I was working as a research assistant at the World Bank and this was my first chance to leave the air-conditioned Washington, D.C., headquarters and see what development work actually was like in the field.

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You get a different perspective on things.” It started with a PowerPoint that went viral—seriously! The deck “Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility” was created by the video-streaming company's former chief talent officer, Patty McCord, and was shared over 13 million times on Slideshare. Sheryl Sandberg called the presentation “the most important document ever to come out of the Valley.” McCord started a revolution for work-life balance. In it, the company explained its policy on holidays: “We should focus on what people get done, not how many hours or days worked. Just as we don't have a nine-to-five day policy, we don't need a vacation policy.” 5 Hastings says work must also be about play.

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With thanks to the incredibly talented Andrew Duffy, our first collaborator, who helped us brainstorm initial concepts and provided us with the foundational draft on which everything was built. Shelley Page, our dear friend and confidante, will always be our editor-in-residence, a voice of reason, guidance, and an invaluable perspective. No project would be complete without your input. To Sheryl Sandberg and Sir Richard Branson, thank you for the inspiring words. We couldn't think of two better people to open and close this book; each of you embodies the principles of the WEconomy, putting purpose at the forefront of business. We are grateful to Brian McGregor, Sue Allan, Rick Groves, Kieran Green, and Lee-Anne Goodman for their writing contributions, insights, and research.

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News by Clint Watts

4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Climatic Research Unit, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Filter Bubble, global pandemic, Google Earth, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Julian Assange, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, operational security, pre–internet, Russian election interference, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing test, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Even when dragged in front of Congress, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, known for public awkwardness, sailed through testimony, fully overmatching his congressional interrogators, who seemed ill equipped or laughably out of touch with regard to how today’s technology works. Facebook’s second-in-command, Sheryl Sandberg, did equally well, and it looked for most of the past year as if the public’s and regulators’ ire toward Facebook would wane. That was until mid-November 2018. The New York Times dropped a bombshell on Facebook’s comeback, asserting that Facebook, facing user backlash, employed an opposition-research firm to discredit detractors by linking them to George Soros, a wealthy liberal donor who’s been the target of personal attacks and fake news on sites such as Facebook.35 Hiring of the public relations firm sparked public outrage undoing much of the progress Facebook had made countering disinformation since 2016.

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Two years of public outrage and congressional hearings would lead one to believe that government regulation would have been instituted, but that would not be true. Every congressional session with the social media giants showed just how unlikely lawmakers are to effectively regulate tech companies. Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Jack Dorsey, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai—introverted techies—all handled congressional grilling well and outmatched the legislators who would regulate them. Even when bipartisan support for legislation exists, Congress has been unable to move laws forward to help defend the 2018 midterm elections.

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utm_term=.e6ecc3ff9a8e. 22. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018–12–14/meet-the-russians-picked-for-butina-s-trip-to-trump-breakfast. 23. https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/07/politics/russia-delegation-washington-prayer-breakfast/index.html. 24. https://web.archive.org/web/20140818073152/http:/archive.adl.org/anti_semitism/duke_russia.html. 25. https://www.thedailybeast.com/richard-spencer-and-white-supremacists-return-to-charlottesville-chanting-you-will-not-replace-us. 26. https://leagueofthesouth.com/российский-охват-russian-outreach/. 27. https://www.apnews.com/a4ffacbbf51748fc86eb442fb3db18b5. 28. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/congress/gop-senators-headed-to-moscow-to-smooth-things-over-with-putin. 29. https://dailycaller.com/2018/03/08/the-ever-changing-russia-narrative-in-american-politics-is-cynically-false-public-manipulation/. 30. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/twitter-s-response-russia-inquiry-inadequate-democratic-senator-says-n805646. 31. https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/enabling-further-research-of-information-operations-on-twitter.html. 32. https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/twitter-health-metrics-proposal-submission.html. 33. https://medium.com/dfrlab/youtubes-kremlin-disinformation-problem-d78472c1b72b. 34. https://www.facebook.com/facebookmedia/blog/working-to-stop-misinformation-and-false-news. 35. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html and https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/technology/george-soros-facebook-sheryl-sandberg.html. 36. https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/the-honest-ads-act. 37. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/22/election-security-bill-congress-437472. 38. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/11/08/white-house-shares-doctored-video-support-punishment-journalist-jim-acosta/?

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

Our task for a better future must be to foster a willingness to subdivide and reengineer failing systems at a basic, structural level, rather than contenting ourselves to simply patch existing failures in our digital infrastructures—leaving the broader systems that created these problems largely unchanged. Notes 1. Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) admonished women to try to overcome structural sexism through sheer force of will and individual action, ignoring the enormous privilege that this kind of message takes for granted. The Guardian’s Zoe Williams described it as a “carefully inoffensive” book that was not “about how women could become more equal, but about how women can become more like Sheryl Sandberg.” Zoe Williams, “Book Review: Lean In,” Guardian (February 13, 2013), https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/13/lean-in-sheryl-sandberg-review.

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Zoe Williams, “Book Review: Lean In,” Guardian (February 13, 2013), https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/13/lean-in-sheryl-sandberg-review. It is perhaps not surprising that Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, wrote a supposedly feminist book that nonetheless endorsed and sought to maintain all of the exclusionary power structures that, on the surface, it claimed to critique. 2. Google Walkout for Real Change, “Google Employees and Contractors Participate in Global ‘Walkout for Real Change,’” Medium (November 2, 2018), https://medium.com/@GoogleWalkout/google-employees-and-contractors-participate-in-global-walkout-for-real-change-389c65517843; Matthew Weaver et al., “Google Walkout: Global Protests after Sexual Misconduct Allegations,” Guardian (November 1, 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/01/google-walkout-global-protests-employees-sexual-harassment-scandals; Susan Fowler, “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber,” personal blog (February 19, 2017), https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber; Maya Kosoff, “Mass Firings at Uber as Sexual Harassment Scandal Grows,” Vanity Fair (June 6, 2017), https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/06/uber-fires-20-employees-harassment-investigation. 3.

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We believe that one solution lies in connecting tech and social justice leaders to spearhead revolutionary tech programs whose benefits extend to the most disadvantaged of society.”54 Jones argues that showcasing minorities as successful coders can also change stereotypes about technical talent: “The minute we have an African-American Mark Zuckerberg or a Latina Sheryl Sandberg, the conversation will shift.”55 The point is not that every female or minority coder sees their work in political terms, or that increasing their representation will automatically make computer culture more democratic—but without groups that are led and defined by underrepresented coders, a shift toward equality is unlikely to happen.

Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China's ByteDance by Matthew Brennan

Airbnb, AltaVista, augmented reality, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, ImageNet competition, income inequality, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, paypal mafia, Pearl River Delta, pre–internet, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WeWork, Y Combinator

While many videos on TikTok had hundreds of thousands of likes, “the videos in Lasso’s nearly identical feed typically have a few dozen,” 298 noted one highly critical New York Times article. Experimenting further, another clone of TikTok “Reels,” this time built into Instagram, began testing in the Brazilian market in late 2019. By early 2020 Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg was publicly admitting that the company was concerned about TikTok. “Of course, we worry about it,” 299 she said, after noting that her children loved using the app, later adding, “They’ve gotten to bigger numbers faster than we ever did.” A pattern that had begun in China was now repeating itself in the West.

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v=P3UjKrYckA0 296 https://www.tiktok.com/@davidkasprak/video/6640342878226763014?source=h5_m 297 https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/1/20892354/mark-zuckerberg-full-transcript-leaked-facebook-meetings 298 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/03/technology/tiktok-facebook-youtube.html 299 https://www.nbcnews.com/podcast/byers-market/transcript-facebook-s-sheryl-sandberg-n1145051 300 https://themargins.substack.com/p/tiktok-the-facebook-competitor 301 https://youtu.be/rW8mDQYrOnw?t=1877 302 https://creatormarketplace.tiktok.com/ 303 https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/creator-fund-first-recipients 304 https://www.toutiao.com/i6803294487876469251/?

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Carl Icahn, centre right, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, illegal immigration, impulse control, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, obamacare, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Powell, who had come into the White House as an adviser to Ivanka Trump, rose, in weeks, to a position on the National Security Council, and was then, suddenly, along with Cohn, her Goldman colleague, a contender for some of the highest posts in the administration. At the same time, both she and Cohn were spending a good deal of time with their ad hoc outside advisers on which way they might jump out of the White House. Powell could eye seven-figure comms jobs at various Fortune 100 companies, or a C-suite future at a tech company—Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, after all, had a background in corporate philanthropy and in the Obama administration. Cohn, on his part, already a centamillionaire, was thinking about the World Bank or the Fed. Ivanka Trump—dealing with some of the same personal and career considerations as Powell, except without a viable escape strategy—was quite in her own corner.

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Actually, she was Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy—the difference, Bannon pointed out, between the COO of a hotel chain and the concierge. Coming back from the overseas trip, Powell began to talk in earnest to friends about her timetable to get out of the White House and back into a private-sector job. Sheryl Sandberg, she said, was her model. “Oh my fucking god,” said Bannon. On May 26, the day before the presidential party returned from the overseas trip, the Washington Post reported that during the transition, Kushner and Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, had, at Kushner’s instigation, discussed the possibility of having the Russians set up a private communications channel between the transition team and the Kremlin.

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“McMaster wants to send more troops to Afghanistan, so we’re going to send him,” said a triumphal Bannon. In Bannon’s scenario, Trump would give McMaster a fourth star and “promote” him to top military commander in Afghanistan. As with the chemical attack in Syria, it was Dina Powell—even as she made increasingly determined efforts to get herself out of the White House, either on a Sheryl Sandberg trajectory or, stopping first at a way station, as ambassador to the United Nations—who struggled to help support the least disruptive, most keep-all-options-open approach. In this, both because the approach seemed like the safest course and because it was the opposite of Bannon’s course, she readily recruited Jared and Ivanka.

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital map, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Grace Hopper, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, iterative process, job automation, Lao Tzu, large language model, lockdown, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, microaggression, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, occupational segregation, old-boy network, OpenAI, openstreetmap, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, randomized controlled trial, remote working, risk tolerance, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, work culture , you are the product

One such ad, targeting highly paid executives, appeared 1,816 times to men and just 311 times to women. Recalling earlier résumé studies, the Carnegie Mellon study employed fake job-seeking profiles to ensure that gender—not browsing behavior, shopping patterns, or social connections—was the only difference.12 In a press release, Facebook CFO Sheryl Sandberg, author of the feminist call to action Lean In, said, “Getting this right is deeply important to me and all of us at Facebook because inclusivity is a core value for our company.” And yet, as we have already seen, taking out identity markers as inputs doesn’t always guarantee that the algorithm will “get it right.”

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You Can’t Be What You Can’t See Cultural innovation comes with social progress, but there is no invisible hand that will push communities to change their collective perceptions. With a smartphone in hand and an expanded range of digital capacities, everyone is a photographer and an artist. Getty has been deliberate in nudging the choices of image seekers. In 2014, the Getty Foundation—with the help of Facebook COO and Lean In author Sheryl Sandberg—developed a collection of diverse, empowering images of women, as well as same-sex families and men performing non-traditional gender roles. The motto of the Lean In Collection is that “you can’t be what you can’t see.” The goal of the collaboration is to shift perceptions, overturn clichés, and incorporate authentic images of women into media and advertising.

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Samuel Gibbs, “Women Less Likely to Be Shown Ads for High-Paid Jobs on Google, Study Shows,” Guardian, July 8, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/08/women-less-likely-ads-high-paid-jobs-google-study; Nathan Newman, “Racial and Economic Profiling in Google Ads: A Preliminary Investigation (Updated),” Huffpost, last updated December 6, 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/racial-and-economic-profi_b_970451. 13. Sheryl Sandberg, “Doing More to Protect Against Discrimination in Housing, Employment and Credit Advertising,” Meta, March 19, 2019, https://about.fb.com/news/2019/03/protecting-against-discrimination-in-ads/. 14. Facebook, Facebook’s Civil Rights Audit—Final Report (2020), 73, https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Civil-Rights-Audit-Final-Report.pdf (describing the housing ad library). 15.

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Program participants improved their SAT scores from, on average, the twentieth to the fortieth percentile, and those higher test scores enabled many of them to become the first in their families to go to college. I emphasized that the Obama administration had invited us to the White House and heralded CollegeSpring as a promising model for supporting academic achievement in communities of color; we’d also receive praise from national media and then Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who had written about us in her number one bestseller Lean In. Edward seemed impressed. We’re going to get this donation, I remember thinking. Then, seemingly out of the blue, he asked a question about the students we served. “So, this program of yours,” he began. “When you go into the schools, you offer the program to all of the students at the school?”

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Since women are rarely six feet tall, gender height differences may be among the reasons why women are underrepresented in leadership positions. Anecdotal evidence seems to bear this out, since many well-known female leaders are atypically tall: former Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman is six foot one; First Lady Michelle Obama is five foot eleven; U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg are all five foot eight; and Urusla Burns, who became the first Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company in 2009, is six feet tall. Sometimes, it appears, part of what it takes to break glass ceilings is being tall enough to reach the glass. At the same time, though, I don’t want to imply that height carries the equivalent weight of other identity-based hundred advantages like socioeconomic status, gender, and race.

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Khalil Gibran Muhammad, who helped shape many of this book’s ideas; Shirley Leung at the Boston Globe, who saw value in an early iteration of the compounding unearned advantages concept; Darren Walker at the Ford Foundation, who funded the background research that laid the analytical foundation for this book; my Harvard Business School professor Laura Huang, who shared her book proposal with me so I would have a road map; business executive and philanthropist Sheryl Sandberg, who introduced me to her literary agency, WME; journalist Sandy Banks, my incredible writing coach, who helped me craft the initial proposal and edit the book; and Robin DiAngelo and allen kwabena frimpong, who contributed a wonderful foreword and introduction, to this book. I also want to thank those who were instrumental in this book becoming a reality: Mel Berger, my agent at WME, who has been an incredible advocate every step of the way, including taking seriously every silly first-time author question I’ve had; Krishan Trotman, publisher at Legacy Lit, who took a chance on this project and helped me see that this book was really about challenging myths generated in the halls of power; editor Emi Ikkanda, who made innumerable contributions to this book, including a vision for structuring this book in a way that made every page better; the entire team at Hachette Book Group and the publicity firm DEY., who have played an essential role toward getting this book into the hands of readers; Sandy Banks, who took me on “low-bono” as a writing coach client because of her belief in me and this project; and University of Michigan undergraduate student Irving Peña, who took on the crucial tasks of documenting the hundreds of sources that underpin this book and creating the accompanying resource list.

For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, bank run, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, buy low sell high, carbon tax, carried interest, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, move fast and break things, Peter Thiel, power law, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steven Levy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, work culture , Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Stories emerged of people buying engagement rings online and, within minutes, receiving calls from their friends saying congratulations. Some users sued over the perceived violation of their privacy. Facebook disbanded the program, and Zuckerberg apologized.26 In response to these missteps, Zuckerberg decided to try something new. In the spring of 2008, he brought on a new chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, and tasked her with building out Facebook’s monetization strategy. Sandberg made a splash at Facebook almost immediately. On her first day, while attending a new-employee boot camp, she turned the tables on the trainers: instead of receiving the training, she gave it, delivering a speech on monetization to the attendees.

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Perhaps even more surprising was how they conducted the experiment: without telling the users, the researchers intentionally tweaked their News Feeds to hide either positive or negative posts. As a result, the users tended to themselves become more positive or negative (as measured by what they shared on their own posts). But the idea that a large corporation was toying with hundreds of thousands of people’s emotions just to see what would happen caused an immediate blowback. Sheryl Sandberg was forced to apologize for the furor, stating, “This was part of ongoing research companies do to test different products, and that was what it was; it was poorly communicated. And for that communication we apologize. We never meant to upset you.”37 In the beginning, it wasn’t entirely clear why all this data gathering mattered.

…

Hannah Kuchler, “How Facebook Grew Too Big to Handle,” Financial Times, Mar. 28, 2019. 23. Levy, Facebook 267. 24. Levy, Facebook 141. 25. Levy, Facebook 180. 26. Dan Farber, “Facebook Beacon Update: No Activities Published Without Users Proactively Consenting,” ZDNet, Nov. 29, 2007. 27. Levy, Facebook 195–96. 28. Robert Hof, “Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg: ‘Now Is When We’re Going Big’ in Ads,” Robert Hof, Apr. 20, 2011; Emily Stewart, “Lawmakers Seem Confused About What Facebook Does—and How to Fix It,” Vox, Apr. 10, 2018. 29. Antonio Garcia Martinez, Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley 5 (2018); Levy, Facebook 197. 30.

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever by Alex Kantrowitz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, anti-bias training, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer vision, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, fulfillment center, gigafactory, Google Chrome, growth hacking, hive mind, income inequality, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Jony Ive, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, work culture , zero-sum game

It has nine lobbies, two layers of security to enter, and guards demanding you sign a nondisclosure agreement before taking another step. Once inside, I made my way to a glass-walled conference room, smack in the middle of everything, where Zuckerberg holds his meetings. And after he finished a conversation with his chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, he ushered me in, along with my editor Mat Honan, for a chat in full view of anyone walking by. Zuckerberg had been hard at work on his “Manifesto,” a fifty-seven-hundred-word exposition outlining Facebook’s response to the troubling content, and its role in its users’ lives more broadly.

…

“Peter became a director because he was a very early investor. But Mark wanted him to stay because Peter was such a loud voice putting forward ideas that Mark disagreed with.” Zuckerberg, still only thirty-five, has filled his inner circle with more experienced people, seeking to learn from them. This is where Sheryl Sandberg fits in. When Zuckerberg was twenty-three, he realized he needed someone to help him grow the company’s business, and so he reached out to Sandberg. At the time, Sandberg was Google’s vice president of global online sales and operations, had worked in the Clinton White House, and received CEO offers from companies in Silicon Valley.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Up to 60 percent of Netflix’s rentals come from the personalized guesses it can make about each customer’s movie preferences—and at this point, Netflix can predict how much you’ll like a given movie within about half a star. Personalization is a core strategy for the top five sites on the Internet—Yahoo, Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Microsoft Live—as well as countless others. In the next three to five years, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told one group, the idea of a Web site that isn’t customized to a particular user will seem quaint. Yahoo Vice President Tapan Bhat agrees: “The future of the web is about personalization ... now the web is about ‘me.’ It’s about weaving the web together in a way that is smart and personalized for the user.”

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If Mark Zuckerberg were a standard mid-twenty-something, this tangle of views might be par for the course: Most of us don’t spend too much time musing philosophically about the nature of identity. But Zuckerberg controls the world’s most powerful and widely used technology for managing and expressing who we are. And his views on the matter are central to his vision for the company and for the Internet. Speaking at an event during New York’s Ad Week, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said she expected the Internet to change quickly. “People don’t want something targeted to the whole world—they want something that reflects what they want to see and know,” she said, suggesting that in three to five years that would be the norm. Facebook’s goal is to be at the center of that process—the singular platform through which every other service and Web site incorporates your personal and social data.

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow

3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, attribution theory, augmented reality, barriers to entry, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Google X / Alphabet X, hive mind, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, popular electronics, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, Steve Jobs, superconnector, vertical integration

In fact, one-on-one mentoring in which an organization formally matched people proved to be nearly as worthless as a person having not been mentored at all. However, when students and mentors came together on their own and formed personal relationships, the mentored did significantly better, as measured by future income, tenure, number of promotions, job satisfaction, work stress, and self-esteem. This is why Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook and the author of Lean In, dedicates a chapter in her book to this concept, arguing that asking someone to formally mentor you is like asking a celebrity for an autograph; it’s stiff, inorganic, and often doesn’t work out. “Searching for a mentor has become the professional equivalent of waiting for Prince Charming,” she writes.

…

Eby, Tammy D. Allen, Sarah C. Evans, Thomas Ng, and David L. DuBois, “Does Mentoring Matter? A Multidisciplinary Meta-Analysis Comparing Mentored and Non-mentored Individuals,” Journal of Vocational Behavior 72, no. 2 (2008): 254–67. 44 “Searching for a mentor has become the professional equivalent”: Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013). 46 journey-focused mentorship and not just a focus on practice: Further research shows that when protégés open up to their mentors—what my friend and NextJump.com founder Charlie Kim calls “vulnerability”—they tend to achieve more positive results: Connie R.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

At present that is still possible if you leave your phone at home, walk wherever you want to go, pay cash where there is no CCTV (both increasingly difficult moves, I admit), don’t browse the internet for a few days. Soon, though, as smart devices and smart implants become normal, you won’t be logging in. You’re in. You’re on. For life. From sci-fi to Wi-Fi to my-wi. * * * Former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt, sitting next to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg at Davos in 2015, put it like this: The internet will disappear. There will be so many IP addresses, there will be so many devices, sensors, things you are wearing, things you are interacting with, that you won’t even sense it. It will be part of your presence all the time. This raises new ethical questions.

…

Susan Sellers, 1994 The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, Shulamith Firestone, 1970 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari, 2011 Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Caroline Criado Perez, 2019 The I-Ching Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society, Cordelia Fine, 2017 (and everything she has written and will write) The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience That Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain, Gina Rippon, 2019 The Future Isn’t Female Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing, Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher, 2002 Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing, Marie Hicks, 2017 Algorithims of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Safiya Umoja Noble, 2018 The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars, Dava Sobel, 2016 Let it Go: My Extraordinary Story – from Refugee to Entrepreneur to Philanthropist, the memoir of Dame Stephanie Shirley, 2012 (If you don’t have time for this, just find her TED Talk.) Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener, 2020 The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir, 1949 Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy, 1984 Psychology of Crowds, Gustave Le Bon, 1896 Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, Sheryl Sandberg, 2013 Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, Helen Lewis, 2020 A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf, 1929 Your Computer Is on Fire, various editors, 2021 (haven’t read this at time of going to press but looks great) The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Steven Pinker, 2002 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich, 1976 The Better Half: On the Genetic Superiority of Women, Sharon Moalem, 2020 Jurassic Car Park Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, 1949 The War of the Worlds, H.

Advertisers at Work by Tracy Tuten

accounting loophole / creative accounting, centre right, content marketing, crowdsourcing, follow your passion, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, QR code, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

That’s the best way to describe what’s next for me. I’m open to the opportunities and I plan on enjoying every moment. * * * 1TED is a non-profit organization that supports the spread of ideas through presentations by thought leaders. Learn more at www.ted.com. 2TED, “Sheryl Sandberg: Why we have too few women leaders,” www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/sheryl_sandberg_why_we_have_too_few_women_leaders.html, December 2010. 3TED, “Madeleine Albright: On being a woman and a diplomat,” www.ted.com/talks/madeleine_albright_on_being_a_woman_and_a_diplomat.html, February 2011. 4The Volkswagen “Milky Way” spot aired in 1999 and was thought to be Volkswagen’s best advertising until its 2011 spot, “The Force.”

…

I asked him for flextime to work from home one day a week. Earl made it clear that he didn’t help me out of pity, but because he valued my contribution. I learned to accept actions like these not as symptoms of weakness, but as evidence of my worth. When I was considering this job here at Mullen, I saw Sheryl Sandberg [chief operating officer at Facebook] speak at TED.1 She spoke about the lack of women in C-suite jobs. I was surprised to hear her chide women for walking away from top jobs. She said that by doing so, we didn’t allow companies the chance to be progressive and contemporary in their approach.2 I took her advice to heart and that was a major reason I asked Mullen to consider my work schedule proposal.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

That June, he gathered the company’s fifty top executives to announce that Facebook was at war and that he was now a wartime CEO. He would be brooking less dissent, demanding greater obedience, and taking the fight to Facebook’s enemies. In a company-wide town hall, he called news coverage of Facebook’s privacy abuses, for which Facebook would face multiple regulatory fines, “bullshit.” He dressed down Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s second-ranked executive and his longtime advisor. Facebook hired a dark-arts PR firm, which seeded disparaging information, some of it false, about Facebook’s critics. Prominent investors in the venture-capitalist class announced that the Valley was at war with a dishonest national media looking to punish them for their success.

…

Pattison’s office activated its contacts in Silicon Valley. “I made this pitch on a human level: ‘Go back to your companies, get ready, start pulling together teams,’” he has recalled telling them. He set up calls between Tedros and the heads of Facebook, Google, and other platforms. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg suggested the WHO set up pages on WhatsApp and Facebook to post updates and answer user questions. On February 13, two weeks after the spread of the virus now known as Covid-19 had been declared a global emergency, Pattison landed in California for a meeting, hosted at Facebook, with Silicon Valley’s top firms.

…

Just as quickly as they rolled back reforms, Silicon Valley leaders also began questioning how much responsibility they really had to change anything at all. “I think these events were largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate, don’t have our standards, and don’t have our transparency,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s second in command, said of the January 6 insurrection. Her comments, though widely derided outside the Valley, sent a clear signal within it: we’re digging in. A few days later, Adam Mosseri, the former news-feed chief who now ran Instagram, said that while January 6 would “mark a big shift” in society’s relationship to technology, it was important not to overcorrect.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

David Bank, “Why Sun Thinks Hot Java Will Give You a Lift,” San Jose Mercury News, March 23, 1995, 1A; Karen Southwick, High Noon: The Inside Story of Scott McNealy and the Rise of Sun Microsystems (New York: Wiley, 1999), 131. 8. Malia Wollan, “Before Sheryl Sandberg Was Kim Polese – the Original Silicon Valley Queen,” The Telegraph.co.uk, November 11, 2013, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/people-in-technology/10430933/Before-Sheryl-Sandberg-was-Kim-Polese-the-original-Silicon-Valley-queen.html, archived at https://perma.cc/Z7Y6-G2HM [inactive]. 9. Elizabeth Corcoran, “Mother Hen to an Industry,” The Washington Post, October 13, 1996, H1. 10.

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Schmidt hadn’t been the VCs’ first choice, but his technical smarts and management credentials made him the perfect fit for a company that venerated engineering above all else. With Schmidt came others from beyond the intimate, Stanford-centric world of early Google. One notable hire came from Washington: Sheryl Sandberg, former chief of staff to the U.S. Treasury Secretary, whom Schmidt brought in to grow Google’s advertising operations. Then there was Bill Campbell, the Kodak executive who had come to Apple at the start of the Sculley years and had gone on to helm the business software powerhouse Intuit. Campbell was now Silicon Valley’s beloved “Coach,” often brought in by VCs to give encouragement and enlarge the worldview of boy-wonder founders.

…

The Valley’s Internet-era inner circle had become funders and close advisors. Peter Thiel had given Facebook its first big investment back in 2004 and was a board member. Marc Andreessen was a mentor as well, meeting Zuckerberg regularly for hash-and-egg breakfasts at a local diner. Star executives had joined from Yahoo! and Google, including Sheryl Sandberg, who became the company’s chief operating officer in 2007. Gone was the hyper-macho culture of earlier Valley giants like Intel and Sun; Facebook’s top people were a tight and friendly team, passionate about the value of their product. “Technology does not need to estrange us from one another,” declared senior executive Chris Cox, well-known around the company for the upbeat speeches he delivered to new hires.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

While the percentage of computer and information sciences degrees women earned rose from 14 percent to 37 percent between 1970 and 1985, that share declined to 18 percent by 2008.15 An article in the New York Times about gender and tech reported on the barriers women face in Silicon Valley: Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Yahoo!’s Marissa Mayer excepted, the notion of the boy genius prevails. Over 85 percent of venture capitalists are men looking to invest in other men, and women make forty-nine cents for every dollar their male counterparts rake in. Though 40 percent of private businesses are women-owned nationwide, only 8 percent of the venture-backed tech start-ups are.

…

Meanwhile, the personal and the commercial further merged through the arrival of “social ads,” which allow marketers to turn our actions into advertisements, transforming everything we do into a form of promotion. If you “like” a product, your picture will appear, endorsing it on a friend’s page. “This is in many ways the Holy Grail of marketing: making your customers your marketers,” said Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, and so far it seems to work.53 An analysis by Nielsen “found that people who viewed ads displaying a friend’s endorsement were 68 percent more likely to remember the ad than were people who saw a plain display ad” and that “they were more than four times as likely to say they intended to purchase the advertised product.”

The Facebook era: tapping online social networks to build better products, reach new audiences, and sell more stuff by Clara Shih

Benchmark Capital, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, glass ceiling, jimmy wales, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, pets.com, pre–internet, rolodex, Salesforce, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social web, software as a service, tacit knowledge, Tony Hsieh, web application

Force.com for Facebook makes it easy for Facebook developers to build enterprise social apps on Force.com’s global, trusted enterprise infrastructure. At salesforce.com, we’ve spent the last ten years building out enterprise-grade functionality like workflow, security, multilanguage and multicurrency, and integration services “in the cloud” so that developers can focus on innovation, not infrastructure. Both Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer at Facebook, and I believe that this partnership will enable a whole new class of business applications inside Facebook, such as truly social CRM. The Service Cloud and Sales Cloud, our set of technologies that allow customer service reps and sales reps to tap the knowledge of customer conversations taking place on social networks, are proof that social CRM is real.

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The Camp Amelia team who first taught me in Ghana many summers ago that nothing can’t be solved by the power of human connection and compassion, sometimes with the help of technology—Shirley Somuah, David Weekly, Katie Kollitz, Mel Burns, Nina Hsu, Sandy Yu, Julie Zhuo, Brandon Burr, Andy Szybalski, Camille Hearst, Shona Brown, Marina Remennik, Herb Walberg, Feliz Swapp, and the many thousands of kids around the world who have gone through our programs and curriculum. Todd Perry, without whose help on Faceconnector (formerly Faceforce), none of this would have ever happened. Dave Morin, Sheryl Sandberg, Elliot Schrage, Kelly Winters, and David Swain at Facebook for the historic partnership between our two companies that bring together social networking and enterprise applications and are making into reality many of the ideas in this book. Charlene Li, Dave McClure, Don Tapscott, Kevin Efrusy, Sramana Mitra, Tony Perkins, and Timothy Chou for their wisdom, thought leadership, and willingness to help with this manuscript despite having some of the industry’s busiest schedules.

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

We thus almost have a moral obligation to reveal our true selves on the network, to participate in the real-time confessional of our brightly lit global village. That’s why the socially autistic Zuckerberg believes that we only have “one identity,” telling Kirkpatrick that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”97 And it’s why Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, says that “you can’t be on Facebook without being your authentic self.”98 But this, like so much else that Zuckerberg and Sandberg say, is entirely wrong. Having multiple identities—as a citizen, a friend, a worker, a woman, a parent, an online buddy—is actually an example of somebody with so much integrity that they are unable to compromise their different social roles.

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“What I missed most about not having a label wasn’t the monetary investment, but the right to be quiet, the insulation provided from incessant self-promotion,” Simone writes. “I was a singer, not a saleswoman. Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur.”25 None of this impacts Silicon Valley’s gilded class. Some—like Google’s Eric Schmidt, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman—are also part of that tiny elite of best-selling celebrity authors. Indeed, Hoffman’s 2012 bestseller was titled The Start-up of You and advised everyone to think about their professional life as if it were an entrepreneurial project. But for those insiders who didn’t get multimillion-dollar book contracts to write about their own success, there’s always the Huffington Post—a platform designed for celebrities to post free content that peddles their own agendas, personal brands, or companies.

Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power by Rose Hackman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, cognitive load, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Graeber, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, game design, glass ceiling, immigration reform, invisible hand, job automation, lockdown, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, performance metric, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Her mother was among the first generation of women who entered previously male-dominated white-collar industries en masse in the second half of the twentieth century.22 The figure of a corporate woman was normal to her, and she had good reason to believe her qualifications combined with her natural intelligence, charm, and assertiveness would all work in her favor as she sought to get ahead. Only a few years prior, in 2010, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, delivered a viral TED Talk titled “Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders” that was followed by a 2013 bestselling book, Lean In.23 Her insight promised younger women like Devin the tools to not just enter former male-dominated industries but do what few women of older generations had managed once they were there: climb up the corporate ladder and thrive.

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Caroline Criado-Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (New York: Abrams Press, 2019). 21.  “Droit du Seigneur,” Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed December 17, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/topic/droit-du-seigneur. 22.  “White-Collar,” Cambridge English Dictionary, accessed July 28, 2020, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/white-collar. 23.  Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), accessed January 20, 2021, https://leanin.org/book. 24.  According to the nonprofit organization that was created in the book’s name; “About,” Lean In, accessed July 29, 2020, https://leanin.org/about. 25.  “How Millennials Get News: Inside the Habits of America’s First Digital Generation,” American Press Institute, March 16, 2015, https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/survey-research/millennials-news/. 26.  

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Airbnb, airport security, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Burning Man, business logic, Celtic Tiger, centralized clearinghouse, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, content marketing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, drop ship, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, Gary Kildall, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hacker News, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, information security, interest rate swap, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, second-price auction, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Socratic dialogue, source of truth, Steve Jobs, tech worker, telemarketer, the long tail, undersea cable, urban renewal, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, éminence grise

An adjoining minikitchen, like so many that littered the campus, stocked plenty of lemon-lime Gatorade, Zuck’s official beverage. Inside Facebook’s campus, geography was destiny, and your physical proximity to Zuck was a clear indicator of your importance. Along the periphery of the L ran the exclusive conference rooms of Facebook’s five business-unit leaders. Zuck’s desk neighbors at that point were Sheryl Sandberg, the star chief operating officer (COO) of Facebook; Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, the engineering director who had created News Feed; and Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technical officer (CTO). None of them were at their desks as I strode in from the courtyard that afternoon. Unlike much of the user-facing side of Facebook, the Ads team was held at arm’s length, as if it was a pair of sweaty underwear, in the next building over.

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Dan looked up at the screen as if noticing the kitten pics for the first time, and then turned to Sheryl and answered, almost under his breath: “Well . . . for demo purposes we don’t show really bad photos . . . so the engineers use kittens instead. Because, you know . . . kittens and cats are like, pu—” He stopped right there, but he almost said “pussy” in front of the Queen of Lean, Sheryl Sandberg. “Got it!” she expectorated. After sucking in a lungful of air, as if loading for a verbal barrage, she continued. “If there were women on that team, they’d NEVER, EVER choose those photos as demo pics. I think you should change them immediately!” Before the salvo had even finished Dan’s head was bowed, and he was madly taking notes in a small notebook.

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That might explain why his lips were hermetically sealed to her ass. “How’d that go?” “Well, she basically convinced me by saying: ‘Look, I either hire you now and you come work for Facebook, or a year from now I’ll hire you to work for the guy whose job I’m offering you right now.’ And that’s what convinced me.” Oh, Sheryl Sandberg and her wiles. So that’s how you seduced the Bolands of the world: you offered them a rung up on the ladder they thought they’d miss out on otherwise. By the time I had gotten Boland’s informal CV, we’d arrived at Willows. In a second, I understood the charm of owning your own bar or restaurant, as the idle wealthy often did.

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Clayton Christensen, data acquisition, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, do what you love, escalation ladder, fear of failure, Google Earth, haute couture, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, rolodex, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, SpaceShipOne, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, time dilation, Virgin Galactic, Walter Mischel, X Prize

And certainly, lateralization isn’t the only way to shift paradigms, but on the flow path, it’s often the only way forward. Sooner or later, there’s always a Jaws: a mental hurdle we can’t clear, a decision too dangerous to attack head on. In those situations, sideways is forward. Plus, these days, sideways is often the way life works. “Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder,” wrote Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in her book Lean In, and she’s not wrong. Statistics vary, but today, the average person changes jobs seven times between ages eighteen and forty. Most important, there’s momentum on the flow path. Lateralization allows you to hold on to that thrust no matter the circumstances. Momentum over time—that’s the invisible kung fu.

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Jamie Wheal: Jamie Wheal, AI, July 2012. 123 “I grew up watching the greatest show on earth”: All of the Ian Walsh quotes and details were garnered in an interview conducted February 2013. 124 The article: Michael Shapiro, “On One Breath,” Hana Hou! The Magazine of Hawaiian Airlines, August/September 2008. 125 the ride was his: See: http://xxl11.billabong.com/archive/roty. 126 “Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder”: Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (Knopf, 2013), p. 53. 8. THE WE OF FLOW 128 Mark Powell who first solved these issues: Steven Roper, Camp 4: Recollections of a Yosemite Rock Climber (The Mountaineers, 1994), pp. 83–87. “He knew that a person who didn’t mind a little hardship”: Ibid. 129 “Powell distinguished himself”: Joseph Taylor III, Pilgrims of the Vertical: Yosemite Rock Climbers and Nature at Risk (Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 134. 130 “When you play in ensembles”: Unless otherwise noted, all Keith Sawyer information in this chapter comes from a series of interviews conducted between August 2012 and July 2013. 131 “Surgeons say that during a difficult operation”: Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, p. 65.

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, food desert, Google X / Alphabet X, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

The article, with the provocative headline “Death to Core Competency,” suggests that whatever a company’s specialty product or service might be—whatever got you to where you are today—might not be the thing that gets you to the next level. Even newer companies must make these kinds of major shifts:12 In 2008, Facebook—having already achieved remarkable early growth in terms of attracting nearly 100 million users—brought in a new executive, Sheryl Sandberg, who reportedly posed a fundamental question to the company’s leaders and employees: What business was Facebook in? With all of its rapid subscriber growth, the company had yet to settle on a model for making money. Sandberg’s question prompted internal debate—and resulted in a new strategy that was much more advertising-focused.

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CEO,” Fast Company, September 2010. 10 Are we really who we say we are? . . . Polly LaBarre, “Hit Man,” Fast Company, August 31, 2002. 11 Fast Company pointed out that a . . . Austin Carr, “Death to Core Competency,” Fast Company, February 14, 2013. 12 Even newer companies must make these kinds of major shifts . . . Sheryl Sandberg’s question-driven initiative was described by Kurt Eichenwald, “Facebook Leans In,” Vanity Fair, May 2013. 13 Early in its history, the microprocessor . . . This famous story from Intel’s early history appears in many articles and sites, but I came across it on the website for the Center for Applied Rationality, http://rationality.org/rationality/. 14 Jack Bergstrand of Brand Velocity thinks . . .

How to Work Without Losing Your Mind by Cate Sevilla

Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, emotional labour, gender pay gap, Girl Boss, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, imposter syndrome, job satisfaction, lockdown, microaggression, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, remote working, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Skype, tech bro, TED Talk, women in the workforce, work culture

The problem is, with very rare exceptions, no matter how many times I read these quotes or watch their TED Talks or even purchase their books, with all due respect, I just never know what the fuck they’re on about. I mean … ‘Empathetic instincts, when coupled with operating rigor, drive a leadership style in which everybody wins.’ Fran Hauser, The Myth of the Nice Girl ‘We must raise both the ceiling and the floor.’ Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In ‘I’m a workaholic and I don’t believe in “no”. If I’m not sleeping, nobody’s sleeping.’ Beyoncé Knowles Whenever I read this sort of stuff my face literally turns into the ‘calculating lady’ meme. There’s a lot of chat about ceilings (and floors) and nonsensical methodologies and general smugness about being a supposed boss lady.

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We’ll do the SEO thing.’ They apologized, admitting it ‘might come across as sexist and demeaning to women’ and said it was taking steps to remove ‘girl’ from the advert. The term ‘girlboss’ was made known to most by Nasty Gal founder Sophia Amoruso with her 2014 business memoir called #GIRLBOSS. Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In organization also helped propel this idea of ‘boss women’ with their 2014 ‘Ban Bossy’ campaign5 – the launch video of which featured Beyoncé confidently saying, ‘I’m not bossy, I’m the boss.’ While Sandberg and Amoruso disagreed on whether or not you should call a woman ‘bossy’6 – ‘girlboss’ and its many derivatives and colloquial cousins have survived long past their period of favour amongst most millennial feminists.

No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings, Erin Meyer

Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, FedEx blackjack story, global village, hiring and firing, job-hopping, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, late fees, loose coupling, loss aversion, out of africa, performance metric, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, super pumped, tech worker, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, work culture

Netflix culture, on the other hand, is famous—or infamous, depending on your point of view—for telling it like it is. Millions of businesspeople have studied the Netflix Culture Deck, a set of 127 slides originally intended for internal use but that Reed shared widely on the internet in 2009. Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, reportedly said that the Culture Deck “may well be the most important document ever to come out of Silicon Valley.” I loved the Netflix Culture Deck for its honesty. And I loathed it for its content. Below is a sample so you can see why. Quite apart from the question of whether it is ethical to fire hardworking employees who don’t manage to do extraordinary work, these slides struck me as pure bad management.

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We don’t emulate these top-down models, because we believe we are fastest and most innovative when employees throughout the company make and own decisions. At Netflix, we strive to develop good decision-making muscles everywhere in our company—and we pride ourselves on how few decisions senior management makes. Awhile back, Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook spent a day shadowing me at work. She attended all of my meetings and one-on-ones. It’s something I do occasionally with other Silicon Valley executives, so we can learn from watching one another in action. Afterward, when Sheryl and I debriefed, she said, “The amazing thing was to sit with you all day long and see that you didn’t make one decision!”

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality by Blake J. Harris

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, airport security, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, call centre, Carl Icahn, company town, computer vision, cryptocurrency, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, financial independence, game design, Grace Hopper, hype cycle, illegal immigration, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, sensor fusion, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, unpaid internship, white picket fence

It was mostly because it was Mark Zuckerberg, but Iribe and Malamed had also started throwing around a crazy idea: What if a company like Facebook led our Series C? It wasn’t the type of thing Facebook had done before, but, hey, there’s a first time for everything, right? “TURN TO YOUR RIGHT,” IRIBE SUGGESTED, WALKING ZUCKERBERG THROUGH A demo in Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s conference room. Donning one of Oculus’ Crystal Cove headsets and trying out the Tuscany demo, Zuckerberg tentatively swiveled his head. “Now try leaning forward,” Iribe said, highlight Crystal Cove’s positional tracking. Beside Zuckerberg was Ondrejka, gleefully watching his boss amble through virtual environments.

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A few weeks later, in an op-ed for the Iowa Gazette, Hillary Clinton reaffirmed her support for the federal ethanol mandate.5 JUNE On June 22—with Facebook pondering a multibillion-dollar acquisition of Unity (in a deal codenamed “One”)—Zuckerberg laid out his vision and strategy for VR/AR to Iribe, Sheryl Sandberg, Mike Schroepfer, Amin Zoufonoun and four other Facebook VPs: “Beyond the sheer value we can deliver to humanity by accelerating and shaping the development of this technology,” Zuckerberg wrote, “we have three primary business goals.” The first goal was strategic. “We are vulnerable on mobile to Google and Apple,” he wrote, “because they make major mobile platforms.

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Brendan was the obvious answer, but even though he wasn’t totally into really open systems, he hadn’t imposed his will on DK1 or DK2. So why start now? He wouldn’t. Which meant . . . “Yup,” Luckey nodded. “Marky Z.” “Oh man,” Chen said, shaking his head and laughing. “I’m glad I got out when I did!” Chapter 39 Lockdown January/February 2016 ALONG WITH A TRIO OF OTHER EXECUTIVES—SHERYL SANDBERG, DEBORAH Crawford, and Dave Wehner—Mark Zuckerberg addressed a handful of financial analysts during the Facebook’s year-end Earnings Call on January 27. “Overall Q4 was a strong quarter and a great end to the year,” Zuckerberg said. “More than 1.59 billion people now use Facebook each month . . . and when it comes to our business, we’re also pleased with our continued growth.”

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

They permit collaborative structures that would have been unthinkable just a decade back. Even better, in many cases, these structures are self-organizing. If the community has been set up in the right way, then growth happens organically, without need for too much direct intervention or intensive capital spends. For example, after Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg wrote Lean In, her bestselling book on empowering women to pursue their ambitions, she decided to capture the energy it was generating by building an online women’s community. As part of their growth strategy, one of their ideas was to create Lean In circles—local groups of eight to ten women coming together to share experiences and offer support.

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Simply highlighting members’ contributions or achievements also enhances their reputation. 2. The Meet-up. The goal is to generate real emotions, and nothing works better than live bodies in a room together. Even better, if you can figure out how to make these meet-ups self-organizing—such as Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In circles—you are getting all the benefits of deep engagement with far less effort. Of course, if you can’t get everybody together physically, get them together virtually, though don’t be afraid of hosting a structured discussion. People are busy. Drawing up boundary lines and focusing the conversation is a great way of showing folks that you respect their time. 3.

The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, Chris Yeh

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, centralized clearinghouse, cloud computing, disruptive innovation, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, new economy, pre–internet, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, Steve Jobs

The members of the executive team select people into this hand-picked group on the basis of their contributions to the company as employees, contributions to the company as alumni, or accomplishments in the industry over their careers. To these distinguished alumni, LinkedIn extends special invitations to events on campus, such as judging hackathons or attending fireside chats between Reid and outside guests such as Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg. Together, these corporate alumni programs impose little incremental cost on LinkedIn. As noted, much of the content is repurposed from existing initiatives, and the few out-of-pocket costs like gifts for candidate referrals or network intelligence are minimal in comparison with alternatives like paying recruiting fees or hiring consultants and outside analysts.

Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

But in spite of these measures, social media remain polluted by misinformation and disinformation, not only because of their own internal mechanisms, which privilege sensational content, or because of the speed and volume of posts, but also thanks to the actions of malicious actors who seek to game them.191 For example, in spite of widespread revelations of Russian influence operations over social media in 2016, two years later researchers posing as Russian trolls were still able to buy political ads on Google, even paying in Russian currency, registering from a Russian zip code, and using indicators linking their advertisements to the Internet Research Agency — the very trolling farm that was the subject of intense congressional scrutiny and indictments by Robert Mueller.192 In similar fashion, despite all the attention given and promises made to control misinformation about COVID-19 on its platform, an April 2020 study by the Markup found that Facebook was nonetheless still allowing advertisers to target users who the company believes are interested in “pseudoscience” — a category of roughly 78 million people. In testimony before the U.S. Congress, Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg made a startling admission193: that from October to March 2018, Facebook deleted 1.3 billion fake accounts. In July 2018, Twitter was deleting on the order of a million accounts a day, and had deleted 70 million fake Twitter accounts between May and June 2018 alone.194 The revelations caused Twitter’s share price to drop by 8 percent — a good indication of the type of business disincentives working against digging too deep into one’s own platform in the search for fake accounts.

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Science, 359(6380), 1146–1151. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap9559 Researchers posing as Russian trolls were still able to buy political ads: Warzel, C. (2018, September 4). This group posed as Russian trolls and bought political ads on Google. It was easy. Retrieved from https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/researchers-posed-as-trolls-bought-google-ads Sheryl Sandberg made a startling admission: Vaidhyanathan, S. (2018, September 5). Why Facebook will never be free of fakes. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/facebook-sandberg-congress.html Twitter was deleting on the order of a million accounts a day: Spangler, T. (2018, July 9).

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises by Timothy F. Geithner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Buckminster Fuller, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Brooks, Doomsday Book, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, implied volatility, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, Northern Rock, obamacare, paradox of thrift, pets.com, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tobin tax, too big to fail, working poor

In my twelve-year initial stint at Treasury, I caught many glimpses of Washington’s pettiness and dysfunction, but I also got a somewhat unrealistic view of the positive impact that public servants could have on the world. That debt relief legislation, for example, included a $50 million U.S. contribution to a global vaccination fund that Sheryl Sandberg, Larry’s chief of staff, and I had championed. These were good causes, and we were able to do something valuable for countless people we would never meet. I HAD started at Treasury as a civil servant, but I was now an appointee in a Democratic administration. So when President Bush took office, it was time for me to leave.

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Risk consistently migrated to institutions that had fewer constraints than banks and did not have access to the government safety net. Source: Federal Reserve Board. In those early months, I often joked that being president of the New York Fed was like being the Wizard of Oz; my friend and former Treasury colleague Sheryl Sandberg, who had become a vice president at Google, used to call me the man behind the curtain. There was a widespread perception that we had awesome powers to fight financial fires, but when I studied our actual firefighting equipment—cataloged in a New York Fed binder known internally as “the Doomsday Book”—I was not particularly impressed.

…

I was probably overprotective of my colleagues in the foxhole—and overly defensive about my own role—but I told Larry that it was bad form for a former Treasury secretary to second-guess a successor in public, and that not even he could imagine the constraints Ben and Hank faced. “You have no idea how hard this is,” I said. I TRAVELED with my family to California in February to look at colleges for my daughter, Elise, but again, I wasn’t really with them. We stayed with my former Treasury colleague Sheryl Sandberg, who was especially close with Elise, but I spent most of the time on my cell phone. We also spent a few days at Big Sur, staying at a hotel that had yurts overlooking the ocean. This time, I spent most of the time on a satellite phone; I had to drive to the edge of a cliff just to get a signal, and spent hours in a light rain on call after call.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

The main consequence of the change was to amplify misinformation and political polarization, as lies and misleading posts spread rapidly from user to user. The change did not just affect the company’s then almost 2.5 billion users; billions more people who were not on the platform were also indirectly affected by the political fallout from the resulting misinformation. The decision was made by Zuckerberg; the company’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg; and a few other top engineers and executives. Facebook users and citizens of affected democracies were not consulted. What propelled the Chinese Communist Party’s and Facebook’s decisions? In neither case were they dictated by the nature of science and technology. Nor were they the obvious next step in some inexorable march of progress.

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The initiative was immediately seen to be a colossal violation of user privacy and was discontinued. The company needed to forge an approach that combined a massive amount of data collection for digital advertisements and at least some amount of user control. The person who made this a reality was Sheryl Sandberg, who had been in charge of Google’s AdWords and had been instrumental in the transformation of that company into a targeted-ad machine. In 2008 she was hired at Facebook as chief operating officer. Sandberg understood how to make this combination work and also the potential that Facebook had in this space: the company could create new demand for products, and thus for advertising, by leveraging its knowledge about users’ social circles and preferences.

…

Material in this section builds on Isaacson (2014) and Markoff (2015). “In this paper…” is from the abstract in Brin and Page (1998). Page, “amazingly…,” is from Isaacson (2014, 458). The Socially Bankrupt Web. Material in this section draws on Frenkel and Kang (2021), which is also the source for Sheryl Sandberg, “[W]hat we believe we’ve done is…” (2021, 61). Look-alike audiences and “a way your ads can reach…” are from the Meta Business Help Center, www.facebook.com/business/help/164749007013531?id=401668390442328. The mental health effects of Facebook’s expansion are from Braghieri, Levy, and Makarin (2022) and O’Neil (2022).

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, clean tech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor

Learning about startups is worthless if you’re just reading stories about people who won the lottery. Slot Machines for Dummies can purport to tell you which kind of rabbit’s foot to rub or how to tell which machines are “hot,” but it can’t tell you how to win. Did Bill Gates simply win the intelligence lottery? Was Sheryl Sandberg born with a silver spoon, or did she “lean in”? When we debate historical questions like these, luck is in the past tense. Far more important are questions about the future: is it a matter of chance or design? CAN YOU CONTROL YOUR FUTURE? You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain.

Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age by Michael Wolff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Carl Icahn, commoditize, creative destruction, digital divide, disintermediation, Golden age of television, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Joseph Schumpeter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, telemarketer, the medium is the message, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Mark Zuckerberg is a technology-focused multibillionaire who believes his company offers a central piece of functionality in everybody’s life. He seems at best impatient with if not contemptuous of media. From the beginning of his career and the earliest days of Facebook he has made sour pronouncements about advertising, seeing it, apparently, as a transitional revenue phase for the company. Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s president, the default public presence for Zuckerberg who seemingly would rather not be publicly present, is a government and public affairs bureaucrat, more focused on Facebook’s Wall Street and political brand (and, as the author of the women’s empowerment book Lean In, her own personal brand) than on selling anything.

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert B. Reich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, Carl Icahn, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job automation, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, stock buybacks, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Weill calls Rubin “extremely” helpful to him during his years at Citi, but Weill could not account for what happened after his own departure from the bank in October 2003. (Weill remained nonexecutive chair of the Citigroup board until April 2006.) “Unfortunately, something happened that was not very pleasant for a lot of people and not very pleasant for a lot of people that worked for the company. It was very sad.” Sheryl Sandberg, now the chief operating officer of Facebook, who worked at the Treasury Department under Rubin after she graduated from Harvard Business School in 1995, suspects Rubin was scapegoated for events he could not possibly have controlled. “My own view is that, look, these have been hard times, and people need people to blame.

Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Workflow by Dominica Degrandis, Tonianne Demaria

cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, DevOps, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, loose coupling, microservices, Parkinson's law, Sheryl Sandberg, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, TED Talk, transaction costs, two-pizza team

While the number of minutes available to us each day might be the same, control over what we do with those hours differs significantly. When Elon Musk is faced with too much work-in- progress (WIP), he has the authority to delegate, deprioritize, or simply say no. When variation rears its head and a well-thought- out strategic plan no longer aligns with the organization’s needs, Sheryl Sandberg has the ability to switch gears. And when Jeff Bezos is confronted with conflicting priorities, it is likewise doubtful he needs to seek direction via a convoluted bureaucracy to gain clarity over which course to follow. When these things happen to us (and let’s face it, they often do), we’re faced with a very different set of repercussions than those of our billionaire counterparts.

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte

8-hour work day, affirmative action, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deliberate practice, desegregation, DevOps, East Village, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, game design, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, machine readable, meta-analysis, new economy, profit maximization, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Zipcar, éminence grise

This was about sustainable living, healthy populations, happy families, good business, sound economies, and living a good life. At coffee breaks, some women researchers, who struggled with role overload of their own, shared stories of their young daughters or female students who proclaimed to want anything but their own crazy busy lives. Although Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg would soon tell them to Lean In to their careers and not throttle back on their ambition out of fear there wasn’t enough time to have both a career and a family, the researchers worried that many young women they knew already had. “My daughter decided to become a teacher. Not that she’s passionate about it, but she doesn’t see any other way to have time to work and have a family,” one researcher confided.

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And four in ten women thought so, too,62 percentages that hadn’t moved much from when the question was posed in 1988 and in 1994. The survey does not ask whether married men and fathers of preschoolers should work. The assumption is, clearly, they should. * * * About the time I was exploring the roots of the overwhelm at work, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg made a splash by admitting she left the office at 5:30 to be home for dinner with her two children. I’d heard about high-tech firms’ famous flexible work styles—one former Google exec told me people could work from a beach in Hawaii as long as work got done on time. Sandberg’s confession seemed a hopeful sign that perhaps the new economy jobs of Silicon Valley were liberated from the grip of the ideal worker.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

He spun up teams of lobbyists in every market that mattered. He wanted them ready to deal with an incoming administration that was a friend to unions and an enemy to companies that relied on contract workers. Clinton hadn’t come after Big Tech quite yet; she was closely tied to major donors in the Valley, including Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, and Marc Benioff of Salesforce. But if there was a company a Clinton presidency might come after, it could be the most hated startup in the country: Uber. But Trump’s upset victory caught everyone at Uber off guard. Most of the rank and file, a largely Democratic- and Libertarian-leaning force, were tearing their hair out at the thought of a Trump presidency.

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Rubenstein ultimately decided not to take on Kalanick as a client, though he would cross paths again with Kalanick less than a month later. But as a parting gift, Rubenstein offered two pieces of advice: First, Kalanick had to “find his Sheryl,” a reference to Mark Zuckerberg’s relationship with Sheryl Sandberg, then widely considered a competent counterbalance to Zuck’s leadership. Second, he said Kalanick needed to take a leave of absence. “You either shoot yourself in the foot, or the press will end up shooting you in the head.” ¶¶¶¶¶¶¶ One witness to the confrontation between Hazelbaker and Kalanick recalled the communications executive using far more colorful vocabulary during the encounter.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar

CHAPTER 20 Community-Adjusted Profit Despite being at the company just three years, Artie Minson by 2018 had already survived several near-death experiences on the stomach-churning and turbulent ride of WeWork senior leadership. Minson was hired in 2015 to be an adult in the room at WeWork, a move pushed on Neumann by investors, including Benchmark and Michael Eisenberg. Neumann made him the president and chief operating officer—akin to Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, the deputy to Mark Zuckerberg. By year two, Minson had fallen from grace. Neumann cited frustrations over delays in new building openings as he pushed Minson to the sidelines. His new role was a more narrow one as chief financial officer—a humiliating reassignment. Until then, Minson had enjoyed a nearly friction-free upward career trajectory.

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Without hesitation, Neumann replied, “Me.” CHAPTER 26 Both Mark and Sheryl In Silicon Valley, it had become conventional wisdom that a visionary founder should hire a business-focused right-hand operator to bring the business into shape. Under Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, there was Sheryl Sandberg. At Google, the co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, tapped Eric Schmidt, and later Sundar Pichai, to be their CEO while the founders took more ceremonial roles or pursued pet projects. Adam Neumann, though, trusted few. Why would he cede control? As far as he was concerned, he was the one with the skills needed to run WeWork—from vision to detailed operations.

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America by Sarah Kendzior

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, clean water, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, gentrification, George Santayana, glass ceiling, income inequality, independent contractor, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, payday loans, pink-collar, post-work, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

When they attempt to return to the workforce, their years at home are held against them, considered a “blank spot” on the résumé—a blank spot with a reason so obvious and laudable and often involuntary that it is sick we deride it as “choice.” Careers Are Not Pursued by Choice Corporate feminists like Sheryl Sandberg frame female success as a matter of attitude. But it is really a matter of money—or the lack thereof. For all but the fortunate few, American motherhood is making sure you have enough lifeboats for your sinking ship. American motherhood is a cost-cutting, debt-dodging scramble somehow interpreted as a series of purposeful moves.

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future by Julia Hobsbawm

8-hour work day, Airbnb, augmented reality, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cal Newport, call centre, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Graeber, death from overwork, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, digital nomad, driverless car, emotional labour, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Greensill Capital, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Ocado, pensions crisis, remote working, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, social distancing, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Upton Sinclair, WeWork, work culture

Two kinds of network began to thrive as people needed them to both ‘level up’ politically but also as the white-collar job market became increasingly competitive and insecure as a result of globalisation. On the one hand there were support networks based around identity focusing on disability, gender or sexual orientation, and on the other social networks often industry-led which focused more on areas of special interest or skill. Pamela Ryckman’s book Stiletto Network and Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, both published in 2013, drew on both kinds of network, and contributed to the movements that produced political gains in the boardroom and indeed the rise of #metoo. These networks directly challenged inequality and led to a more meritocratic social approach. Such was their success that networks were more widely appreciated as more people began to experience their benefits.3 The Co-Working Years were also marked by a huge upswing in conferences and a study of professional women across America in 2018 showed that women’s chances of promotion doubled if they belonged to certain conference circuits and networks.4 LinkedIn, the pre-eminent social network for professionals with 750 million members, began to take off in 2006, on the cusp of this period.5 It launched as a platform to showcase and circulate your professional CV.

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

At Baker’s suggestion, most of the dormitories and instructors’ houses were named after secretaries of the Treasury—Alexander Hamilton, Albert Gallatin, Salmon Chase, Hugh McCulloch, John Sherman, Carter Glass, and Andrew Mellon. While Baker obviously saw himself and his friend Morgan as public servants of a sort, only one HBS grad has actually gone on to serve as Treasury secretary—Hank Paulson, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs who served under President George W. Bush. (Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, came close, serving as chief of staff to Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary Larry Summers.) The McKim, Mead & White plan resulted in a campus built in a huddle, not opened up to the outside, but rather turned inward, an architectural metaphor for the still closely huddled denizens of a School accustomed to receiving periodic and sharp criticism, including from across the Charles River itself.

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Dean Nitin Nohria made inclusion one of the main goals of his administration, but the School’s bungling of the solution to at least one part of the problem—the grading differential—was laid out in a scathing New York Times exposé in September 2013. (More on that in chapter 61.) Today, the School counts a remarkably long list of prominent females among its alumni, including Meg Whitman (’79), the CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and former CEO of eBay; Sheryl Sandberg (’95), the chief operating officer of Facebook; Claudia Sender (’02), the CEO of TAM, Brazil’s largest airline; Ann Moore (’78), the former CEO of Time Inc.; Judy Dimon (’82), who has a storied career in nonprofit and philanthropic work, particularly education, and is the wife of classmate Jamie Dimon; Barbara Franklin (’64), the secretary of commerce under George H.

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That made him de facto partners with Amy Pascal, Sony’s studio chief. At that point, Lynton was a journeyman HBS CEO—he’d run Penguin Books and AOL Europe. And he leaned in to the HBS network with particular enthusiasm, doing such things as arranging for a film audition for the niece of billionaire hedge funder Leon Black (’75) and plotting with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (’95) to see if they could find the right blind date for New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell.3 The Lynton/Pascal partnership worked for a decade, but by 2013, there was trouble. Activist hedge fund manager Dan Loeb took aim at Sony Corporation, buying more than 6 percent of its shares, and demanded that the company—particularly Sony Pictures—get its financial house in order.

Maeve in America: Essays by a Girl From Somewhere Else by Maeve Higgins

Black Lives Matter, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, imposter syndrome, Jon Ronson, Lyft, place-making, quantum entanglement, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, Snapchat

It would be remiss of me not to curtsy as I mention Queen Maeve, the “Warrior Queen” of the West of Ireland, said to have existed sometime between 50 BCE and 50 CE, if in fact she did exist. It’s not known if she was even a real person to begin with, or just a complete myth. Here is what we know for sure about that real person, or myth, from the Internet. Queen Maeve was queen of the West of Ireland and she had a Sheryl Sandberg attitude about gender equality and the pay gap. She leaned all the way in. Under the Brehon laws of ancient Ireland women had equality with men: they had the power to raise their own armies, hold their own property, participate in the court system as lawyers and judges, as well as pick their own partners.

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

"Susan Fowler" uber, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, job automation, Kickstarter, lifelogging, lolcat, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, real-name policy, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Tactical Technology Collective, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

So she started talking with other women of color and found that their experiences were similar: they felt ignored or overlooked in a sea of white faces. It’s not just Grace Hopper. You can’t throw a pebble in Palo Alto without hitting a corporate-funded “diversity” event these days—like the “Lean In” circles that Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg advocated in her book of the same name, or the ubiquitous code camps for kids from low-income homes put on by companies like Google. But what Thomas experienced convinced her that it’s not really about the pipeline. The tech industry just isn’t looking for people of color—even when those candidates are right in front of them, like she was at Grace Hopper.

Damsel in Distressed: My Life in the Golden Age of Hedge Funds by Dominique Mielle

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, fear of failure, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, glass ceiling, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, profit maximization, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, satellite internet, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, Sheryl Sandberg, SoftBank, survivorship bias, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, tulip mania, union organizing

Alas, it is hard to so thoroughly miss the point. Does he ever watch sports? It isn’t the best talent that wins; it’s the best team. A great baseball team doesn’t have nine great hitters. Even I know that, and no one ever called me a sports fan. Absent both incentives and impetus, no amount of Sheryl Sandberg’s call to “lean in” will make a difference to average numbers. At the margin, will it help some women forge a trailblazing path? Absolutely. Just as I hope that my own technique will. In keeping with a two-word commandment, I opt to hang on. Or I raise you to three: stick with it. As for societal changes, however, a motto will not do.

Generations: the Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future by Jean M. Twenge

1960s counterculture, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, critical race theory, David Brooks, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McJob, meta-analysis, microaggression, Neil Armstrong, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ralph Nader, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, superstar cities, tech baron, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

POPULATION IN 2020) 62.7% White 12.8% Black 16.6% Hispanic 6.7% Asian, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander 1.2% Native American Parents: Silent and Boomers Children: Millennials, Gen Z, Polars Grandchildren: Polars and post-Polars MOST POPULAR FIRST NAMES * First appearance on the list Boys Michael Jason* David Christopher* John James Robert Girls Lisa Jennifer* Karen Mary Kimberly* Susan Michelle* Amy* Heather* Angela* Jessica* Amanda* FAMOUS MEMBERS (BIRTH YEAR) Actors, Comedians, Filmmakers Ben Stiller (1965) Chris Rock (1965) Brooke Shields (1965) Viola Davis (1965) Adam Sandler (1966) John Cusack (1966) Jim Gaffigan (1966) Julia Roberts (1967) Jimmy Kimmel (1967) Will Ferrell (1967) Will Smith (1968) Molly Ringwald (1968) Anthony Michael Hall (1968) John Singleton (1968) Margaret Cho (1968) Jennifer Lopez (1969) Jennifer Aniston (1969) Matthew McConaughey (1969) Wes Anderson (1969) Ken Jeong (1969) Julie Bowen (1970) Matt Damon (1970) Tina Fey (1970) Melissa McCarthy (1970) Ethan Hawke (1970) Kevin Smith (1970) Sarah Silverman (1970) Winona Ryder (1971) Amy Poehler (1971) Gwyneth Paltrow (1972) Ava DuVernay (1972) Sofia Vergara (1972) Seth Meyers (1973) Kristen Wiig (1973) Dave Chappelle (1973) Wilson Cruz (1973) Jimmy Fallon (1974) Leonardo DiCaprio (1974) Drew Barrymore (1975) Angelina Jolie (1975) Zach Braff (1975) John Cena (1977) James Franco (1978) Katie Holmes (1978) Ashton Kutcher (1978) Andy Samberg (1978) Jason Momoa (1979) Jordan Peele (1979) Mindy Kaling (1979) Claire Danes (1979) Musicians and Artists Janet Jackson (1966) Kurt Cobain (1967) Liz Phair (1967) Jay-Z (1969) Gwen Stefani (1969) Queen Latifah (1970) Tupac Shakur (1971) Snoop Dogg (1971) Eminem (1972) Jewel (1974) Lauryn Hill (1975) Blake Shelton (1976) Kanye West (1977) John Legend (1978) Entrepreneurs and Businesspeople Michael Dell (1965) Peter Thiel (1967) Sheryl Sandberg (1969) Elon Musk (1971) Larry Page (1973) Sergey Brin (1973) Sean Parker (1979) Politicians, Judges, and Activists Brett Kavanaugh (1965) Kevin McCarthy (1965) Neil Gorsuch (1967) Gavin Newsom (1967) John Fetterman (1969) Paul Ryan (1970) Ted Cruz (1970) Ketanji Brown Jackson (1970) Hakeem Jeffries (1970) Marco Rubio (1971) Gretchen Whitmer (1971) Amy Coney Barrett (1972) Stacey Abrams (1973) Raphael Warnock (1973) Marjorie Taylor Greene (1974) Andrew Yang (1975) Ron DeSantis (1978) Josh Hawley (1979) Athletes and Sports Figures Mary Lou Retton (1968) Nancy Kerrigan (1969) Tonya Harding (1970) Andre Agassi (1970) Mia Hamm (1972) Shaquille O’Neal (1972) Dale Earnhardt Jr. (1974) Derek Jeter (1974) Tiger Woods (1975) Tom Brady (1977) Kobe Bryant (1978) Journalists, Authors, and People in the News Rodney King (1965) Matt Drudge (1966) Mika Brzezinski (1967) Kellyanne Conway (1967) Anderson Cooper (1967) Joe Rogan (1967) Ron Goldman (1968) Tucker Carlson (1969) Melania Trump (1970) Chuck Klosterman (1972) Monica Lewinsky (1973) Rachel Maddow (1973) David Muir (1973) Norah O’Donnell (1974) John Green (1977) Donald Trump Jr. (1977) Kourtney Kardashian (1979) On the Internet, No One Knows You’re a Dog Trait: Analog and Digital Communicators YouTube was created because a Gen X’er wanted to see a nipple.

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PayPal was founded by Peter Thiel (b. 1967) and Elon Musk (b. 1971). Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey (b. 1976), and Uber by Travis Kalanick (b. 1976) and Garrett Camp (b. 1978). Sean Parker (b. 1979) cofounded Napster, the file-sharing music site later shut down over copyright issues, and served as the first president of Facebook. Gen X’er Sheryl Sandberg (b. 1969) didn’t found Facebook—that would be Millennial Mark Zuckerberg—but she helped run it for a decade. So, when it comes to the internet, Gen X was first. Gen X was also last. Gen X is the last generation to have had a mostly analog childhood. They are the last to use rotary phones instead of push-button or wireless; the last to languish in a childhood without cable TV or videotapes; the last to spend their high school years without the internet; the last to learn to type as teens instead of as children; the last to use a typewriter for their college essays; the last to look things up in bound encyclopedias; the last to use cameras with film; the last to use a radio with a dial, buy cassette tapes, or attempt to scam the Columbia Record Club (thirteen records or tapes for $1!)

Working Hard, Hardly Working by Grace Beverley

Cal Newport, clockwatching, COVID-19, David Heinemeier Hansson, death from overwork, glass ceiling, global pandemic, hustle culture, Jeff Bezos, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, stop buying avocado toast, TED Talk, TikTok, unpaid internship, work culture

At the point of compiling this list, the books in the series are: How to Build It: Grow Your Brand (Niran Vinod and Damola Timeyin), How to Change It: Make a Difference (Joshua Virasami), How to Write It: Work With Words (Anthony Anaxagorou), How to Calm It: Relax Your Mind (Grace Victory), How to Save It: Fix Your Finances (Bola Sol) and How to Move It: Reset Your Body (Joslyn Thompson Rule) Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, Sheryl Sandberg (2013) Little Black Book: A Toolkit for Working Women, Otegha Uwagba (2017) Me and White Supremacy: How to Recognise Your Privilege, Combat Racism and Change the World, Layla Saad (2020) Mind Over Clutter: Cleaning Your Way to a Calm and Happy Home, Nicola Lewis (2019) ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (2010) Self-Care for the Real World, Nadia Narain and Katia Narain Phillips (2017) Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, Simon Sinek (2011) Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance, Steven D.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

airport security, Albert Einstein, Cal Newport, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital nomad, Douglas Hofstadter, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Floyd, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, Inbox Zero, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kanban, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, New Journalism, Parkinson's law, profit motive, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs

“Attention is the beginning of devotion”: Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays (New York: Penguin, 2016), loc. 166 of 1669, Kindle. the former Facebook investor turned detractor Roger McNamee: Quoted in “Full Q&A: Zucked Author Roger McNamee on Recode Decode,” Vox, February 11, 2019, available at www.vox.com/podcasts/2019/2/11/18220779/zucked-book-roger-mcnamee-decode-kara-swisher-podcast-mark-zuckerberg-facebook-fb-sheryl-sandberg. In the words of the philosopher: Quoted in James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), xii. “distracted from distraction by distraction”: T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” in Four Quartets (Boston: Mariner, 1968), 5. “a thousand people on the other side of the screen”: For example, in Bianca Bosker, “The Binge Breaker,” The Atlantic, November 2016, available at www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-binge-breaker/501122/. 6.

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, British Empire, capitalist realism, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, impulse control, job satisfaction, liberation theology, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, placebo effect, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, source of truth, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, work culture

For it to endure, she writes, “people must willingly participate in and reproduce its structures and norms,” and, especially in times of crisis, “capitalism must draw upon cultural ideas that exist outside of the circuits of profit-making.”10 Mindfulness fits the bill perfectly. Kabat-Zinn is its prophet, joining the ranks of capitalist apologists such as Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, the media mogul Oprah Winfrey, billionaire Bill Gates, and John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods. It is probably no coincidence that Kabat-Zinn — like other mindfulness gurus — traded his activism for meditative quietism fifty years ago. From his comfortable perch, it might make sense to be a passive observer of human afflictions, just “radically accepting” unwholesome conditions.

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson

Ben Horowitz, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, data science, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, functional programming, Google Earth, hive mind, Innovator's Dilemma, iterative process, Kanban, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, loose coupling, microservices, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no silver bullet, pull request, Richard Thaler, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, statistical model, systems thinking, the long tail, web application

It’s suggested that mature companies have more stable periods while startups have a greater propensity for change, but it’s been my experience that what matters most is the particular team you join. I’ve seen extremely static startups, and very dynamic teams within larger organizations. I particularly want to challenge this old refrain: “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on.” —Sheryl Sandberg Even hypergrowth companies tend to have teams that are largely sheltered from change by either their management or because they’re too far away from the company’s primary constraints to get attention. By tracking your eras and transitions, you can avoid lingering in any era beyond the point when you’re developing new masteries.

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP