The Joys of Founder Porn
As if by some algorithmic magic, network TV is currently flush with shows about controversial tech founders. (If I were feeling particularly liberal, I would throw Winning Time, about the birth of the modern Los Angeles Lakers, into the mix as well.) I know quite specifically what appeal this sort of content holds for me; the plan right after high school was to major in Physics and minor in the Classics at Brown, and take a golden retriever to the Google campus everyday. My conviction that my work would be in California, changing ‘the world’, reinventing ‘the wheel’, or reshaping ‘history’, was only hardened by an article in Rolling Stone about a cafeteria all the hip young founders at the time frequented. I think Chad Hurley and Steve Chen shortly before Google purchased YouTube; the Blake Ross kid from Firefox; one Mark Zuckerberg; the Tumblr dude. I told myself these were essentially stories these gentlemen were coding, about the sort of world anyone with the least bit of resistance in their bones — of fuck you — should aspire to live in. I was looking to tell stories too. It all seemed terribly exciting, and I wanted in.
I would like to posit that our downfall as human beings is we’re programmed towards a pretty fucked up idea of success, and thus have a terrible relationship with it. Once we’re in the system capitalism is pretty good at telling us we’re destined for cooler shit, and if we don’t get to build it (and brag about building it) we should at least be able to afford it. The fetishisation of hard work, and grind, benefits both the corporation that owns all the means of production right now and the one that’s going to make sure it has a ticket to your IPO. That it’s all so perfectly broadcastable now is everything; if you’re such and such age, acquiring such and such credentials, ideally in such and such economy, you — the big dreamer — helps keep the machine running. If you look closely enough, as I did in my early 20s, it’s all the same powerhouse VCs. Globally, it’s the same power gradient of Ivy League dropouts marketing questionable life-hacks to dopamine-craving zombies (us!) in newly digitised societies.
The shows in question are The Dropout, about the Theranos debacle; WeCrashed, about whatever the hell sort of whirlwind WeWork was; and Super Pumped, by a nose-hair the most interesting, about how volatile a chief executive Travis Kalanick was for Uber. Before I mesmerised myself with the old tingles, which you could justifiably argue power the very existence of this website, I made an attempt to take note of what symptoms these shows suggest bright young founders, and their dazzling startups, have in common.
A not fully thought through idea.
It’s a peculiar thing to consume content whose spoilers reside on news sites, on the public record. Once or twice an episode I’m tempted to Google some ridiculously infantile power play, unable to fully comprehend as ‘real life’ certain junctures in these companies’ paths towards stock valuations. A lot of this detail in fact resides within the pages of tell-all exposés, which themselves feel just as indulgent as TV shows set in technological utopias — where it seems the more reckless the abandon the fairer the game.
There are lots of no’s at first, sometimes by the same adults who end up investing. But airy qualities like sass and charisma move the needle eventually, through big fat speeches about what’s really at stake; and then the investing adults seem to decide to just figure shit out somewhere along the way. No one really tells Kalanick he’s going too far when Uber mysteriously finds a way to mine unknowable data about its customers. No one pulls the plug on Elizabeth Holmes when she first fails to offer straight answers to deadly serious questions. If this animated portrayal of WeWork’s Adam Neumann rings true, with Jared Leto at his hammy best, Neumann’s persistence in the art of bullshit speaks volumes about more founder stories than just his own.
It’s often too late, when laws start getting broken, rights violated — but I suspect it’s easy to project this onto tragic founder figures, raven Lears who can absorb the narrative fallout with endless reserves of world-conquering spiel. Because which TV network rrreally wants to sling real mud at the universal complacency that allows these regimes to persist?
A charismatic founder that refuses to give up the gun.
When the one adult in the room does go, “Whoa?” he or she is quickly doused by the oratory extinguisher that is the startup founder. This is kept to a refreshing minimum in the Holmes story, where the founder seemed to lead by example: by packaging sleeplessness and its resulting mania as admirable, even replicable traits. The creative team that gave the world Billions is also the one that has brought us Super Pumped, and is not above yet more trademark, petulant dick-swinging. Even after the fact, people being screwed out of millions of dollars, or their mental or physical health, we the discerning public continue to lionise to some degree what we ought shame.
When Kalanick doubles down, mostly on making casualties of taxi drivers, no one in the room at Showtime (God bless you guys, please call me) seems to think, Maybe we shouldn’t soundtrack that moment this way. Maybe let’s not make this complete ass look like a bad ass. But I get the conceit: you’re supposed to feel the magic everybody else did, when they let the shark into the aquarium.
Which brings me to …
The starry-eyed believer.
In the aforementioned junctures, in the path(s) towards stock valuations, there tends to be a decision point. A trusted confidante, a general in the war room, a lover, that could have stepped in the way of a train wreck and at least altered its momentum, dampened or delayed its impact. Super Pumped depicts some of these wonderfully. In Kalanick’s office, many (maybe too many) of his clarion calls are sounded in front of a digital map of the world. It makes the man look like a Bond villain, and it lends at least some of the show’s approximations real style. Other times, often after Kalanick resists the high road and often amidst the swell of big city traffic, supporting characters exit stage by summoning Ubers. It’s a simple, appropriate, and yet delicious little trick.
Who are those supporting characters, though? I’m a bit uncomfortable, real life or no, with the reliable flow of compliant Asian men. Emil Michael (portrayed by Babak Tafti) nods his head vigorously at Kalanick’s every whim, despite prior connections to Kalanick’s lead investor, in a manner that seems to advance the interests of a show-runner rather than any high-brow commentary. At least The Dropout’s Sunny Balwani (portrayed by Naveen Andrews) was driven by romantic investment. Maybe the wrong characters, because these shows are at liberty to expand whomever, are granted the status of third option. Because there aren’t enough sturdy foils, the first few episodes of these series feel imbalanced — in favour of air-time for the ego-trips, the pissing contests, the frankly vacuous speeches.
Nearly all the adults in the room, this is what the shows say, stepped aside as soon as the founders’ corporate megalomania was verified by the numbers. All three shows are off to entertaining if never quite excellent starts.
