Innovation invites hawkers

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I’m angry at startup founders who promise too much, misbehave, and sometimes screw up their business and walk away.

But deep down, I also wonder if unscrupulous and boundary-pushing executives are a key ingredient in innovation — not an aberration.

If we want technology that changes the world, are street vendors part of the deal? Here’s a version of a question I’m having a hard time dealing with about technology like Facebook and Uber: Is the best technology that technology can do intimately tied to all the horrors?

I thought about it recently to the amazement of two startup founders, Adam Newman and Trevor Melton.

Neumann was the managing director of office rental company WeWork. He bragged that his company would change the nature of work (on the ground) and Mars), forge new bonds of social cohesion and earn a lot of money. WeWork doesn’t do any of these things.

A new book details the ways WeWork just rents cabins, burns piles of other people’s money, treats employees like trash, and made Newman rich as the company nearly collapsed in 2019. WeWork has remained in a less grotesque form without Neumann.

And last week, federal officials accused Milton of deceiving investors in his electric truck startup Nikola into believing that the company’s hydrogen- and battery-powered vehicle technology was much better than it actually was. Among the allegations, Milton ordered a promotional video faked to make the Nikola truck prototype appear to be fully functional when it wasn’t. (Milton’s legal team said the government is seeking to “criminalize lawful business conduct.”)

It’s easy to shake your head in front of those and others, including Fondatrice Foundation in Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes who will soon stand trial for fraud—and wonder what personal failures have led them to misinformation, hype, crash, and burn.

But people like Holmes, Neumann, and Milton are not nerds. These are the extreme results of a startup system that rewards people with the biggest and most infuriating ideas, even if they have to fake a little (or a lot).

I’m constantly angry about this system that seems to force startups to target the moon, or whatever. WeWork came up with a fundamentally smart, if not completely original, idea to eliminate many of the problems associated with renting commercial office space. But that wasn’t enough, and I could hardly blame Newman for that.

The disproportionate rewards go to entrepreneurs and companies who can sell a vision to billions of users and trillion-dollar values. That’s why Airbnb isn’t just saying that it lets people rent a house in an app. The company says Airbnb is helping ” People fulfill a basic human need for communication. That’s why delivery companies like Uber and DoorDash aim to make any physical product accessible to anyone, and companies believe they need to make virtual reality as popular as smartphones. Mere worldly ambitions are not enough.

These circumstances make people circumvent what is fair and legal. But I also wonder if reducing excesses would also slow down the ambition we want. Sometimes the fervor of imagining the great, absurd visions of the future bring us Theranos. And sometimes that leads us to Google. Are these two sides of the same coin?

Elon Musk shows both the good and the bad of what happens when techies dream crazy. Perhaps more than anyone else, Musk made it possible for automakers, governments, and all of us to imagine electric cars to replace conventional cars. This is a change that can change the planet.

But Musk also put people’s lives at risk by exaggerating driver-assist technology, repeatedly promising technology that didn’t work and that bypassed the law. human decency.

I used to ask an ex-colleague half-jokingly: Why don’t they just make car catchers? But it is perhaps impossible to separate the reckless carnival barks deceiving themselves and others from the bold ideas that really help change the world for the better.

I hate to think so. I want to believe that technologies can be successful without aiming to reprogram all of humanity and without the temptations associated with fraud or abuse. I want the good musk without the bad. I want the cool and empowering elements of social media without genocide. But I don’t know if we can separate the wonderful from the terrible.

Before going…

• The next target for China’s technological repression? My colleague Kao Li reports that the authorities have shown they can be unhappy with video game companies, and stock prices have plummeted for some of the major Chinese game makers. The Chinese government recently pushed for tighter regulations for tech companies, including targeting Chinese companies that roll out to the public outside the country, those that offer online food delivery or tutoring, and the ubiquitous WeChat app in the country.

• Here’s one way to get Facebook’s attention: It is almost impossible for people who have lost access to their Facebook accounts to seek help from anyone in the company. Some people have found a solution, NPR reported: Buy one of Facebook’s $299 Oculus VR headset, call the Oculus customer service team, and ask them to help you recover your Facebook account. Yes, it’s crazy, and it doesn’t always work.

• The Secret of the Lost Book by Dan Brown: My co-worker Caity Weaver goes down a rabbit hole to see if a failing barcode explains why online book sellers keep sending the wrong addresses to someone trying to buy a new 1995 dating book from the author of “The Da Vinci Code.”

kisses for it

a quickly And Acrobatic cat cut a baseball game For several minutes, the crowd cheers and yells at the pesky humans trying to chase the cat away from the field. My colleague Daniel Victor wrote about animal behavior in professional baseball Monday night.

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