Tech CEOs’ Nightmare: A President Totally at Odds With Their Values

There’s gloom in the Valley as it prepares for an anti-diversity, climate-denying, old-economy-loving White House.



(Getty Images) Hi, Backchannelers. How are all of you doing?

Steven here. Asking the above question is treacherous these days. Just yesterday I had an exchange that began with the cruise-control, “How are you?” “Great,” on both sides. After a pause, I said what we both were thinking: “You know and I know that we’re not great.”

I was in Silicon Valley last week and I can report that people are not doing great. That includes those in charge—the CEOs and other top executives. Overwhelmingly, they preferred the candidate who won the popular vote but lost in the electoral college, and the election itself. Now they are asking themselves if they should have done more, even though they’re not sure what they could have done.

These are people whose identities hinge on their belief that they are doing good for the world. They think their products promote the best instincts of humankind, and they want those products to serve the whole world, regardless of borders or national characterizations. They are concerned about the very real threat to the environment, and brag about how green their companies are. Despite persistently discouraging pie charts, they pride themselves on promoting diversity within their ranks, and they commonly establish firm internal guidelines against harassment and disparagement. Now they have a president with a record of disparaging utterances and harassing behavior that would universally disqualify him from being hired to a senior position in virtually any company in the industry. Plus, he’s a climate change denier.

This puts the CEOs in a tough position. Their ability to express their disappointment and outrage is limited because it’s simply bad business and almost always just plain inappropriate for a company to take a political stance. Many of their customers clearly voted for Donald Trump, and CEO’s have a responsibility to shareholders, investors and, well, the bottom line not to offend them. But in a case where the president-elect’s values so deeply conflict with the lofty corporate values many Silicon Valley companies have adopted, silence seems deafeningly awkward.

Many CEOs have reached out to their teams, through company-wide emails or all-hands meetings. The point generally is to assure employees that results of the 2016 election have not killed the idealism and humanistic values that the company espouses, values that bind employees together. It’s a tricky needle to thread because no CEO is really free say the obvious: I can’t believe we elected this horrible person. Not every leader can pull it off. of At least one of those letters got the CEO in hot water — the head of GrubHub, who suggested that employees agreeing with Trump’s rhetoric should resign, immediately had to backtrack.

This is only the beginning of the industry’s woes with Trump in the White House. The president-elect clearly distrusts Silicon Valley, and seems unhappy with technological progress in general. He embraces a retromingent economic philosophy that celebrates past glories of the industrial age and ignores the need to prepare and support workers for the difficult adjustments that technological advances demand, whether we like it or not. In a Hollywood Reporter interview with Steve Bannon, Michael Wolff quotes Trump’s chief strategist negatively referring to “people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people,” implying that leaders of lean yet influential tech firms are out of touch with the reality of the nation.

There is definitely some truth to the charge that the tech elites have shown insufficient attention to working-class struggles. (There are signs that some techies are now urging change on this, and, indeed, Silicon Valley can do more for those left behind.) But the reality of this century and beyond is that the leading companies will be those with a lower headcount than the industrial giants of the past. Denying this won’t mean American (re)ascendency, but that other countries will host those firms.

With Barack Obama, we had a president who was willing to engage with technology on a high level and the Valley loved it. He wasn’t in total alignment with the industry — how about that encryption thing? — but he understood its vital importance to the economy. He could quiz a teenage maker at a science fair with the deftness of a VC. His team ran conferences on understanding AI. He sent a squad of geeks into the Defense Department to root out bugs and reform its enterprise software. His chief technical officer made diversity her number one priority. He not only knew what net neutrality was, but appointed an FCC leader who made it policy.

Now we will have a president whose affinity for high-tech seems limited to Twitter bullying. A president who picks coal over solar. A president who seems to disparage efforts to achieve diversity. A president explicitly enamored with the past, seemingly unaware of that technology is the lynchpin of America’s global leadership, as well as the key in any attempts he may make to create better times for his supporters.

No, the tech world is not doing great. But while this is a gloomy moment, I should mention that the universal reaction of those CEOs, as far as I can perceive, is not to shrink from the challenge, but to problem-solve it. It’s going to take more than an election to stop the smarter algorithms, creative business models and just cool stuff that Silicon Valley is committed to producing.

We at Backchannel don’t know what’s going to happen next, but rest assured we’ll be watching closely. And letting you know what we find.

This week in Backchannel, we got out of bed and did our thing. Here are some highlights. On an upbeat note, we had a fun story about a television show. Well, maybe not so upbeat — it was “Black Mirror.”

According to Snopes, Fake News is Not the Problem. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has to deal with more than a Trump presidency: he’s grappling with charges that his company, by empowering users to share “fake news” stories, helped elect the guy. But a top editor at Snopes, the internet’s best debunking site, believes that the problem is actually with the mainstream media. Our Jessi Hempel has the (non-fake) story.

My Start-Up Can’t Stop Bro’ing Out. The first advice column by Silicon Valley legend Karen Wickre, whose storied career includes figuring out how companies like Google and Twitter should communicate with their users. If you have an issue in your tech workplace, or your miserable life in general, ping her at advice@backchannel.com.

Our World Is Going Full “Black Mirror.” Inspired by our dead-on sourcing of characters in the “Silicon Valley” TV show, our resident binge-watcher Miranda Katz presents the definitive, episode-by-episode guide to the real-life tech phenomena that fuels the plotlines of this amazing series. A must-read for every “Mirror”-gazer.