Mike: It’s like Christmas in summertime!

Katie: Barring that, we’re seeing a pretty much unprecedented board implosion. One thing that hasn’t been touched on much is that Uber, valued at $70 billion, has been the poster child for staying private for as long as possible. We sort of forget that being public also imposes operational discipline and rigor on management teams that, hopefully, curbs some of the behaviors that got Uber to this point.

I think Bill Gurley, one of Uber’s ex-board members, wrote about the benefits of going public in one of his great blog posts. But then he was totally ignored by one of his most prominent founders and had to sue that founder to make the same point, so he’s been too busy to write a follow-up.

Mike: Indeed! Lastly, we have to talk about the thing that has completely overtaken Silicon Valley’s consciousness: The infamous “Google manifesto.”

If you haven’t been paying attention, last weekend a Google employee’s 10-page memo on Google culture went viral internally and created quite a controversy with some of its assertions, which included specious reasoning around why women were not as prevalent in engineering positions at the company.

Cut to a few days later, when Google fired him for breaking some of its policies with the text. Almost instantaneously, the guy was embraced by the alt-right, which harped on the idea that James Damore, the employee in question, was being unfairly silenced by a liberal tech company.

The way this played out has been extraordinary and yet predictable, a narrative in which corporate culture has been highly politicized because of the current divisive tenor of American cultural discourse.

I’m just curious for your perspective on it, and where you think it may head from here.

Katie: Damore put forth that there are biological reasons for there being fewer women in the tech industry, and argued that Google itself is not being honest if it pursues gender parity and doesn’t acknowledge these biological factors. But he tried to protect this argument — the sort of thing that would have caused a meltdown if it had been directed at ethnic minorities — and wrapped it in another argument: that tech is so liberal it can’t hear dissenting opinions. The maneuver immediately positioned him as a victim and aimed to shield him from being held accountable for his words. His being fired was a big lesson that free speech is not the same thing as free speech without consequences.