Ellen Pao has been axed from her job at Reddit (timeline). She failed to collect on the $176 million that she was seeking from Kleiner Perkins. Her husband seems to be underwater financially due to legal fees associated with defending against various fraud lawsuits. Pao apparently still gets checks from Kleiner, payouts from deals made during her time as a junior partner, but presumably at age 45 she eventually needs to find a new way to make money.
If Ellen Pao actually had the superior ability as a venture capitalist that Kleiner was allegedly unable to discover, she could become the richest person in the U.S. in fairly short order, simply by backing the right startups and taking the standard 2 and 20 percent fee (presumably investors in VC funds would forgive her history of litigation if she could earn consistently high returns for them). That Pao went to work as a salaried manager of an existing company (Reddit), however, suggests that she doesn’t know how to outperform the S&P 500 (like most VCs, according to this analysis!).
As noted in this April 2015 posting, Ellen Pao could have been paid $238 million tax-free for having sex with her old boss at Kleiner. From a legal point of view, the fact that Pao is now married does not impair her ability to earn money from bearing out-of-wedlock children with (or selling abortions to) any of the high-income men that she might meet in Silicon Valley. However, at age 45 it might be tough for her to establish a profitable pregnancy (see OvaScience.com, however, for how the career opportunity of child support profiteer might be extended).
Could Pao just get another W2 job? Having embroiled Kleiner Perkins in years of litigation, being married to a man who embroiled his previous employer in race discrimination litigation, and having failed to meet expectations at Reddit, she doesn’t seem like a new employer’s likely first pick. (except maybe the New York Times? all through her Kleiner lawsuit they kept writing about how wonderfully qualified Pao was; the Times has a digital division and now they can use their editorial insights about how exceptional Pao’s performance was at Kleiner to earn some superior profits by hiring Pao for themselves)
One idea would be for Pao to write a book. It seems that at least a large fraction of the New York Times readership would want to read it. “It’s Silicon Valley 2, Ellen Pao 0: Fighter of Sexism Is Out at Reddit” is a July 10, 2015 NYT story that describes Pao as “a hero to many.” Note how the Times editors were confident that a jury in the nation’s most liberal plaintiff-friendly jurisdiction got it wrong. After hearing weeks of evidence, the jury decided that sexism was not the reason that the partners (both male and female) of Kleiner decided not to promote Pao. But, according to the plain words of the headline, there must have been sexism blocking Pao’s career there because that’s what she was fighting against (not “Phantom Sexism” or “Alleged but Disproven Sexism”).
The market for books by female managers at Silicon Valley companies has been proven out by Sheryl Sandberg (see my review of Lean In). By using a ghostwriter, Sandberg demonstrated that Pao wouldn’t even have to do the wordsmithing in order to enjoy an income as an author. That does leave an open question… what should Ellen Pao’s book be called? And what would be a good outline of content?
Related:
- reader comment (Susan, 94085) on NYT article:
“I’m a female Silicon Valley executive who worked with Ellen at Microsoft. Ellen should look for a job in academics because that is her core competency. Working in the business world, not so much. Her story is illustrative of a commonly-held misconception among some that great academic success always translates into great success in other areas. Both Ellen and her employers have bought into this fallacy with disastrous results: employers have continued to hire her for jobs with increasing responsibility, wrongly hoping that she will one day live up to the promise shown at Princeton and Harvard, only to be disappointed; and, Ellen still can’t accept that she can’t repeat her academic success in the business world, which has caused her to believe that her failure is the result of discrimination.”
- one from Ambrose Birece in “Hades”:
“Ellen Pao encapsulates the myth of elites in America. Silicon Valley and Wall Street both suffer from tautological thinking where the best are the best. However again and again we see the mediocrity of our “elite” schools. (See: Bush, G.W.; also Summers, Larry)
Ellen Pao represents entitlement of the elites personified, a sort of Peter Principle for the well heeled: they keep getting promoted, regardless of their incompetence, because of old school ties. And yet America was and is built by the Scrappy Classes, not the country club set looking to get their kids into the Ivies, Stanford, or Duke.”
From VCs to Reddit: How I exposed Silicon Valley sexism.
That NY Times article is mocked here.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/nyt-doubles-down-on-ellen-pao/
She already had a kid with a gay black billionare. That should have been enuf of an opportunistic pregnancy (except that his fortune is in doubt). Her book could explain what that relationship is all about.
She could explain what she thought that she was going to get out of the affair with the Indian K-P partner. Or why she always gives women bad reviews, and fired the Reddit woman. And why there is too much free speech on Reddit. And how unfair it is that no one wants to hire her as a CEO.
> A long-time lurker, Ellen comes to us by way of a long, adventurous career spanning venture capital, business development, law, and electrical engineering. She’s been a formal and informal advisor to reddit for more than a year, and recently decided to finally join us full-time. She’ll be working on helping us build strategic partnerships that benefit the community. Here’s Ellen in her own words:
> “I grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey, raised by enginerds on Star Wars, computers and books. I live in San Francisco, via New York City, Boston and Hong Kong. I’ve worked with dozens of tech companies, traveling to eleven countries on five continents, to help build a variety of consumer and business platform companies. My favorite subreddits are /r/IAmA and /r/pareidolia (I like people even when they’re not real). Being part of a community of people who care is inspiring and energizing. reddit has so much to offer so many people, and I’m excited to find partners to help make reddit even more awesome.”
Pretty sure either Hillary or Carly would snap her up as IT Director, Tech/Science Advisor, Social Media Strategist, Vice Presidential Candidate, Diplomat.
Pao! Right in the Kisser!
The Sayings of Chairman Pao
How to Get Ahead in Business without Really Trying
How to Marry a Millionaire
Mean In
Rean In
Pu$$y Warrior, Fighting White Male Patriarchy: the Ellen Pao Story
Ellen Pao may be an unpleasant person, but she was fired from Reddit because of a user revolt over her efforts to rid the site of its white supremacists and other virulent fringes so it becomes easier to monetize:
http://gawker.com/how-reddit-became-a-worse-black-hole-of-violent-racism-1690505395
Fazal: So she was fired from Kleiner for having a vagina and and fired from Reddit because of her staunch opposition to white male supremacy? And therefore we are to infer that being an outspoken white male supremacist is a path to career advancement in a typical Silicon Valley firm?
Pao says she left reddit by as she could not demonstrate the higher user growth the board wants:
> So why am I leaving? Ultimately, the board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining reddit’s core principles.
https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3cudi0/resignation_thank_you/
Sam Altman says the petition had no effect.
In a longer column pronouncing the death of reddit, Chuq says, and I agree, that in effect Pao was a terrible fit and a terrible CEO for reddit since the day she was hired. She mishandled the community. She had no idea how or why her site worked. She had no sense of how to deal with problems. And all of that was foreseeable by the board.
http://www.chuqui.com/2015/07/the-death-of-reddit/
She had one job.
One interesting point is why any journalist thought that Pao would have been likely to succeed as the manager of a publishing/engineering enterprise such as Reddit. What was there in her background that could have been considered a qualification or relevant experience for this position?
The journos all became masters of social media without any instruction. And the journos are all experts at business and investing. It’s pretty simple stuff phil, ask any journo.
So clearly Altman could drop a highly credentialed never a CEO, never a manager (?) into reddit and expect great things including a huge growth in users and big steps towards making it profitable.
Besides, Pao claims to have introduced Twitter to KP which basically demonstrates her qualifications to run reddit.
Otherwise, there is nothing in her background that would make her qualified to run reddit. (To run Nest or an IOT company on the other hand….)
I said nothing about Kleiner. She was passed over for promotion there in favor of equally obnoxious individuals (e.g. Ajit Nazre, Chi-Hua Chien) who did not reverse the firm’s declining fortunes, stemming primarily from them developing delusions of grandeur about transferability of investment competence, and investing in green tech outside their area of expertise. Whether she would have done better is unknowable. The jury decided she wasn’t passed over due to gender discrimination, just for being bad at office politics. Then again, being a woman does put you at a disadvantage in office politics, but was not the primary factor.
The poor performance of the firm led to eventual rounds of downsizing, where she was a casualty. Once again, having a reputation as a troublemaker couldn’t have helped, but the jury decided it was not retaliation.
As for Pao’s ouster, the circumstances are highly specific to Reddit and not indicative of much in Silicon Valley, just as the ouster of Brendan Eich at hippie commune Mozilla is not representative either. Reddit is owned by the parent company of Conde Nast, and like many Internet media sites it has huge traffic but meagre revenues. Pao herself was only an interim CEO, so I would say her job was to keep the ship running until they found a permanent CEO, and the latter’s job would be to raise revenues.
Your syllogism seems to be:
1. If white supremacists (assumed to be also male supremacists) are dominant, women will be discriminated against, and opponents to white supremacists will also be discriminated against
2. Let’s assume for the sake of argument Pao was discriminated against
3. It follows from 1 and 2 that while/male supremacists are dominant in Silicon Valley
4. Yet there is no evidence that white/male supremacists are dominant in SV
5. We have proved by reductio ad absurdum that 2 is false
The logical fallacy is in step 3. The negation of “A implies B” is not “B implies A”. We can’t infer anything from the premises.
My point is:
1. Pao’s ouster from Reddit is different than her ouster at Kleiner
2. She put in place policies against harassment that are unobjectionable elsewhere, and indeed are official policy at Facebook et al
3. Reddit has a problem with white supremacist subgroups
4. Reddit is massively successful in terms of popularity, but underperforms as a business by financial measures
5. Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) are extremely popular beyond Reddit’s core audience and thus critical to efforts to turn around the company
6. Pao instituted anti-harassment policies at Reddit, and applied it specifically at a fat-shaming subgroup
7. There was a backlash against her from the white supremacists subgroups, who felt threatened. The vitriol against her took personal forms, including deeply misogynistic ones, and led to a petition for her ouster. None of that has anything to do with her lawsuit against Kleiner.
8. Reddit AMAs are managed by unpaid volunteers, hitherto supported by Victoria Taylor
9. Victoria Taylor was fired, apparently for objecting to company plans to more aggressively monetize the AMA format. Reddit co-founder and executive Alexis Ohanian says he made the decision, and presumably Pao rubber-stamped it.
10. This caused a backlash from AMA volunteers (who are completely distinct from the white supremacist subgroups) and effectively a strike
11. Pao backpedaled, did a non-apology apology, AMA volunteers were not mollified and the petition for her ouster gained speed
12. The board of Reddit did not have any other option left to mollify the AMA volunteers, who hold the future of Reddit in their hands, than to make Pao a scapegoat (instead of Ohanian, for instance).
Was Pao fired from Reddit for being a woman? No.
Was she fired because the board of Reddit are white supremacists? No.
Are AMA volunteers supremacists? No.
Is Victoria Taylor a supremacist or a bad person? No.
Are the board of Reddit and Alexis Ohanian spineless? Hell, yes.
Does the business model of Reddit stink? Yes.
Is Reddit’s shielding of white supremacists and other hate groups offensive? To me it is
Did both Kleiner and Pao come out looking bad from the lawsuit: Yes
Do I feel Pao was treated poorly by Reddit? Yes
Is Ajit Nazre a sleaze and Buddy Fletcher a crook? Yes
Did Pao show poor judgment in having an affair with the former and marrying the latter? Yes.
Do I find the schadenfreude around Pao’s firing from Reddit distasteful? Yes.
Is there an old boy’s club in Silicon Valley? Statistically it is irrefutable
Is that caused by white/male supremacists? No, that would be sufficient but it is not a necessary precondition.
As far as I am concerned, the best outcome for this would be for a new startup to do just AMAs (much cheaper to run than a full-blown social website, even one as unmoderated as Reddit), hire Victoria Taylor to gain instant credibility (this means finding a monetization model both she and the Reddit AMA moderators can live with), steal Reddit’s lunch, and leave the festering cesspool of hate groups left in the rump Reddit to die a well-deserved death.
We Google Translate to add an additional language – SJW Newspeak. I’ve run the following thru my alpha version:
“efforts to rid the site of its white supremacists and other virulent fringes” – “efforts to silence and delegitimize anyone who doesn’t totally kowtow to our POV, especially white males”
” so it becomes easier to monetize” – “the only way you should be allowed to make money is by catering to the SJW POV. If you try to make money from people with views that we consider to be illegitimate, we will delegitimize your business too. We will not rest until everyone who doesn’t loudly and publicly buy into our POV is deprived of a means to make a living and has to beg for our forgiveness.”
For example, now that Donald Trump has said Something Bad, everyone whom he has ever done business with has to drop him like a hot potato.
This is all so in keeping with the grand American tradition of free speech. Whatever happened to “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” I guess that’s part of the violent patriarchal tradition and must be discarded.
It turns out that the Left really never had any problem with the idea of McCarthyism – they just didn’t like being on the receiving end.
“being a woman does put you at a disadvantage in office politics.” – Yes, it is clear that Ellen Pao was a naive babe in the woods (oops, did I just call her a babe – sorry, I didn’t mean it in that way) when it came to office politics. She was clearly no good at playing Machiavellian games, not at all. Everything she did was purely for the good of Kleiner and women everywhere and she never gave a thought to her own self interest, nor did she try to manipulate the process in any way. Nope.
“but the jury decided it was not retaliation” – gee, it must have really been a close call, with all the negative reviews and 2nd and 3rd and 4th chances that they gave her to clean up her act.
“and the latter’s job would be to raise revenues.” – what a great job. You don’t have to grow the revenues like a real CEO. All you have to do is keep all of your users from abandoning ship. Too bad she couldn’t even do that much.
Pao’s ouster from Reddit is different than her ouster at Kleiner – Tolstoy said, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
“She put in place policies against harassment that are unobjectionable elsewhere, and indeed are official policy at Facebook et al.” If Reddit is going to be the same as Facebook, then who needs Reddit? Why not just post on Facebook?
3.” Reddit has a problem with white supremacist subgroups” – who gets to define what a “problem” is?
“4. Reddit is massively successful in terms of popularity, but underperforms as a business by financial measures” This is true of a lot of websites, including the NY Times. The conundrum of the web, which only a few have solved, is how do you monetize your popularity without chasing away the people who made you popular?
7. “There was a backlash against her from the white supremacists subgroups, who felt threatened. The vitriol against her took personal forms, including deeply misogynistic ones, and led to a petition for her ouster.” This is a great trick – you define anyone who disagrees with you as wholly illegitimate – therefore you don’t have to listen to anything they have to say. I don’t like white supremacists either but I think there are damn few real ones around, unless you define deviancy downward a lot to mean anyone who doesn’t buy into your POV 100%. Even the ones that exist have a right to hold their beliefs. In the past it was felt that the 1st Amendment existed to protect unpopular points of view because popular ones don’t need protection. We don’t need a 1st Amendment so that Tim Cook can make “brave” statements in favor of gay marriage and H1B immigration.
“9. Victoria Taylor was fired, apparently for objecting to company plans to more aggressively monetize the AMA format. “Reddit co-founder and executive Alexis Ohanian says he made the decision, and presumably Pao rubber-stamped it.” – Sources? Reddit has never stated why they fired Taylor or who made the decision. Pao certainly didn’t stand up for Taylor, that’s for sure. Isn’t it strange that these misogynist (oh, sorry DEEPLY misogynist) white supremacists made a big stink over the firing of a woman?
“Does the business model of Reddit stink? Yes.” I think they have (had) a fantastic business model – they got thousands of unpaid volunteers to work for them for free. If these volunteers perceive that they are working for free so that Ellen Pao can earn a bigger bonus, I don’t blame them for not buying into this.
“Is Reddit’s shielding of white supremacists and other hate groups offensive? To me it is” Not only Reddit, but the Internet itself is “shielding” hate groups. I think this is a good thing – I call it “free speech”. The (lousy) alternative is a Chinese style Great Firewall or those content filters they have running in libraries and such. The other day I was visiting someone in the hospital and using the hospital wifi and I tried googling “Fort Knox safes” (because a family member was having trouble getting into his safe to get his passport, ultimately causing him to miss an international flight) and it wouldn’t let me on to their website – it came back “Blocked – guns”. Apparently this company makes gun safes as one of their product lines and the fact that the make safes in which you can place a gun is enough to put them on the list of Bad People. I really don’t want to live in a America where some faceless, unappealable third party gets to decide which points of view and businesses are legitimate and which I will be allowed to see.
“leave the festering cesspool of hate groups left in the rump Reddit to die a well-deserved death.” Just like Fox News has withered on the vine and MSNBC has grown like wildfire.
Weren’t there more than 200,000 signatures on the petition to get rid of her?
Apart from enraging her customers and moderators, Chairman Pao also had that curious policy about salary negotiations, apparently intended to worsen conditions for male employees. (Whether it succeeded or not I leave for someone with deeper knowledge.)
“Weren’t there more than 200,000 signatures on the petition to get rid of her?”
Ignore them. Just a bunch of white male supremacist misogynists. Nothing to see here folks. Move along.
But if three “Asian-American Activists” (literally three – see “protest” photo below) don’t like what you are doing, you must bow to their will immediately if they invoke the magic R word. I almost said “kowtow” but that would be wrong.
https://c.o0bg.com/rf/image_460w/Boston/2011-2020/2015/07/08/BostonGlobe.com/Metro/Images/MFAkimono.jpg
https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/style/2015/07/07/mfa-backs-down-over-kimono-event-response-protests/lv9NHcnpW0lsRE77d9hvkI/story.html
> Chairman Pao also had that curious policy about salary negotiations, apparently intended to worsen conditions for male employees. (Whether it succeeded or not I leave for someone with deeper knowledge.)
That policy of no salary negotiations could only harm all employees!
Does Reddit encourage their workers to unionize as Gawker’s employees voted?
Do feminists who favor removal of salary negotiations really trust the same management that brought them the wage gap to now treat all employees fairly?
I just wonder what Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Robert Reich or any pro-labor advocate would say about removal of salary negotiations.
It sounds more like something Andrew Mellon, John D. Rockefeller, or Snidely Whiplash might advocate. Would even a man as evil as VC John Doerr call to eliminate salary negotiations?
How has our progressive press not pressed reddit on this?
@Izzie:
“efforts to rid the site of its white supremacists and other virulent fringes” – “efforts to silence and delegitimize anyone who doesn’t totally kowtow to our POV, especially white males”
I am not talking about Donald Trump’s foot in his mouth here, but rather Stormfront-level views that are abhorrent for most white males as well, see the examples documented here:
http://gawker.com/how-reddit-became-a-worse-black-hole-of-violent-racism-1690505395
One charming example they didn’t mention: http://www.reddit.com/r/GasTheKikes
I didn’t realize opposing the Holocaust was a controversial stand reeking of political correctness.
“Victoria Taylor was fired, apparently for objecting to company plans to more aggressively monetize the AMA format. “Reddit co-founder and executive Alexis Ohanian says he made the decision, and presumably Pao rubber-stamped it.” – Sources?”
There’s this wonderful thing called Google, you should try it one of these days:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3c0hcz/welcome_back/
(/u/kn0thing is Ohanian’s handle).
” so it becomes easier to monetize” – “the only way you should be allowed to make money is by catering to the SJW POV. If you try to make money from people with views that we consider to be illegitimate, we will delegitimize your business too. We will not rest until everyone who doesn’t loudly and publicly buy into our POV is deprived of a means to make a living and has to beg for our forgiveness.”
It’s really odd how Corporate America is in cahoots with the left and doesn’t like its marketing to be associated with calls for genocide against the Jews.
It looks to me that there must be around 10 people posting on the Gas the Kikes reddit. While this is around 10 people too many, it doesn’t negate the rest of what reddit does and if anything, increases my admiration for them for being willing to be an open forum even for deeply unpopular views. Most of Corporate America is deeply cowardly – they would gladly throw our First Amendment rights overboard if they felt that it endangered profits.
I looked at the link that you gave and while Ohanian indeed says that he takes responsibility for the decision (I would not necessarily take this at face value) it says nothing about the reason for Taylor’s firing, which, again, AFAIK, has not been publicly disclosed.
Rumor has it that Taylor was sacked because Jesse Jackson embarrassed himself with his totally incoherent rambling AMA and Taylor was offered up as the scapegoat.
Former CEO Yishan Wong, who originally hired Pao as a consultant and basically put her in position to step up when he stepped down, got into a fight of sorts with Ohanian, saying it was Ohanian’s fault. To my view, Ohanian didn’t deny much but deflected it instead. (If I understand, he was Chair of Board so Pao’s boss, but at other times as Chief whatever he was, he reported to Pao, therefore, his decision to can Victoria really was Pao’s responsibility.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/3d3nfh/yishan_former_ceo_of_reddit_calls_out_alexis/
Regardless, Pao still had no qualifications to run reddit, and she ran it terribly. Her style of combative non-communication with customers/users stank at any company and clashed irretrievably at reddit.
Apparently Wong and Ohanian hate each other’s guts. When Ohanian fired Pao, the announcement was accompanied by some catty remarks to the effect that “she may have screwed up but at least she didn’t resign without notice like some other people (cough Wong cough).”
There is a reason why you are not supposed to be able to go on tours of the sausage factory. There is such a thing as Too Much Information. All of these Reddit clown seem like amateurs to me, airing their dirty laundry in public. What Reddit really needs is for the whole gang of them to be gone and grownups brought in to run the show. The inner workings of a corporate board should be as opaque to the public as the N. Korean Politburo. Pao should have resigned to “spend more time with her family” and that should have been the extent of the public discussion.