Trampled by Unicorns

CHAPTER 10A Multiplayer Game: Corporate Governance in Tech

I wrote in the previous chapter about what CEOs and their teams can do. But there are other influential players who can push for changes of this sort and drive higher ethical standards: investors, boards, and even the public markets, who unfortunately so far have pretty consistently failed to hold Big Tech's rogue's gallery to account. As long as founder-CEOs “played the game” by delivering hyper-growth, lavish returns, and soaring valuations, a lot of them have turned a blind eye to their transgressions. That needs to change. In my experience, investors, boards, and other stakeholders are usually under no illusions about characters like Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick, of whom I once heard an early investor say, “I know he's an asshole, but he's my asshole.”

Ultimately, of course, this boils down to better corporate governance, and what follows is my take on what the key stakeholders—from VC investors and boards to the public markets and what I call “glue agents” (investment bankers and proxy advisors)—can do to build a tech industry in which startups are more empathetic to their staffs, their users, and the wider world.

1. INVESTORS

Most due diligence processes to invest in private tech startups focus on the same important elements: the quality of the team, the size of the addressable market, the top line growth to be expected through the lenses of product-market fit and current momentum, valuation, and so on. This ...