Tech Company Quotes

Most of a tech company’s value will come at least 10 to 15 years in the future.

One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.

how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.

Social media isn't something that you "do", instead you have to "be" social.

By positioning Theranos as a tech company in the heart of the Valley, Holmes channeled this fake-it-until-you-make-it culture, and she went to extreme lengths to hide the fakery.

An analysis of 248 performance reviews collected from a variety of US-based tech companies found that women receive negative personality criticism that men simply don’t.7 Women are told to watch their tone, to step back. They are called bossy, abrasive, strident, aggressive, emotional and irrational. Out of all these words, only aggressive appeared in men’s reviews at all – ‘twice with an exhortation to be more of it’.

Kevyn, I'm promoting you from Tech Sergeant to Munitions Commander. I want you to take responsibility for all Company weapons. Munitions Commander? Why me? I don't know. Call it "suspicion of extreme competence" on my part. -Captain Tagon & Commander Kevyn Andreyasn

I know of one Bay Area tech company today that uses psychedelics in its management training.

no matter how much tech companies talk about algorithms like they’re nothing but advanced math, they always reflect the values of their creators:

By building mountains out of molehills, through lying by omission, agenda-setting, framing stories and issues in a certain light, and by manipulating what is spread through social media by either limiting its reach or artificially amplifying it, the major media and tech companies try, and they do, influence the way people think and thus how they act.

Everybody who really makes money at some point owns a piece of a product, a business, or some IP. That can be through stock options if you work at a tech company. That’s a fine way to start. But usually, the real wealth is created by starting your own companies or even by investing. In an investment firm, they’re buying equity. These are the routes to wealth. It doesn’t come through the hours.

government may well end up being the insurance provider of last resort, placing the burden of insuring those deemed high risk by private companies on the taxpayers

tech companies often evaluate apps, products, and other companies according to the data they harvest rather than according to the money they generate. A

In fact, the general model for successful tech companies, contrary to myth and legend, is that they become distribution-centric rather than product-centric. They become a distribution channel, so they can get to the world. And then they put many new products through that distribution channel.

And what these winners wanted was for the world to be changed in ways that had their buy-in—think charter schools over more equal public school funding, or poverty-reducing tech companies over antitrust regulation of tech companies. The entrepreneurs were willing to participate in making the world better if you pursued that goal in a way that exonerated and celebrated and depended on them.

When I went to Pixar, I became aware of a great divide. Tech companies don’t understand creativity. They don’t appreciate intuitive thinking, like the ability of an A&R guy at a music label to listen to a hundred artists and have a feel for which five might be successful. And they think that creative people just sit around on couches all day and are undisciplined, because they’ve not seen how driven and disciplined the creative folks at places like Pixar are. On the other hand, music companies are completely clueless about technology. They think they can just go out and hire a few tech folks. But that would be like Apple trying to hire people to produce music. We’d get second-rate A&R people, just like the music companies ended up with second-rate tech people. I’m one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real discipline.

High-tech companies like Google or Microsoft carefully measure the cognitive abilities of prospective employees out of the same belief: they are convinced that those at the very top of the IQ scale have the greatest potential.

The more people stared at their phones, the more money these companies made. Period. The people in Silicon Valley did not want to design gadgets and websites that would dissolve people’s attention spans. They’re not the Joker, trying to sow chaos and make us dumb. They spend a lot of their own time meditating and doing yoga. They often ban their own kids from using the sites and gadgets they design, and send them instead to tech-free Montessori schools. But their business model can only succeed if they take steps to dominate the attention spans of the wider society. It’s not their goal, any more than ExxonMobil deliberately wants to melt the Arctic. But it’s an inescapable effect of their current business model.

The good news is there’s actually no magic to tech. As opaque as it might seem from the outside, it’s just a skill set—one that all kinds of people can, and do, learn. There’s no reason to allow tech companies to obfuscate their work, to call it special and exempt it from our pesky ethics.

network effect really kicks in when a company controls 30 or 40 percent of a given market

In a company where tech decisions were still ultracentralized, the repercussions of a distracted CEO had to be damaging.

high-profile tech companies) are earning only an average of $3 per hour of attention—

The government regulates them, or chooses not to, approves or blocks their mergers and acquisitions, and sets their tax policies (often turning a blind eye to the billions parked in offshore tax havens). This is why tech companies, like the rest of corporate America, inundate Washington with lobbyists and quietly pour hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions into the political system. Now they’re gaining the wherewithal to fine-tune our political behavior—and with it the shape of American government—just by tweaking their algorithms.

And yet a tech founder who is fifty years old is nearly twice as likely to start a blockbuster company as one who is thirty, and the thirty-year-old has a better shot than a twenty-year-old.

This was a culture in which the metrics were always right. The company was simply serving users, even if that meant knowingly monetizing content that was undermining the fabric of democracy.

nowadays sound embarrassing. Jobs wanted Apple “to become a wonderful consumer products company,” Sculley wrote. “This was a lunatic plan. . . . Apple would never be a consumer products company. . . . We couldn’t bend reality to all our dreams of changing the world. . . . High tech could not be designed and sold

The tech companies are destroying something precious, which is the possibility of contemplation. They have created a world in which we’re constantly watched and always distracted. Through their accumulation of data, they have constructed a portrait of our minds, which they use to invisibly guide mass behavior (and increasingly individual behavior) to further their financial interests. They have eroded the integrity of institutions—media, publishing—that supply the intellectual material that provokes thought and guides democracy. Their most precious asset is our most precious asset, our attention, and they have abused it.

When pragmatists buy, they care about the company they are buying from, the quality of the product they are buying, the infrastructure of supporting products and system interfaces, and the reliability of the service they are going to get.

Apple, for example. It employs 12,000 workers in Cupertino. Through the multiplier effect, however, the company generates more than 60,000 additional service jobs in the entire metropolitan area, of which 36,000 are unskilled and 24,000 are skilled. Incredibly, this means that the main effect of Apple on the region’s employment is on jobs outside of high tech.

The result of this solutions-minded mentality is a kind of tunnel vision and cognitive blindness that goes a long way in explaining the lack of diversity, the toxic cultures, and the embarrassing PR blunders that plague so many Big Tech companies.

Republicans also screamed bloody murder about the censorship by social media platforms of conservative voices and negative news stories about Democrats. They were horrified by a media complex that moved from extreme partisan bias to unabashed propaganda in defense of the Democratic Party. They watched as a completely legitimate story about international corruption involving the Biden family business—and implicating Joe Biden himself—was crushed by media and tech companies colluding to suppress it.

Her emergence tapped into the public’s hunger to see a female entrepreneur break through in a technology world dominated by men. Women like Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg had achieved a measure of renown in Silicon Valley, but they hadn’t created their own companies from scratch. In Elizabeth Holmes, the Valley had its first female billionaire tech founder.

less than 1% of new businesses started each year in the U.S. receive venture funding, and total VC investment accounts for less than 0.2% of GDP. But the results of those investments disproportionately propel the entire economy. Venture-backed companies create 11% of all private sector jobs. They generate annual revenues equivalent to an astounding 21% of GDP. Indeed, the dozen largest tech companies were all venture-backed. Together those 12 companies are worth more than $2 trillion, more than all other tech companies combined.

The First Amendment codifies a ‘negative liberty’; that is to say, it affords citizens the right to freedom from government interference. While this is essential, it means that it is ill-equipped to tackle many of the free speech battles of the digital age. Historically, censorship has been enacted by the state, but with the rise of social media as the de facto public square, big tech corporations now have dominion over the acceptable limits of popular discourse. We are rapidly moving into an age in which unelected plutocrats hold more collective power and influence than any national government, only without any of the democratic accountability. This is why the argument that private companies should be free to discriminate at will is no longer persuasive or viable. They claim to be platforms committed to the principle of free speech, and yet at the same time behave like publishers who seek to enforce limitations on the opinions that may be expressed.

Excuse me,” I said. “We’re talking about all this like journalism is the only thing that matters, but isn’t this really about… democracy?” If newspapers and magazines are all driven out of business by Google or companies like it, I asked, how are people going to find out what’s going on?

Erring on the side of caution paid off. Japanese retailers liked that one high-tech company finally took responsibility for its errors and fixed them for free. (Nintendo continues to do so today, to the point of reapplying kids’ stickers onto a new console if the old one has to be replaced instead of repaired.)

One of Dorian Purcell’s rules for living a good life was that no matter what you were doing, whether it was building a giant tech company or banging your mistress, breaking a competitor and driving him into ruin or playing pinball, you had to commit to it as if it was everything, as if your very survival depended on it.

Part of my response is to urge policymakers to broaden their thinking about the role of technology in economic development. Too often they focus on trying to attract Silicon Valley companies in hopes they will open offices locally. They want Silicon Valley satellites. Instead, they should be working on plans to make the best technologies available to local entrepreneurs so that they can organically grow more jobs at home—not just in high-tech industries but in every economic sector.

Training takes place in a tiny room, where for two weeks I sit shoulder to shoulder with twenty other new recruits, listening to pep talks that start to sound like the brainwashing you get when you join a cult. It’s amazing, and hilarious. It’s everything I ever imagined might take place inside a tech company, only even better.

Senior engineers can develop bad habits, and one of the worst is the tendency to lecture and debate with anyone who does not understand them or who disagrees with what they are saying. To work successfully with a newcomer or a more junior teammate, you must be able to listen and communicate in a way that person can understand, even if you have to try several times to get it right. Software development is a team sport in most companies, and teams have to communicate effectively to get anything done.

Josh is the company tech expert, which means we all think he’s a little bit shaman, a little bit magician, and mostly a nerd.

We suggest that if you are feeling yourself resisting this change, you might need to be the one to change lest you, or your company, be left behind.

The difference between Amazon, Netflix, Google, Facebook, and the legions of large but slowly dying companies is usually exactly that: product leadership.

Unemployment is an excellent time to beef up your resume.

You can blame the "stupid user" all you want, but you still have to staff those phones with expensive tech-support people if you want to sell or distribute within your company software that hasn't been designed.

Just a maintenance tech here, folks, heading home after a long night of rebooting routers. That’s all. I am definitely not an indent making a daring escape with ten zettabytes of stolen company data in his pocket. Nosiree.

We are relentlessly encouraged by tech companies to think of their technology as enabling human processes, making human actions more efficient. Do your bookkeeping better! Find a restaurant more easily! Talk to a loved one far away! In fact, the business models of most tech giants, and especially social media giants, most thrive when they have replaced human experience and human actions. And now they have moved on to suppressing human experience and human actions.

Lots of people are not in the business you think they’re in. Xerox, for instance, is in the business of selling toner cartridges. All that mucking about they do developing high-tech copying and printing machines is just creating a commodity market in toner cartridges, which is where their profit lies. Television companies are not in the business of delivering television programmes to their audience, they’re in the business of delivering audiences to their advertisers.

Political pessimism keeps people trapped in a search for purely personal and individual solutions. But here's the truth: this despair isn't just self-defeating; I think it's actually empirically wrong. I reminded myself - forces as powerful as the tech companies have been defeated many times in human history, and it always happens in the same way. It is when ordinary people form movements and demand something better, and they don't give up until they have achieved it.

There is an uncomfortable willingness among privacy campaigners to discriminate against mass surveillance conducted by the state to the exclusion of similar surveillance conducted for profit by large corporations. Partially, this is a vestigial ethic from the Californian libertarian origins of online pro-privacy campaigning. Partially, it is a symptom of the superior public relations enjoyed by Silicon Valley technology corporations, and the fact that those corporations also provide the bulk of private funding for the flagship digital privacy advocacy groups, leading to a conflict of interest. At the individual level, many of even the most committed privacy campaigners have an unacknowledged addiction to easy-to-use, privacy-destroying amenities like Gmail, Facebook, and Apple products. As a result, privacy campaigners frequently overlook corporate surveillance abuses. When they do address the abuses of companies like Google, campaigners tend to appeal to the logic of the market, urging companies to make small concessions to user privacy in order to repair their approval ratings. There is the false assumption that market forces ensure that Silicon Valley is a natural government antagonist, and that it wants to be on the public’s side—that profit-driven multinational corporations partake more of the spirit of democracy than government agencies. Many privacy advocates justify a predominant focus on abuses by the state on the basis that the state enjoys a monopoly on coercive force. For example, Edward Snowden was reported to have said that tech companies do not “put warheads on foreheads.” This view downplays the fact that powerful corporations are part of the nexus of power around the state, and that they enjoy the ability to deploy its coercive power, just as the state often exerts its influence through the agency of powerful corporations. The movement to abolish privacy is twin-horned. Privacy advocates who focus exclusively on one of those horns will find themselves gored on the other.

Companies with billions of dollars employ some of the most intelligent, creative humans on the planet to mastermind new ways to lure us into spending our lives on their apps and in their platforms. Remember, stock prices rely on keeping engagement metrics high. Many tech companies’ survival is based on continuously inventing ways to capture an ever-growing share of your time and attention. If you think you’re a customer of these products and platforms, think again. Your time, attention, and data are their product.

Starting something new in middle age might look that way too. Mark Zuckerberg famously noted that “young people are just smarter.” And yet a tech founder who is fifty years old is nearly twice as likely to start a blockbuster company as one who is thirty, and the thirty-year-old has a better shot than a twenty-year-old. Researchers at Northwestern, MIT, and the U.S. Census Bureau studied new tech companies and showed that among the fastest-growing start-ups, the average age of a founder was forty-five when the company was launched.

The very Internet companies that snookered us all with the promise of democratizing communications made it impermissible for Americans to criticize their government or question the safety of pharmaceutical products; these companies propped up all official pronouncements while scrubbing all dissent. The same Tech/Data and Telecom robber barons, gorging themselves on the corpses of our obliterated middle class, rapidly transformed America’s once-proud democracy into a censorship and surveillance police state from which they profit at every turn.

Yokoi had no desire (or capability) to compete with electronics companies that were racing one another to invent some entirely new sliver of dazzling technology. Nor could Nintendo compete with Japan’s titans of traditional toys—Bandai, Epoch, and Takara—on their familiar turf. With that, and Drive Game, in mind, Yokoi embarked on an approach he called “lateral thinking with withered technology.” Lateral thinking is a term coined in the 1960s for the reimagining of information in new contexts, including the drawing together of seemingly disparate concepts or domains that can give old ideas new uses. By “withered technology,” Yokoi meant tech that was old enough to be extremely well understood and easily available, so it didn’t require a specialist’s knowledge. The heart of his philosophy was putting cheap, simple technology to use in ways no one else considered.

Facebook mouthed platitudes about user privacy and choice; company executives disclaimed any political manipulation or unequal treatment; but the truth was clearly otherwise. Facebook had a political agenda, or more precisely, a social agenda, and it was determined to use its power to achieve it.

To solve the problems created by social media platforms, many politicians are now giving the call to break up big tech. Empowered by their own limited understanding of the matter and blinded by their own biases, their brain has made them believe that impeding the growth of big tech companies will magically give power back to the people. Here they act just like another kind of anti-intellectuals, who can't even perceive the real problem, so they think of breaking up the companies as the ultimate solution. The real problem here is the psychological inability of the human population to use the platforms in a healthy manner.

This first generation of corporate barons left a lasting, if dubious, legacy: they made America more hierarchical, with new divisions between management and labor, between a professional class and everyday workers. They made the economy more centralized, consolidating power into a few mega-companies and their owners; they made it more globalized, keyed to international capital and trade. They diminished the voice of the ordinary citizen in society and politics in favor of educated, professionalized elites. In short, they gave America an entirely new political economy, what some historians have called corporate liberalism.

Writing software is not a variable cost, but it's not really a fixed cost either. Writing software is an ongoing, revenue-generating operation of the company, and it is not the same as constructing a factory. The expensive craftsmen who build the factory leave and go to work on some other job after the building is erected.

Many pieces of management advice tell new managers that part of their job, if they are effective, is to be a shield (or, less politely, a “bullshit umbrella”). They should help their team focus on what they need to get done without being distracted by the wider drama, politics, and changes happening in the company around them.

Dear Valued Customer: Your cable bill is now increasing 5% per month. You cannot cancel your cable. Ever. You cannot reduce your bill in any way. If you turn off your cable, your bill will remain exactly the same. If you rip your cable out of the wall, your bill will remain exactly the same, with the exception that we will charge you for the damage. Your children will be unable to cancel your cable contract. Also, please note that we will be reducing our delivery of channels by approximately 1 every month. As we deliver fewer channels, you can anticipate that your bill will sharply increase. If you do not pay your bill on time, the ownership of your house will revert to us, and we will lock you in an undisclosed location, where you will be forced to do tech support, and where we will be unable to protect you from assault and rape. If you attempt to defend yourself when we come to take your house, we are fully authorized to gun you down. Sincerely, The Statist Cable Company

One example of a high-tech company that submits to a Graham type of analysis is Amazon.com. Though it does business exclusively on the Web, Amazon is essentially a retailer, and it may be evaluated in the same way as Wal-Mart, Sears, and so forth. The question, as always, is, does the business provide an adequate margin of safety at a given market price. For much of Amazon’s short life, the stock was wildly overpriced. But when the dot-com bubble burst, its securities collapsed. Buffett himself bought Amazon’s deeply discounted bonds after the crash, when there was much fearful talk that Amazon was headed for bankruptcy. The bonds subsequently rose to par, and Buffett made a killing.

You don’t get rewarded for creating great technology, not anymore,” says a friend of mine who has worked in tech since the 1980s, a former investment banker who now advises start-ups. “It’s all about the business model. The market pays you to have a company that scales quickly. It’s all about getting big fast. Don’t be profitable, just get big.

When I first became a manager, I had mixed feelings about training. Logically, training for high-tech companies made sense, but my personal experience with training programs at the companies where I had worked was underwhelming. The courses were taught by outside firms who didn’t really understand our business and were teaching things that weren’t relevant. Then I read chapter 16 of Andy Grove’s management classic, High Output Management, titled “Why Training Is the Boss’s Job,” and it changed my career. Grove wrote, “Most managers seem to feel that training employees is a job that should be left to others. I, on the other hand, strongly believe that the manager should do it himself.

Since tech became a consumer phenomenon, thousands of nontech people have come up with great ideas that use technology. But if their startups outsource their engineering, they almost always fail. Why? It turns out that it’s easy to build an app or a website that meets the specification of some initial idea, but far more difficult to build something that will scale, evolve, handle edge cases gracefully, etc. A great engineer will only invest the time and effort to do all those things, to build a product that will grow with the company, if she has ownership in the company—literally as well as figuratively. Bob Noyce understood that, created the culture to support it, and changed the world.

During one hearing, Senator Ted Cruz pointed out that Twitter and Facebook now have power that is much greater than that of any other company that has ever existed in the United States, and that’s including the ones that have been broken up by antitrust laws. According to the rules of the free market, you need to have competition. Otherwise, the company that controls the whole thing becomes lazy, corrupt, or worse. This is what is happening right now with big tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Because they’re so big and because they’re almost 100 percent liberal, they have the power to tilt the national conversation to the left and literally block the voices on the right.

What the Soviet émigrés brought with them is symptomatic of what Israeli venture capitalist Erel Margalit believes can be found in a number of dynamic economies. “Ask yourself, why is it happening here?” he said of the Israeli tech boom. We were sitting in a trendy Jerusalem restaurant he owns, next to a complex he built that houses his venture fund and a stable of start-ups. “Why is it happening on the East Coast or the West Coast of the United States? A lot of it has to do with immigrant societies. In France, if you are from a very established family, and you work in an established pharmaceutical company, for example, and you have a big office and perks and a secretary and all that, would you get up and leave and risk everything to create something new? You wouldn’t. You’re too comfortable. But if you’re an immigrant in a new place, and you’re poor,” Margalit continued, “or you were once rich and your family was stripped of its wealth—then you have drive. You don’t see what you’ve got to lose; you see what you could win. That’s the attitude we have here—across the entire population.

To some extent, the amnesia around the concepts that tech companies draw on to make public policy (without admitting that they are doing so) is by design. Fetishizing the novelty of the problem (or at least its “framing”) deprives the public of the analytic tools it has previously brought to bear on similar problems. Granted, quite frequently these technologies are truly novel—but the companies that pioneer them use that novelty to suggest that traditional categories of understanding don’t do them justice, when in fact standard analytic tools largely apply just fine. But this practice tends to disenfranchise all of the people with a long tradition of analyzing these problems—whether they’re experts, activists, academics, union organizers, journalists, or politicians.

In the longer term, by bringing together enough data and enough computing power, the data giants could hack the deepest secrets of life, and then use this knowledge not just to make choices for us or manipulate us but also to reengineer organic life and create inorganic life-forms. Selling advertisements may be necessary to sustain the giants in the short term, but tech companies often evaluate apps, products, and other companies according to the data they harvest rather than according to the money they generate. A popular app may lack a business model and may even lose money in the short term, but as long as it sucks data, it could be worth billions.4 Even if you don’t know how to cash in on the data today, it is worth having it because it might hold the key to controlling and shaping life in the future. I don’t know for certain that the data giants explicitly think about this in such terms, but their actions indicate that they value the accumulation of data in terms beyond those of mere dollars and cents. Ordinary humans will find it very difficult to resist this process. At present, people are happy to give away their most valuable asset—their personal data—in exchange for free email services and funny cat videos. It’s a bit like African and Native American tribes who unwittingly sold entire countries to European imperialists in exchange for colorful beads and cheap trinkets. If, later on, ordinary people decide to try to block the flow of data, they might find it increasingly difficult, especially as they might come to rely on the network for all their decisions, and even for their healthcare and physical survival.

a quote from John Doerr, the famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist: “We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.” Mercenaries build whatever they're told to build. Missionaries are true believers in the vision and are committed to solving problems for their customers. In a dedicated product team, the team acts and feels a lot like a startup within the larger company, and that's very much the intention.

A company that is not designed to create high-tech products is very unlikely to have the culture or the DNA that it takes to create high-tech products. So if you are a high-tech person in that company, then you're basically a glorified typist in some sense. It's very unlikely that the kind of people who would be successful in an entertainment company would even understand what programmers do that makes them more than typists.

Carly Fiorina took over Hewlett-Packard shortly before the tech bubble burst. Anne Mulcahy got a shot at being the first female CEO at Xerox—precisely as the company was being investigated by the SEC. What do these leaders have in common? They are women. Women who were given big responsibilities right as the shit hit the fan. Which meant that when they failed—almost inevitably—the problem was blamed on them, not the surrounding circumstances.

hear companies talk about consumers being bombarded with thousands and thousands of advertising messages every day, because there’s usually a lot of discussion among companies and ad agencies talking about how to get their message to stand out. There’s a lot of buzz these days about “social media” and “integration marketing.” As unsexy and low-tech as it may sound, our belief is that the telephone is one of the best branding devices out there. You have the customer’s undivided attention for five to ten minutes, and if you get the interaction right, what we’ve found is that the customer remembers the experience for a very long time and tells his or her friends about it. Too many companies think of their call centers as an expense to minimize. We believe that it’s a huge untapped opportunity for most companies, not only because it can result in word-of-mouth marketing, but because of its

Michael Arrington, the loudmouth founder and former editor in chief of TechCrunch, is famous for investing in the start-ups that his blogs would then cover. Although he no longer runs TechCrunch, he was a partner in two investment funds during his tenure and now manages his own, CrunchFund. In other words, even when he is not a direct investor he has connections or interests in dozens of companies on his beat, and his insider knowledge helps turn profits for the firm.

Like the railroads that bankrupted a previous generation of visionary entrepreneurs and built the foundations of an industrial nation, fiber-optic webs, storewidth breakthroughs, data centers, and wireless systems installed over the last five years will enable and endow the next generation of entrepreneurial wealth. As Mead states, "the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life was to get a company going during the bubble". Now, Mead says, "there's space available; you can get fab runs; you can get vendors to answer the phone. You can make deals with people; you can sit down and they don't spend their whole time telling you how they're a hundred times smarter than you. It's absolutely amazing. You can actually get work done now, which means what's happening now is that the entrepreneurs, the technologists, are building the next generation technology that isn't visible yet but upon which will be built the biggest expansion of productivity the world has ever seen.

One day, Jerry Yang sat down for an interview with Doug Levy, a former journalist who had become well known for his tech-industry coverage in USA Today. Levy was no longer a member of the media. He was working as an independent media consultant and he’d figured out a good gig. He would go into a company and interview its executives as though he were going to write an article. Then he’d prepare a critical piece and let them read it. The idea was to show them where the company’s holes were.

Of course, this is not an innocent activity—even though the tech companies disavow any responsibility for the material they publish and promote. They plead that they are mere platforms, neutral utilities for everyone’s use and everyone’s benefit. When Facebook was assailed for abetting the onslaught of false news stories during the 2016 presidential campaign—a steady stream of fabricated right-wing conspiracies that boosted Donald Trump’s candidacy—Mark Zuckerberg initially disclaimed any culpability. “Our goal is to give every person a voice,” he posted on Facebook, washing his hands of the matter. It’s galling to watch Zuckerberg walk away from the catastrophic collapse of the news business and the degradation of American civic culture, because his site has played such a seminal role in both. Though Zuckerberg denies it, the process of guiding the public to information is a source of tremendous cultural and political power. In the olden days, we described that power as gatekeeping—and it was a sacred obligation.

There is an enormous difference between starting a company and running one. Thinking up great ideas, which requires mainly intelligence and knowledge, is much easier than building an organization, which also requires measures of tenacity, discipline, and understanding. Part of the reason that nineteen out of twenty high-tech start-ups end in failure must be the difficulty of making this critical transition from a bunch of guys in a rented office to a larger bunch of guys in a rented office with customers to serve. Customers? What are those?

It’s a cliché that tech workers don’t care about what they wear, but if you look closely at those T-shirts, you’ll see the logos of the wearers’ companies—and tech workers care about those very much. What makes a startup employee instantly distinguishable to outsiders is the branded T-shirt or hoodie that makes him look the same as his co-workers. The startup uniform encapsulates a simple but essential principle: everyone at your company should be different in the same way—a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission. Max Levchin, my co-founder

The thing about Web companies is there's always something severely fucked-up. There is always an outage, always lost data, always compromised customer information, always a server going offline. You work with these clugey internal tools and patch together work-arounds to compensate for the half-assed, rushed development, and after a while the fucked-upness of the whole enterprise becomes the status quo. VPs insecure that they're not as in touch as they need to be with conditions on the ground insert themselves into projects midstream and you get serious scope creep. You present to the world this image that you're a buttoned-down tech company with everything in its right place but once you're on the other side of the firewall it looks like triage time in an emergency room, 24/7. Systems break down, laptops go into the blue screen of death, developers miskey a line of code, error messages appear that mean absolutely nothing. The instantaneousness with which you can fix stuff creates a culture that works by the seat of its pants. I swear the whole Web was built by virtue of developers fixing one mistake after another, constantly forced to compensate for the bugginess of their code.

It was assumed we would never discuss the glaring inconsistencies between the public narratives spun around our startup customers and the stories that their data told: if we were to read breathless, frothy tech-blog coverage about companies we suspected were failing, we would only smile and close the tab. It was assumed that if we had a publicly traded company using our software—and, if so moved, could chart the overall health of that public company based on its data set, or build out predictive models of when its overall value might grow or recede—we would resist buying or selling its stock.

And frankly the people who seem to best understand that we are creatures of love and desire, not thoughts, are the current giant tech companies of the world. Think about how Apple exists with a temple-like space (tell me their retail stores don't feel so "set apart" from the ordinary retail design that it doesn't immediately conjure up sacred feelings) where you go to sacrifice (enormously large portions of your money) to obtain that which you are looking for - connection, meaning and depth. People stand in line all night, some even camping out on the sidewalk, for the latest device that offers those implicitly understood benefits. This phone can, and will, be more than a phone. I think it's even fair to say that Apple is a religion with Steve Jobs as a priest (who has become a venerated secular saint after his death), mediating between man and God to give us what we want. Connection. Power. God-like knowledge of good and evil. And we take the phone, and we crouch and bend over. Usually with heads bowed. Laser focused on something. Blocking out all around us. We are silent and solemn. Tending not to speak. And then we perform a certain behaviour over and over and over again. Sound familiar? Swipe.

After the huge push for CES, it was time for Amiga to sort a few things out. First, the Amiga systems engineers began producing 100 Lorraine developer systems to hand out to companies like Activision, Electronic Arts, Infocom, and Microsoft. At the time, Commodore programmer Andy Finkel was helping Infocom in Cambridge to port its games to the C64. “That was where I first got a hint of the Amiga,” says Finkel. “There was this locked room where I couldn’t go, even though I could go anywhere else in the building. The Infocom tech people would sneak in and work on the computer. They told me there was a secret computer that they couldn’t talk about.

Many of our friends who grew up here now live in Brooklyn, where they are at work on “book-length narratives.” Another contingent has moved to the Bay Area and made a fortune there. Every year or so, these west-coasters travel back to Michigan and call us up for dinner or drinks, occasions they use to educate us on the inner workings of the tech industry. They refer to the companies they work for in the first person plural, a habit I have yet to acculturate to. Occasionally they lapse into the utopian, speaking of robotics ordinances and brain-computer interfaces and the mystical, labyrinthine channels of capital, conveying it all with the fervency of pioneers on a civilizing mission. Being lectured quickly becomes dull, and so my husband and I, to amuse ourselves, will sometimes play the rube. “So what, exactly, is a venture capitalist?” we’ll say. Or: “Gosh, it sounds like science fiction.” I suppose we could tell them the truth—that nothing they’re proclaiming is news; that the boom and bustle of the coastal cities, like the smoke from those California wildfires, liberally wafts over the rest of the country. But that seems a bit rude. We are, after all, Midwesterners. Here, work is work and money is money, and nobody speaks of these things as though they were spiritual movements or expressions of one’s identity.

I returned to our surveillance. The houses around us reminded me of Ryan Kessler’s place. About every fifth one was, if not identical, then designed from the same mold. We were staring through bushes at a split-level colonial, on the other side of a dog-park-cum-playground. It was the house of Peter Yu, the part-time professor of computer science at Northern Virginia College and a software designer for Global Software Innovations. The company was headquartered along the Dulles “technology corridor,” which was really just a dozen office buildings on the tollway, housing corporations whose claim to tech fame was mostly that they were listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange. I

Equally bad deals have been made with Big Tech. In many ways, Silicon Valley is a product of the U.S. government’s investments in the development of high-risk technologies. The National Science Foundation funded the research behind the search algorithm that made Google famous. The U.S. Navy did the same for the GPS technology that Uber depends on. And the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the Pentagon, backed the development of the Internet, touchscreen technology, Siri, and every other key component in the iPhone. Taxpayers took risks when they invested in these technologies, yet most of the technology companies that have benefited fail to pay their fair share of taxes.

Lavabit was an e-mail service that offered more security privacy than the large corporate e-mail services most of us use. It was a small company, owned and operated by a programmer named Ladar Levison, and it was popular among the tech-savvy. It had half a million users, Edward Snowden amongst them. Soon after Snowden fled to Hong Kong in 2013, Levison received a National Security Letter demanding that the company turn over the master encryption key that protected all of Lavabit’s users—and then not tell any of its customers that they could be monitored. Levison fought this order in court, and when it became clear that he had lost, he shut down his service rather than deceive and compromise his customers. The moral is clear. If you run a business, and the FBI or the NSA wants to turn it into a mass surveillance tool, it believes that it is entitled to do so, solely on its own authority. The agency can force you to modify your system. It can do it all in secret and then force your business to keep that secret. Once it does that, you no longer control that part of your business. If you’re a large company, you can’t shut it down. You can’t realistically terminate part of your service. In a very real sense, it is not your business anymore. It has become an arm of the vast US surveillance apparatus, and if your interest conflicts with the agency’s, the agency wins. Your business has been commandeered.

It was a tough journey, though, and I realize that some people don’t have the endurance, or the faith, to continue in the face of such great resistance. But not a day goes by when I don’t meet someone who’s also put it all on the line and is working their butt off to achieve their professional and personal dreams. Many millennials, in particular, are willing to take a chance and do something outside the box, without the “right” degree or experience or any guarantee of future success. They’re willing to start a business—a tech company, a nonprofit—with a couple of friends or alone in their apartment. They’ve rejected the narrative that most boomers lived by—that you should go to school, get a job, work for the same company for thirty years, trust that the company will take care of you after retirement with a pension and possibly stock options. They’ve rejected that narrative because it doesn’t exist anymore in most cases. Most of the millennials who expect that path are, in my opinion, the ones still living at home. Getting angry at “the man” for keeping them down. Waiting for someone else, the government most likely, to come in and save the day. These are the ones who reject or don’t take personal responsibility. Who get out of college, get their first job, and want to be the boss of the company the very same day. They’re twenty-five, have no experience beyond that one semester as an intern, but they want that corner office and $100K in year one.

The Objectives and Key Results (OKR) technique is a tool for management, focus, and alignment. As with any tool, there are many ways to use it. Here are the critical points for you to keep in mind when using the tool for product teams in product organizations. Objectives should be qualitative; key results need to be quantitative/measurable. Key results should be a measure of business results, not output or tasks. The rest of the company will use OKRs a bit differently, but for the product management, design, and technology organization, focus on the organization's objectives and the objectives for each product team, which are designed to roll up and achieve the organization's objectives. Don't let personal objectives or functional team objectives dilute or confuse the focus.

The same thing, notes Brynjolfsson, happened 120 years ago, in the Second Industrial Revolution, when electrification—the supernova of its day—was introduced. Old factories did not just have to be electrified to achieve the productivity boosts; they had to be redesigned, along with all business processes. It took thirty years for one generation of managers and workers to retire and for a new generation to emerge to get the full productivity benefits of that new power source. A December 2015 study by the McKinsey Global Institute on American industry found a “considerable gap between the most digitized sectors and the rest of the economy over time and [found] that despite a massive rush of adoption, most sectors have barely closed that gap over the past decade … Because the less digitized sectors are some of the largest in terms of GDP contribution and employment, we [found] that the US economy as a whole is only reaching 18 percent of its digital potential … The United States will need to adapt its institutions and training pathways to help workers acquire relevant skills and navigate this period of transition and churn.” The supernova is a new power source, and it will take some time for society to reconfigure itself to absorb its full potential. As that happens, I believe that Brynjolfsson will be proved right and we will start to see the benefits—a broad range of new discoveries around health, learning, urban planning, transportation, innovation, and commerce—that will drive growth. That debate is for economists, though, and beyond the scope of this book, but I will be eager to see how it plays out. What is absolutely clear right now is that while the supernova may not have made our economies measurably more productive yet, it is clearly making all forms of technology, and therefore individuals, companies, ideas, machines, and groups, more powerful—more able to shape the world around them in unprecedented ways with less effort than ever before. If you want to be a maker, a starter-upper, an inventor, or an innovator, this is your time. By leveraging the supernova you can do so much more now with so little. As Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media, observed in a March 3, 2015, essay on TechCrunch.com: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.

In the introduction, I wrote that COVID had started a war, and nobody won. Let me amend that. Technology won, specifically, the makers of disruptive new technologies and all those who benefit from them. Before the pandemic, American politicians were shaking their fists at the country’s leading tech companies. Republicans insisted that new media was as hopelessly biased against them as traditional media, and they demanded action. Democrats warned that tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Alphabet, and Netflix had amassed too much market (and therefore political) power, that citizens had lost control of how these companies use the data they generate, and that the companies should therefore be broken into smaller, less dangerous pieces. European governments led a so-called techlash against the American tech powerhouses, which they accused of violating their customers’ privacy. COVID didn’t put an end to any of these criticisms, but it reminded policymakers and citizens alike just how indispensable digital technologies have become. Companies survived the pandemic only by allowing wired workers to log in from home. Consumers avoided possible infection by shopping online. Specially made drones helped deliver lifesaving medicine in rich and poor countries alike. Advances in telemedicine helped scientists and doctors understand and fight the virus. Artificial intelligence helped hospitals predict how many beds and ventilators they would need at any one time. A spike in Google searches using phrases that included specific symptoms helped health officials detect outbreaks in places where doctors and hospitals are few and far between. AI played a crucial role in vaccine development by absorbing all available medical literature to identify links between the genetic properties of the virus and the chemical composition and effects of existing drugs.

It's ironic that Juanita has come into this place in a low-tech, black-and-white avatar. She was the one who figured out a way to make avatars show something close to real emotion. That is a fact Hiro has never forgotten, because she did most of her work when they were together, and whenever an avatar looks surprised or angry or passionate in the Metaverse, he sees an echo of himself or Juanita - - the Adam and Eve of the Metaverse. Makes it hard to forget. Shortly after Juanita and Da5id got divorced, The Black Sun really took off. And once they got done counting their money, marketing the spinoffs, soaking up the adulation of others in the hacker community, they all came to the realization that what made this place a success was not the collision-avoidance algorithms or the bouncer daemons or any of that other stuff. It was Juanita's faces. Just ask the businessmen in the Nipponese Quadrant. They come here to talk turkey with suits from around the world, and they consider it just as good as a face-to-face. They more or less ignore what is being said -- a lot gets lost in translation, after all. They pay attention to the facial expressions and body language of the people they are talking to. And that's how they know what's going on inside a person's head-by condensing fact from the vapor of nuance. Juanita refused to analyze this process, insisted that it was something ineffable, something you couldn't explain with words. A radical, rosary-toting Catholic, she has no problem with that kind of thing. But the bitheads didn't like it. Said it was irrational mysticism. So she quit and took a job with some Nipponese company. They don't have any problem with irrational mysticism as long as it makes money. But Juanita never comes to The Black Sun anymore. Partly, she's pissed at Da5id and the other hackers who never appreciated her work. But she has also decided that the whole thing is bogus. That no matter how good it is, the Metaverse is distorting the way people talk to each other, and she wants no such distortion in her relationships.

TechCrunch, Fast Company, Mashable, Inc., Entrepreneur, and countless other publications. LinkedIn and Hacker News abound with job postings: Growth Hacker Needed. Their job isn’t to “do” marketing as I had always known it; it’s to grow companies really fast—to take something from nothing and make it something enormous within an incredibly tight window. And it says something about what marketing has become that these are no longer considered synonymous tasks. The term “growth hacker” has many different meanings for different people, but I’ll define it as I have come to understand it: A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are e-mails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money. While their marketing brethren chase vague notions like “branding” and “mind share,” growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth—and when they do it right, those users beget more users, who beget more users. They are the inventors, operators, and mechanics of their own self-sustaining and self-propagating growth machine that can take a start-up from nothing to something.

Dr. Fauci’s business closures pulverized America’s middle class and engineered the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history. In 2020, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion.46 Some 493 individuals became new billionaires,47 and an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line.48 The biggest winners were the robber barons—the very companies that were cheerleading Dr. Fauci’s lockdown and censoring his critics: Big Technology, Big Data, Big Telecom, Big Finance, Big Media behemoths (Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom, and Disney), and Silicon Valley Internet titans like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, and Jack Dorsey. The very Internet companies that snookered us all with the promise of democratizing communications made it impermissible for Americans to criticize their government or question the safety of pharmaceutical products; these companies propped up all official pronouncements while scrubbing all dissent. The same Tech/Data and Telecom robber barons, gorging themselves on the corpses of our obliterated middle class, rapidly transformed America’s once-proud democracy into a censorship and surveillance police state from which they profit at every turn.

As black-box technologies become more widespread, there have been no shortage of demands for increased transparency. In 2016 the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation included in its stipulations the "right to an explanation," declaring that citizens have a right to know the reason behind the automated decisions that involve them. While no similar measure exists in the United States, the tech industry has become more amenable to paying lip service to "transparency" and "explainability," if only to build consumer trust. Some companies claim they have developed methods that work in reverse to suss out data points that may have triggered the machine's decisions—though these explanations are at best intelligent guesses. (Sam Ritchie, a former software engineer at Stripe, prefers the term "narratives," since the explanations are not a step-by-step breakdown of the algorithm's decision-making process but a hypothesis about reasoning tactics it may have used.) In some cases the explanations come from an entirely different system trained to generate responses that are meant to account convincingly, in semantic terms, for decisions the original machine made, when in truth the two systems are entirely autonomous and unrelated. These misleading explanations end up merely contributing another layer of opacity. "The problem is now exacerbated," writes the critic Kathrin Passig, "because even the existence of a lack of explanation is concealed.

By March, front-line doctors around the world were spontaneously reporting miraculous results following early treatment with HCQ, and this prompted growing anxiety for Pharma. On March 13, a Michigan doctor and trader, Dr. James Todaro, M.D., tweeted his review of HCQ as an effective COVID treatment, including a link to a public Google doc.48,49 Google quietly scrubbed Dr. Todaro’s memo. This was six days before the President endorsed HCQ. Google apparently didn’t want users to think Todaro’s message was missing; rather, the Big Tech platform wanted the public to believe that Todaro’s memo never even existed. Google has a long history of suppressing information that challenges vaccine industry profits. Google’s parent company Alphabet owns several vaccine companies, including Verily, as well as Vaccitech, a company banking on flu, prostate cancer, and COVID vaccines.50,51 Google has lucrative partnerships with all the large vaccine manufacturers, including a $715 million partnership with GlaxoSmithKline.52 Verily also owns a business that tests for COVID infection.53 Google was not the only social media platform to ban content that contradicts the official HCQ narrative. Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, MailChimp, and virtually every other Big Tech platform began scrubbing information demonstrating HCQ’s efficacy, replacing it with industry propaganda generated by one of the Dr. Fauci/Gates-controlled public health agencies: HHS, NIH and WHO. When President Trump later suggested that Dr. Fauci was not being truthful about hydroxychloroquine, social media responded by removing his posts.

At a Male Allies Plenary Panel, a group of women engineers circulated hundreds of handmade bingo boards among attendees. Inside each square was a different indictment: Mentions his mother. Says “That would never happen in my company.” Wearables. Asserts another male executive’s heart is in the right place. Says feminist activism scares women away from tech. At the center of the board was a square that just said Pipeline. I had heard the pipeline argument, that there simply weren’t enough women and underrepresented minorities in STEM fields to fill open roles. Having been privy to the hiring process, I found it incredibly suspect. What’s the wearable thing, I asked an engineer sitting in my row. “Oh, you know,” she said, waving dismissively toward the stage, with its rainbow-lit scrim. “Smart bras. Tech jewelry. They’re the only kind of hardware these guys can imagine women caring about.” What would a smart bra even do? I wondered, touching the band of my dumb underwire. The male allies, all trim, white executives, took their seats and began offering wisdom on how to manage workplace discrimination. “The best thing you can do is excel,” said a VP at the search-engine giant whose well-publicized hobby was stratosphere jumping. “Just push through whatever boundaries you see in front of you, and be great.” Don’t get discouraged, another implored—just keep working hard. Throughout the theater, pencils scratched. “Speak up, and be confident,” said a third. “Speak up, and be heard.” Engineers tended to complexify things, the stratosphere jumper said—like pipelines. A woman in the audience slapped her pencil down. “Bingo!” she called out.

Disparity, Education and Economy Every dollar spent on luxury is a dollar of disparity. Citizens of earth could force big tech to pay their employees fair wages tomorrow, if they just stop buying their fancy, overpriced products and go for humbler alternatives unless the companies bring down their disparities in salary. The CEO may enjoy certain benefits of their position, but not until those working at the bottom can afford the fundamentals of life for their family. I'll say it to you plainly. An employee wronged is a company wronged. You see, trying to build a disparity-free economy pursuing revenue is like trying to achieve pregnancy through vasectomy. So long as greed drives the economy, it's not economy, but catastrophe. So long as greed drives the industries, it's not industrialization, it is vandalization. Ambition to climb the ladder of status so that you could be on the affluent side of disparity, is no ambition of a civilized human, it's the ambition of a caveman. So, before you pursue an ambition in life, educate yourself on a civilized definition of ambition. Yet the situation in our world is so pathetic that that's exactly the kind of ambition educational institutes sell. Schools and universities don't teach you to build a civilized society free from disparity, they teach you clever tactics to be on the affluent side of disparity. This is not education, this is castration. Concern for the society should be the bedrock of education - collective welfare should be the bedrock of economy - if not, we might as well start living as hobos on the streets, because with greed as the driving principle of education and economy, sooner or later all of us will end up on the streets.

This book has pushed back against the randomness thesis, emphasizing instead the skill in venture capital. It has done so for four reasons. First, the existence of path dependency does not actually prove that skill is absent. Venture capitalists need skill to enter the game: as the authors of the NBER paper say, path dependency can only influence which among the many skilled players gets to be the winner. Nor is it clear that path dependency explains why some skilled operators beat other ones. The finding that a partnership’s future IPO rate rises by 1.6 percentage points is not particularly strong, and the history recounted in these pages shows that path dependency is frequently disrupted.[5] Despite his powerful reputation, Arthur Rock was unsuccessful after his Apple investment. Mayfield was a leading force during the 1980s; it too faded. Kleiner Perkins proves that you can dominate the Valley for a quarter of a century and then decline precipitously. Accel succeeded early, hit a rough patch, and then built itself back. In an effort to maintain its sense of paranoia and vigilance, Sequoia once produced a slide listing numerous venture partnerships that flourished and then failed. “The Departed,” it called them. The second reason to believe in skill lies in the origin story of some partnerships. Occasionally a newcomer breaks into the venture elite in such a way that skill obviously does matter. Kleiner Perkins became a leader in the business because of Tandem and Genentech. Both companies were hatched from within the KP office and actively shaped by Tom Perkins; there was nothing lucky about this. Tiger Global and Yuri Milner invented the art of late-stage venture capital. They had a genuinely novel approach to tech investing; they offered much more than the equivalent of another catchy tune competing against others. Paul Graham’s batch-processing method at Y Combinator offered an equally original approach to seed-stage investing. A clever innovation, not random fortune, explains Graham’s place in venture history.

Betsy didn’t want to be at the party any more than Cole did. She’d met the birthday girl in a spin class a couple of years earlier and had been declining her Evites ever since. In an effort to meet new people, however, this time Betsy replied “Yes.” She took a cab to the party, wondering why she was going at all. When Betsy met Cole there was a spark, but she was ambivalent. Cole was clearly smart and well educated, but he didn’t seem to be doing much about it. They had some nice dates, which seemed promising. Then, after sleeping over one night and watching Cole wake up at eleven a.m. and grab his skateboard, Betsy felt less bullish. She didn’t want to help another boyfriend grow up. What Betsy didn’t know was that, ever since he’d started spending time with her, Cole had regained some of his old drive. He saw the way she wanted to work on her sculptures even on the weekend, how she and her friends loved to get together to talk about their projects and their plans. As a result, Cole started to think more aspirationally. He eyed a posting for a good tech job at a high-profile start-up, but he felt his résumé was now too shabby to apply. As luck would have it—and it is often luck—Cole remembered that an old friend from high school, someone he bumped into about once every year or two, worked at the start-up. He got in touch, and this friend put in a good word to HR. After a handful of interviews with different people in the company, Cole was offered the position. The hiring manager told Cole he had been chosen for three reasons: His engineering degree suggested he knew how to work hard on technical projects, his personality seemed like a good fit for the team, and the twentysomething who vouched for him was well liked in the company. The rest, the manager said, Cole could learn on the job. This one break radically altered Cole’s career path. He learned software development at a dot-com on the leading edge. A few years later, he moved over and up as a director of development at another start-up because, by then, the identity capital he’d gained could speak for itself. Nearly ten years later, Cole and Betsy are married. She runs a gallery co-op. He’s a CIO. They have a happy life and gladly give much of the credit to Cole’s friend from high school and to the woman with the Evites.

Months later, Time magazine would run its now infamous article bragging about how it had been done. Without irony or shame, the magazine reported that “[t]here was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” creating “an extraordinary shadow effort” by a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” to oppose Trump.112 Corporate CEOs, organized labor, left-wing activists, and Democrats all worked together in secret to secure a Biden victory. For Trump, these groups represented a powerful Washington and Democratic establishment that saw an unremarkable career politician like Biden as merely a vessel for protecting their self-interests. Accordingly, when Trump was asked whom he blames for the rigging of the 2020 election, he quickly responded, “Least of all Biden.” Time would, of course, disingenuously frame this effort as an attempt to “oppose Trump’s assault on democracy,” even as Time reporter Molly Ball noted this shadow campaign “touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding.” The funding enabled the country’s sudden rush to mail-in balloting, which Ball described as “a revolution in how people vote.”113 The funding from Democratic donors to public election administrators was revolutionary. The Democrats’ network of nonprofit activist groups embedded into the nation’s electoral structure through generous grants from Democratic donors. They helped accomplish the Democrats’ vote-by-mail strategy from the inside of the election process. It was as if the Dallas Cowboys were paying the National Football League’s referee staff and conducting all of their support operations. No one would feel confident in games won by the Cowboys in such a scenario. Ball also reported that this shadowy cabal “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” And yet, Time magazine made this characterization months after it was revealed that the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s corrupt deal-making with Chinese and other foreign officials—deals that alleged direct involvement from Joe Biden, resulting in the reporting’s being overtly censored by social media—was substantially true. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey would eventually tell Congress that censoring the New York Post and locking it out of its Twitter account over the story was “a mistake.” And the Hunter Biden story was hardly the only egregious mistake, to say nothing of the media’s willful dishonesty, in the 2020 election. Republicans read the Time article with horror and as an admission of guilt. It confirmed many voters’ suspicions that the election wasn’t entirely fair. Trump knew the article helped his case, calling it “the only good article I’ve read in Time magazine in a long time—that was actually just a piece of the truth because it was much deeper than that.