'time is irrelevant to me'
-mariah carey
*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•by your best friend erin griffith•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•
Buddies!
One thing that happens when I try to write about some Big New Idea is I learn that nothing is actually new at all.
Last year, when I profiled Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, about buttoning up his candid style ahead of Slack’s IPO for the New York Times, I found this profile of Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, buttoning up his candid style ahead of Salesforce’s IPO in the New York Times from 2004.
In 2016, when I wrote about the startup world’s questionable ethics in Fortune, I found this article about the startup world’s questionable ethics in Fortune from 2000.
And in the latest uncanny parallel, I wrote about the culture at Airbnb, where employees felt like family until layoffs soured things. After the story went up, a fellow journalist pointed me to a wildly similar story he wrote about PeopleSoft from 1999. Both start with teary-eyed executives. History always repeats itself!
Anyway, here is the article:
💔 Airbnb was like family, until the layoffs started 💔
I also spoke with my colleague Shira Ovide for her daily newsletter about it.
And while I’m being a gigantic nerd, here are few more fun parallels from ye olde archives:
Saying good riddance to Silicon Valley in 1999: ''In the Valley, it's all about power and money and work, work, work, work, and this expectation among your peers that you're going to do the next big thing.”
Saying good riddance to Silicon Valley in 2020: “It makes no sense paying Bay Area rent if we can earn our salary living elsewhere.”
Housing and inequality in 2000: “With all the new money floating around, the most expensive housing market in the country and the densest concentration of investment capital in the world, there is no other place in the country that offers a starker example of the growing gap between the rich and poor.”
Housing and inequality in 2020: “The mismatch between jobs and housing has become so extreme that Google and Facebook have proposed building thousands of apartments or condos on their own campuses.”
Bonus: Naval Ravikant and Nirav Tolia in 1999 and Naval Ravikant in 2020.
Important Business Matters
Startup everyone’s into: Mmmhmmmmmmmmm.
Startup everyone’s over: Quibi. Fraud at YouPlus. AI chicanery at ScaleFactor. Bad behavior at Carta and Ubisoft.
Reason to go on living: Yes, Business Hero™ John McAfee still plans on eating his dick on national television. (You see, he meant three years from the end of the year he made the bet, not three years from the day he made it. Duh.)
Reason to take up residence under your weighted blanket: The Feds might shove you in a van?
Latest crush: “lol,” “ever so anxious” and “PlugWalkJoe” narced on Kirk.
Latest heartbreak: RIP Fahim Saleh.
Latest hill I will die on: The haters are wrong, Business Hero™ Zuck is wearing the correct amount of sunscreen.
Latest covid effect: Dive bars are actually cleaning.
Latest thing the kids are into: sentient satanic amazon box
Latest thing the millennials are into: Boxed negroni.
Latest thing the startups are into: Unicorn-as-a-service.
lol nothing matters
Fellow Business Heroes™, time feels really weird in 2020. And so it is time (heh) to ask ourselves, is history doomed to repeat itself with humans learning nothing along the way, forever and ever and ever until we die?
current status expressed by stock photography:
*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•the end•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•
Thanks for reading, buddies! If you enjoy EGTttHoB™ please forward it to all of your BFFs. They can sign up here. There's also a "like" button you can hit somewhere on this email.
If you are a new reader and wondering, wtf this is, well, welcome and here is my attempt at explaining.
Wow time really is cyclical and everything repeats and I’m so tired